Detachment is Good!
Indifference is a super power. As you all know from my posts about Twitter - I'm obsessed with Naval Ravikant.
He's got a very insightful way of using social media and sharing bites of information that are both practically useful and also very valuable in terms of how much time it takes to consume them.
In a recent Periscope session (basically just a very personal form of live-streaming), Naval talked about this idea:
"Not wanting to have something is as good as having it"
I found this to be very powerful.
In a society that is plagued with materialism, how do we keep ourselves from falling prey to the animal that is material pursuit?
Pursuing material items will never get you anywhere. It's like our version of a dog chasing it's own tail: you're chasing after a moving target.
That target is always moving away from you.
Another way of thinking about it is like a carrot and a horse. The carrot is constantly moving just out of reach of the horse, despite every effort the horse makes to catch it.
This also applies to other things in life, not just materialistic pursuits:
Who do you think wins every negotiation? The person who cares about the outcome less than those on the other side of every negotiation.
This is not saying that you should be apathetic or lazy. It's saying that you should cultivate a detachment to many things in life. Material things in particular.
Similarly, being passionate about things outside of your control will make you miserable.
A great example of something outside of your control (for most people) is politics. Some people are fascinated by politics and love to follow every little detail of it.
These people often fall prey to the negativity of the media and of politicians and their inability to actually get things done and talk about the ideas that they (the people) actually care about. This can be frustrating and it (in my opinion) is just form of time waste, because it's out of your control.