Caring Less to Avoid Burnout!

I keep seeing smug people saying evil crap like this:

...and it infuriates me.

When Beethoven composed in diapers, it wasn't because he needed advice about work/life balance. He wasn't doing it wrong. He wasn't unhinged. He understood that this is the level of commitment required to give posterity a majestic gift. I'd say nothing less about my car detailing friend, a seeming yokel who devised a way to change the reflection of light off of paint via thousands of caring strokes with his trusty blob of putty. He doesn't need the money, but works like a demon. He cares way too much.

People who care too much have given us everything worthwhile about our world. Every delicious bite, every funny quip, every comfortable chair. Anything better than adequate/functional comes from fuck-givers. And none of them - no one who's done anything good or meaningful or delightful - would ever advise you to care less.

One exception: you can definitely care less about the fake mental drama you've been nurturing as an ongoing project.

Burn out! Burn the hell out! All the way! Use every damned calorie and then keep running on empty! Leave it all on the field! Do everything like your life depends on it because life is short and if you spend it just fiddling around, you're wasting a great gift!

Care the bejesus out of important tasks, but also seemingly trivial ones. Because there are no trivial tasks. Your every action - every word, every gesture - shapes the future. You are the god-like prime mover of all that comes after. You are the Ancestor. You create posterity's ripples.

Funny how the people telling us to care less are always dullards. Shitty reporters grinding out click bait, or Glen from Human Resources, or the sort of noodge who hangs around Facebook all day piling up "likes" via strokes and platitudes. Unimpressive people. Not people you'd want cooking you lasagna, or sharing a foxhole.

The world is full of milk-blooded puddy pud-puds, which, by itself, is fine - I don't judge - but a few of them aren't content to simply eschew full-heartedness. They devote their feeble cojones to persuading the rest of us to give less of a fuck. That's where they invest their quarter-watt of vital human energy. Their passion - insofar as their sour, farty, primly moderate inclinations could be equated with passion - is to patronizingly coax the rest of us into being less passionate. They are forces of darkness. They are energy vampires.

I wrote here that

Passionless people don't behold passion and say "Yup, that's the good stuff!"

The passionless maintain relevance via two lines of gaslighting: 1. "nothing's worth passion", and 2. "passionate people seem awfully loopy".

We have been deliberately blinkered by the myriad stolid pud-puds trafficking in the wide part of the bell curve; in mere competency.

I like to observe that "Shitty", "Adequate", and "Great" are not neighbors. Greatness is a quadrillion times more demanding; a separate realm above and beyond. You can't get there out of moderation. 

I know the reply to that. "Greatness? Woah, buddy. Slow down. That's not my jam."

Yes it is. You've just been denatured by the pud-puds.

And needlessly so, because you do phenomenally great work every single day. The mental world of brooding discontent, self-aggrandizement, and general fantasy you've been nurturing is a bona fide masterpiece of painstaking creativity. If you feel too exhausted to raise your aspirations - for example, to generate delicious bites, funny quips, or comfortable chairs - it's because you've been so fully committed to that.