How to Not Give a Fuck What People Think About You

There’s nobody cooler than the guy who just does not give a fuck what anyone thinks. Yet to become Mr. IDGAF, the road is long, and the journey arduous.

Responding to my article about girls giving dirty looks, Omar, a Middle Eastern man living in a Nordic country struggling with self-consciousness when he goes out to meet girls, asks this:

am a foregienr in a nordic country and i like going out [solo] without a wing besides am not like a buff dude am a bit skinny. Anyways without going on paychopath i want to not give a fuck or atleast not too much fucks about what others think

Well, the first thing to say is nobody actually doesn’t give a fuck what others think. Everybody cares. The people who seem to care the least typically care the MOST. Since junior high I have sought to cultivate an aura of ‘coolness’, and I’ve had many, many people from high school on proclaim that “Chase is so cool; he doesn’t give a fuck what ANYONE thinks of him!”

The truth is that in cultivating that IDGAF aura I have been probably more intensely focused on how other people reacted to me than anyone else I know.

I have had a number of extremely cool people in my life, who seemed most of the time to not give a fuck what anyone thought of them. But I have seen them all in moments of vulnerability, when that IDGAF veneer fell off, and I witnessed just how deeply they cared about what some person or the other thought about them. There is no one who actually DGAF.

But beyond that: you can indeed ‘thicken your skin’.

You can get to the point where it becomes much, much harder to hurt you or intimidate you.

Yet the road is long and arduous, it is filled with trials, and it is not for the faint of heart.

I’m going to use nightlife as the basis of my examples of ‘not giving a fuck’ here, but the general takeaways apply to everything. Nightlife is just a more extreme environment, and it’s what our commenter Omar asks about; I think it works here, and I’ll use it.