Very recently (actually, just a few minutes ago before writing this blog) I was introduced to Stephen Cope by Oliver Burkeman.
Stephen Cope is not the type of person who I might gravitate towards naturally because he combines yoga with good living and how to find your calling and that type of thing.
I have a deep-seated scepticism towards that and even though I would try to embrace aspects of Eastern culture into my own life in terms of meditation or contemplation or stuff like that.
What I'm most interested, though, about Stephen Cope is this quote below.
“At a certain age it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really cares what we’re doing with our life. This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s dream and eschewed our own: no one really cares except us.”
Oliver Burkeman has written a lovely little essay on this and explains what it actually means, but instinctively, I think I completely understand that, and that's perhaps because I'm now in my fifties.
It's not that the people that surround you don't care about you, and it's not that they're not happy for anything that you might have done, it's the fact that they simply don't give a sh*t because they're too busy giving a sh*t about the things that they’re doing to be able to give a sh*t about the thing that you're doing.
At its heart I think this is true, and although it sounds cold and harsh, people get distracted very easily in the modern world because everybody is drinking from a fire hose.
I’m quite happy to be happy for someone else for a short time but then something else comes right in front of me and I have to pay attention to that.
And so, what this means is that if you’re motivating yourself in the hope that somewhere down the line, someone is going to come and wrap their arms around you and tell you that you've been the most incredible human who has done the most incredible things, you're wasting your time because people are simply too busy getting by and making do and dealing with their own difficulties.
I think it's probably taken me an extraordinary amount of time to stop being ‘Kevin's little brother’.
It might even be the fact that I live in England so that I could get away from being Kevin's little brother because my younger life was spent being referenced to somebody who was taller and better looking and generally more successful than I was in terms that our social cohort judged us by.
If I ever wanted to get to the stage where someone came to me to say that I had got past that stage or over that hurdle, I would be wasting my time because that day will never come.
We do the things we do for us when no one else is looking and then we know we've done them and that is a big enough reward for the things that we do.
Blog Post Number - 3366