The years that have come before 2018 have been full of a lot of beautiful things in my life. A lot of self-discovery and realizations about the people and the world around me. But with more self awareness and realization comes a price. You see how truly screwed up the world is and how it’s going to take a lot more than yourself to help fix it.

You see sides of people that you never even imagined were possible, and it breaks your heart when you realize they’ve changed for good and aren’t coming back. So with so many crazy things that have gone on in the years prior, maybe the key of 2018 can be less caring... Specifically caring less about what other people think and caring less about what other people do.

I, by no means, am perfect and no person should ever have to try to be perfect. We are human- we make mistakes, say things we don’t really mean, and all deserve forgiveness. So in regards to that statement, I know I have said and done things in the past to hurt people and acted in ways that haven’t been true to myself because I was caught up in trying to be something I’m not. I have been caught up way too many times in things I don’t necessarily want to be involved in.

I, the people around me and people all over the world are obsessed with caring about what other people do.

Caring about what other people are doing or how they choose to live their life is something I’ve found can be quite tiring, and often leads to spreading unwanted negativity about others. There’s so much negativity in the world already so what good can ever come from spreading more?

We as a society and especially the generation I’ve grown up in, are consumed with a built-in fakeness when it comes to social media. We’re obsessed with how many likes we can get and if we should like a person’s photo or post based on if they liked ours, rather than analyzing the content they post and listening to what they have to say or seeing what they want us to see. We act like we like certain people and then right after we’ve seen them we talk about what physical changes they’ve gone through rather than the different ways they’ve grown to better themselves.

Don’t get me wrong- I love social media and I’m a daily user of it but that’s not the point I’m trying to make. One topic that bothers me a lot is how much people care about the fluctuating weight of their peers. You’ve barely ever talked to that person in your life and now that they’ve graduated high school they’ve gained some weight so that automatically means that they must be failing? We act like significant weight gain or weight loss is a marker of failure and we judge people by this physical change rather than how they may have changed as a person.

You can never be sure what someone has going on in their life, so rather than comparing yourself to what you think of as someone else’s failure to make yourself feel more successful, what if we started caring more about ourselves and what’s going on in our lives, rather?

On the other side of the spectrum of caring is caring about what people think about you. This is a hard one to follow because a little part of us is always going to want to stay in line with societal rules of others in order to achieve some sense of normalcy. If not, we’d all be yelling obscenities at the small frustrations that happen to us in public, without thinking of the consequences that may follow.

But when you finally rule out the little things that have controlled your life for so long is quite a liberating feeling that may make you feel better overall. Like the fear of posting a picture, you like on Instagram without getting a lot of likes. Or even wearing something you want to wear out in public without caring about what other people think.

So if you’re going to care about something, care about the people in your life that make you happy and how you can spread your happiness back to them in return. Care about the fact that someone is doing something they love to do, rather than caring about how bad they may have succeeded or failed at the thing they did. Care about understanding someone’s life choices or the way they are rather than judging them first.

Maybe if 2018 is going to be the year to care less about superficial things, it can also be the year we all begin to understand others more.