I hear this so often that it has lost all meaning- “Don’t give a crap what others think of you.” People never explain convincingly why this is good advice.

My main obstacle to accepting this belief is that, as humans, we are social animals, and we depend on each other for survival. Very few of us are completely self-sufficient, if any really. In our world, people have to like you enough to pay you to do a job, or to buy your stuff if you have a business. If no one wants anything to do with you and doesn’t want to pay you, you starve and die. So it feels like we LITERALLY live or die depending on others’ opinions of us. We all need support, and in order to get that support, we need people to like us.

I’m worried that if I REALLY stop caring what others think and become truly myself, EVERYONE will hate me passionately and not want anything to do with me, and I’ll starve to death alone in a gutter somewhere. I just can’t imagine anyone accepting me for who I truly am, even if I’ve never done anything in my life that horrible to begin with. Mostly I’m just an artist who wants to be fully creative and exploratory and reach my own infinite potential. I think I’m worried I sound narcissistic and that will scare people off.

I have this fear that if I really stopped giving a crap, I would lose control and do horrible things to people, as if I was on drugs and acted purely on impulses. I would be sexually explicit in public, naked wherever, killing people, etc etc, with no fear of what other people think to stop me from being crazy and destructive.

Maybe it sounds illogical, but my emotions don’t care. I still feel strongly that way. How do I know I’ll be okay if I become truly myself and express that to people? Will they hate me?