Nothing anyone else thinks matters. Obviously I don’t think this, but also, I do. Nothing anyone else thinks can matter, for a few reasons and in a few ways. For one thing, people think all kinds of different things. For everyone who thinks something, someone else thinks something else, opposite. This may feel like it leads to relativism, and it does. But also it doesn’t. Because if what other people think doesn’t matter, it doesn’t mean you can’t think about what they think, or what you think in response, just that it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, except to themselves. This allows you to think dispassionately and disinterestedly, which is the best kind of thinking (although obviously not the best kind of living).
Disinterestedly is a funny word because it means, in this case, without your own agenda, and not, without interest, like it might seem. I have read it used this way before, which is why I am using it this way, but every time I read it, used this way, I am confused by it, which is why I like it.
For another thing, other people’s ideas are interesting, and can be useful, but aren’t always. For example: I read a Substack essay yesterday in defense of reading secondary sources about literature. Then I read the comments which included a defender of the original point making the (to my mind unnecessarily vulgar!) claim that “Studying literature from a historical angle is scholarly masturbation.” This is something I could get stuck on–should we read secondary sources–and I could, and probably have at some point in the past, decided that the original idea-haver is right, that somehow secondary sources muddy the waters of literary interpretation, and that what’s most important is for people (in this case students) to have their own experience of the text, unsullied by anyone else’s opinion. It’s funny because now this is an essay against taking into account other people’s opinions using an example in which I, ultimately, disagree with someone who says you shouldn’t read other people’s opinions about something. And I guess that means that I think they’re right, and wrong.
Nothing anyone else thinks matters, because what you think matters most, and first, because what you think definitely does matter, if only as a starting place. What other people think matters less than none, but feels like it matters more, if you don’t know what you think. Once you know what you think, then maybe things that other people think can start to matter. But if you’re floating, lacking an anchor, in the fucked up sea of other people’s ideas, which many of us are, then what you think matters most and first.
And anyway, what does it mean for something to matter? Sometimes, it just means it’s worth taking into consideration at all. This allows for the most extreme interpretation of my original statement, making it mean that nothing anyone else thinks is worth taking into consideration. I don’t think that, but I could.
A different definition might be more right in which mattering means that an idea gets a certain weight, or means something about what you must think in light of it; for something to matter in this way, it might have certain criteria. One might be that it must come from someone you trust, or someone who you think is smart(er than you). In this case, the meaning of what I said might mean, “nothing anyone else thinks matters, unless it comes from someone you trust or think is smart, in which case it does, and it must necessarily affect what you ultimately think.” It’s easy to feel like the ideas that come from someone you trust or respect deserve more consideration, but that’s a dangerous way to think, because then I think that makes you give them less consideration. Not letting what anyone else thinks matter to you allows you to give each idea its due consideration which could be none, or some, or a lot. Don’t give any ideas too much consideration until you have given your own a lot of consideration, unless an idea is helping you give your own consideration.
None of this makes any sense in the context of something else I think, which is that everything that I think is probably what someone else has thought and I have heard or read and integrated on accident. But this is maybe why it’s useful to think, “nothing anyone else thinks matters.” Maybe you will hear or read and integrate less of what other people think on accident, and at the very least only develop new ideas on purpose when you think you are thinking your own thoughts.