It’s okay to not care
This week, for the third time ever, I didn’t finish reading a book. The previous two times were both Ulyssess (or however you spell it) by James Jocye. I’ve never gotten past page 50 of it, and while I always felt kind of bad sending it back to the library unfinished, I wasn’t that invested.
But this week I tried to read The Book of Numbers by Joshua Cohen, and good grief, it was terrible. I don’t usually get Offended by books but this was just on another. The protagonist is a mysogenistic (or however you spell it) garbage human with horrible and disturbing taste in adult entertainment. And he’s racist. And yes, yes, the author is not the characters, but considering that one of the central gimmicks of this book is that the protagonist is named after the author, and is an author, that separation is kind of hard to achieve.
And the way he talks about Arabs, augh, I’ve read “herioc white guy kills the evil muslim terrorists” novels that had less of stereotypes and casual racism.
So anyway, after 180 pages, I didn’t finish it. I decided “I don’t care what happens in this book”. What a relief. Same for blog posts. I used to have a reading list a mile long. If a post was interesting enough to open, then surely I would read it at some point, right? But now I open a post, read a couple paragraphs, and close it, letting it get lost in the soup of the internet.
It even works for getting into fights with people on the internet. Oh no! That person said something wrong and stupid! I could correct them, but…. eh. I don’t care. They probably won’t change their mind anyway.
I’m telling you, it’s fun to not care. Give it a try sometimes. Oh, and while I’m handing out free advice: put seasoning on your food. Seriously, trust me here, you can make it taste like a totally different thing.