No man is an island entire of itself

People always say that you shouldn't care what others think about you and that you shouldn't listen to what they have to say (does that mean we should also not listen to the people who say not to listen to what other people say? Mindfuck). Well isn't that just complete rubbish? If you're not going to take their statements into consideration then they have as much a moral obligation not to listen to what you have to say either. Then ultimately nothing anybody says matters all that much. Then we end up with everybody saying all kinds of shit at, to and of other people and by that point it's all just noise. By that point there would be no more purpose for conversation. Humans pride themselves of being a lot more evolved than their primal counterparts because we have the capability of communicating complex ideas, thoughts and emotions with one another. Why would you throw that wonderful ability away?

You should listen to what they have to say and they should listen to what you have to say because we are people and we live with people. Society means that we matter just as much as everybody else and in so doing each of our respective opinions of one another are equally important. The thing that normally happens with this advice is we don't listen to the criticism people spit at us but listen to the compliments as if the latter is any more true than the former. Please, none of us are perfectly good. If you're going to take into consideration for the good comments but not the bad, it just means you're deliberately blinding yourself of the truth. The truth is not everybody is going to like you. The truth is, no matter how good a person you think you are or how nice you treat everybody, someone is bound not to like you. The truth is we're not always right.

Not caring what other people have to say means that the only thing you should consider before you do some dumbass thing is your own view on the action. If that's not recipe for complete and utter egotistical disaster then I don't know what is. We are social creatures, as much as we like to deny it, society is indistinguishable from our private existence. We can't live effectively without the presence of other people in our lives, that's why we're so gosh darn obnoxious all the gosh darn time! So we can't live and act and speak as though none of it has any effect on any other entity in our community. No matter how insignificant it may seem, we impact others as others impact us. Don't be so egotistic to think that your life belongs merely to yourself. The things you say and do will affect other people. To say "well you shouldn't care what I say anyway" is to shed responsibility that comes with freedom of expression.

There may be those who seem to speak anger and hate for the sake of it. Those who shout even though there was no real cause for it. But we should still care about what they say because if anything I think it sounds like a cry for help. It sounds like someone who longs deeply for love and compassion. Maybe all they want to hear is that we love them and respect them and there is no need for them to say any of those things. Nobody hates out of nothing.

But this is my opinion, you can go live your lives like nobody but yourself matters, hey! To each his own. I'm not going to tell you how to live your life. But I do think that that makes you arrogant and selfish. I do think that that makes you inconsiderate of how other people feels. But I suppose you won't listen to what I say and you won't care either, and that's completely fine. If you do decide to do and live however the hell you want without considering others' inputs, be damn sure that you're absolutely right, be damn sure that you won't cause harm to other people or your surrounding, be damn sure that your moral compass never steers off course.