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The Danger in Caring About Everything, All of the Time
On misunderstanding Buddhism, hiking alone, and desperately searching for inner peace
I realized recently that I give too many fucks.
As metaphysical realizations so often do, this one arose during brunch. I was drinking rosé with a group of friends on the sun-washed back patio of a Venice Beach beer garden. It was the Sunday before Memorial Day; garlands of blue and red bunting dangled from every table, couch, and doorframe like a kind of patriotic fauna. Pop music thumped pleasantly — even politely — from speakers tucked tactfully out of sight, and the smell of sunscreen mingled with that delectable olfactory tang so unique to Southern California: barbecue, sea salt, hot concrete, healthy skin.
It was, in other words, the kind of atmosphere in which one would reasonably expect to not give any fucks about anything other than spending time with treasured friends, consuming cool drinks, and perhaps deciding which filter to employ when posting evidence of all this fun later on Instagram. Yet there I was, doing the exact opposite — obsessing over a variety of outlandish, irrelevant, paranoid concerns that zapped around my brain like mosquitoes in a humid room:
- Did my boss’s occasional reticence on Slack belie her secret…
