The Consequences of Not Giving Two F*cks, by Jenny Bahn

There is a Zen-like quality to not giving a shit about anything. I usually feel this way right after I leave Bikram yoga, when the sweat and the heat and the humidity have hammered me into submission, quelled all the frothing angst that usually develops over the course of a day. Concerns about how I’m not booking modeling jobs (going broke) or how my insurance is charging me $2,000 for routine lab work (also, going broke) or how that guy still doesn’t — and will likely never — love me (dying of loneliness).

But after a meditative hour and a half listening to my passive yogi purr sweet everythings into air so thick you could cut it in two, I feel better…because there’s nothing more liberating than not giving two fucks.

My curse, however, is that I give at least two fucks most of the time, usually about four on average. I can pinpoint the reason for this; a childhood as “the older one” and teenage years spent ensuring I got into a good college, followed by the adulthood discovery that I’m one of those obnoxious Alpha people, the types who want to the first to beeline it through the subway doors because the idea of shuffling behind the incapacitated masses is enough to give them coronary.

I care about how fast I get home.

I care about taking showers before I go to bed.

I care about shaving my legs every night.

I care about money.

I care about saturated fats and chemical sugars.

I care about changing careers.

I care about getting old.

These thoughts, while they have been good for my general well-being and my bank account, are not necessarily that great for living, at least the version of “living” we think of when we’re young: drinking in excess, frequent use of recreational drugs, sleeping with randos.

In fact, when I scroll through the pictures of those more delightfully tragic and reckless than myself, I get the pangs of regret that one might expect to experience after they’ve had children, well aware that this phase of their life has long gone. (Unless you’re a horrible parent, in which case, rage on, asshole.) As though one day we’re going to sit down and ask ourselves “Did I snort enough coke? Was I as horrible as I could have been to as many members of the opposite sex as possible? Did I come close enough to landing myself in AA but not so close that I actually enrolled?”

Are these the measures of a successful youth? Living in New York, you’re made to think so.

Often I think these people — with their fingers wrapped around cigarettes, bottles of Miller High Life tucked into their laps, their cut-off shorts and their tits exposed — are, in a way, Zen, in that they’ve got the recipe for not giving two fucks down. They can find Zen in a party, at the bottom of a bottle, in the bed of a stranger. Meanwhile, I’m here, baking a gluten-free cake with agave and applesauce, which I will chase with a bottle of Kombucha tea and a shot of wheatgrass.

What I wouldn’t do to really, really not give two fucks. To feel the net beneath me fray and give way to my weight. To fall down, down, down into that filthy pit I have avoided my entire life. To dance in hell, revel with the degenerates, light my cigarette with the burning iron of Satan’s pitchfork.

Then again, I might just have to stick to the sweaty, manmade hell of my yoga studio, and get my Zen the hard way.

Sober.