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Comment by bitops | Hacker News Reader

I heard a good joke about this: when you're 20, you're obsessed with what others think about you. When you're 40, you don't give a damn what others think about you. When you're 60, you realize others were never thinking about you at all.

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I hesitate to quote Ayn Rand, but it's fitting:

"Mr. Roark, we’re alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me? In any words you wish. No one will hear us."

"But I don’t think of you."

-Ellsworth Toohey and Howard Roark, The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand

Michael Ginsberg: "I feel bad for you."

Don Draper: "I don't think about you at all."

(The irony of this line is that Draper, in fact, was obsessed with one-upping Ginsberg the whole episode.)

Things like this are what make Don Draper such a fantastic (and fantastically loathsome) character. He knows which buttons to push at which times. It is that quality that makes him both successful in his career and miserable in his life.

"Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person." -- Mark Twain

Ran into a coworker on the elevator. We worked together on the same floor in the same department for a few years then I changed departments and floors and now we hardly see each other. When she saw me on the elevator she said "I forgot you exist!"

Does that empower the "Move fast, break things" mentality since others were never really thinking about you (or other people for that matter) and just mostly themselves?

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