You walk into an upscale bar. No one pays you any attention.
You walk into a high-end seafood restaurant on the Upper East Side during the middle of the day. None of the waiters or waitresses even bothers to stop and acknowledge you.
You walk into a luxury retail boutique. You get some attention, but it’s nothing positive. The retail assistants look at you and give a belittling sneer.
You get laid off. No one even bothers to refer you to a new job opening.
You lose an immediate family member. You share this news on social media and receive a bunch of the standard “I’m so sorry for your loss” messages but nothing beyond that.
You are months behind in rent payments and get evicted from your apartment. Once again, you receive a bunch of “sorry to hear that” messages but not a single helping hand. When you try calling your “best friend” to ask if you can crash at his house for one week while you get back on your feet, he doesn’t pick up or return your calls.
You get into a traffic accident. You pass out and wake up in the hospital. Some more messages of pity and solace come in. A few days go by. You are now just that guy who got injured the prior week. Last week becomes last month and eventually last year. Now you are forgotten again.
You can’t take it anymore. You get drunk midday, run out into the middle of a busy street and yell at the top of your lungs. Both the people in the cars and on the sidewalks largely ignore you. A few people shoot glances your way before proceeding to move onto their next destination. 30 seconds go by and they have completely forgotten about you.
What are we trying to get at here? A simple point: No one can really help you except for yourself. There are no freebies in life and you should eliminate the expectation that people should even care about you in the first place. Why would anyone care about how you are doing when they don’t stand to gain anything from doing so? It is your responsibility to show others that you can add real value to their lives.
The moment you come to the realization that nobody gives a damn about who you are and what you do is the inflection point in your life when you begin to take full responsibility for your own choices and actions. If you want to spend your mornings by the beach and your afternoons in the gym while everyone else is at work, then you need to put yourself in a position where you can easily sustain this type of lifestyle. Yes, this means having multiple income streams and not needing to be employed as a corporate slave sitting inside an office cubicle for 10+ hours every day. If you want to date pretty girls then you need to become the type of man that they find attractive. Attractive girls are not interested in miserable and out-of-shape bozos. No. They like physically fit high-achievers with unshakable confidence and an interesting life.
So rather than asking others to help you achieve your ambitions, ask yourself how you can help others reach theirs and build up mutual goodwill in the process. Instead of constantly complaining about how bad things are for yourself, focus on building up your skills and knowledge to bring about small but lasting changes that will compound over time. Rather than solving boredom by downing a six-pack of Bud Light to go along with low-quality pizza and a Netflix series, go outside and undertake that activity that has always scared you. Trust us, it will turn out to be far more fun and also give you an interesting story to tell.
With that said, we will end this post with the following question for you:
How many peoples’ lives are you able to incrementally improve right now at this very moment? The number you give here is exactly how many people should care about you.