The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
“Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.”
“But when you stop and really think about it, conventional life advice - all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time - is actually fixating on what you lack. It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for you.”
“After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is.”
“And if you’re dreaming of something all the time, then you’re reinforcing the same unconscious reality over and over: that you are not that.”
“The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.”
“By not giving a fuck that you feel bad, you short-circuit the Feedback Loop from Hell; you say to yourself, ‘I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?’ And then, as if sprinkled by magic fuck-giving fairy dust, you stop hating yourself for feeling so bad.”
“Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience - ‘the Backwards Law’.”
“If pursuing the positive is a negative, then pursuing the negative generates the positive.”
“... what I’m talking about here is essentially learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively - how to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you based on finely honed personal values.”
“Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.”
“When we say, ‘Damn, watch out, Mark Manson just don’t give a fuck,’ we don’t mean that Mark Manson doesn’t care about anything; on the contrary, we mean that Mark Manson doesn’t care about adversity in the face of his goals, he doesn’t care about pissing some people off to do what he feels is right or important or noble.”
“To not give a fuck about adversity, yo must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.”
“Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.”
“The idea of not giving a fuck is a simple way of reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is important and what is not.”
“Life itself is a form of suffering.”
“Pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them – Buddha.”
“Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and, as we’ll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness.”
“… the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear.”
“Pain is what teaches us what to pay attention to when we’re young or careless.”
“The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one. Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded. Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is ‘solving’. Happiness is therefore a form of action.”
“True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.”
“Denial: This may make them feel good in the short term, but it leads to a life of insecurity, neuroticism, and emotional repression.”
“Victim Mentality: This may make them feel better in the short term, but it leads to a life of anger, helplessness, and despair.”
“Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.”
“Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.”
“A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider is, ‘What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?’ Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.”
“Because happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems.”
“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”
“Research found that people who thought highly about themselves generally performed better and caused few problems.”
“But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.”
“Entitlement is impervious. People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority. But entitlement is a failed strategy. It’s just another high. It’s not happiness.”
“Each and every one of us can be extraordinary. We all deserve greatness. The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory – after all, if everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be extraordinary – is missed by most people.”
“The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.”
“If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not ‘How do I stop suffering?’ but ‘Why am I suffering – for what purpose?’ “
“Self-awareness if like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times. Let’s say the first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of one’s emotions. The second layer of the self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. This layer of questioning helps us understand the root cause of the emotions that overwhelm us. Once we understand that root cause, we can ideally do something to change it. The third level is our personal values: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?”
“Take a moment and think of something that’s really bugging you. Now ask yourself why it bugs you. Chances are the answer will involve a failure of some sort. Then take that failure and ask why it seems ‘true’ to you. What if that failure wasn’t really a failure? What if you’ve been looking at it the wrong way?”
“The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?”
“If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.”
“There are a handful of common values that create really poor problems for people – problems that can hardly be solved: Pleasure, Material Success, Always Being Right, and Staying Positive.”
“Pleasure – Pleasure is a false god. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose. Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect.”
“Material Success – Research shows that once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food, shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero. So, if you’re starving and living on the street in the middle of India, an extra ten thousand dollars a year would affect your happiness a lot. But if you’re sitting pretty in the middle class in a developed country, an extra ten thousand dollars per year won’t affect anything much. The other issue with overvaluing material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion.”
“Always Being Right – The fact is, people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others.”
“Staying Positive – Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction. Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problems. The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way that aligns with your values. Emotions are just feedback.”
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. That is why these values – pleasure, material success, always being right, staying positive – are poor ideals for a person’s life. Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.”
“Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable. Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable.”
“People who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being reflected back at them.”
“This, in a nutshell, is what ‘self-improvement’ is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about.”
“Five counterintuitive values that I believe are the most beneficial values one can adopt: responsibility, uncertainty, failure, rejection, and contemplation of one’s own mortality.”
“Responsibility – taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who’s at fault.”
“Uncertainty – the acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your own beliefs.”
“Failure – the willingness to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that they may be improved upon.”
“Rejection – the ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life.”
“Contemplation of one’s own mortality – paying vigilant attention to one’s own death is perhaps the only thing capable of helping us keep all our other values in proper perspective.”
“Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.”
“We, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.”
“The point is, we are always choosing, whether we recognize it or not. Always.”
“The real question is: What are we choosing to give a fuck about? What values are we choosing to base our actions on? What metrics are we choosing to use to measure our life? And are those good choices – good values and good metrics?”
“With great responsibility comes great power.”
“Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re currently making, every second of every day.”
“To simply blame others is only to hurt yourself.”
“The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims. The more people there are who proclaim themselves victims over tiny infractions, the harder it becomes to see who the real victims actually are.”
“Do, or do not: there is no ‘how.’”
“Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don’t go from ‘wrong’ to ‘right.’ Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. And when we learn something additional, we go from slightly less wrong to slightly less wrong than that, and then to even less wrong than that, and so on.”
“Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened. That’s why accepting the inevitable imperfections of our values is necessary for any growth to take place.”
“First, the brain is imperfect. We mistake things we see and hear. We forget things or misinterpret events quite easily. Second, once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning. We are biased toward the meaning our mind has made, and we don’t want to let go of it.”
“Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth.”
“Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill up the time available for its completion.”
“Murphy’s Law: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”
“Manson’s Law of Avoidance: The more something threatens to change how you view yourself, how successful/unsuccessful you believe yourself to be, how well you see yourself living up to your values, the more you will avoid ever getting around to doing it.”
“’Knowing yourself’ or ‘finding yourself’ can be dangerous. It can close you off to inner potential and outer opportunities. I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgements and accepting of the differences in others.”
“Here are some questions that will help you breed a little more uncertainty in your life: 1) What if I’m wrong? 2) What would it mean if I were wrong? 3) Would being wrong create a better of a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others? The goal here is to look at which problem is better.”
“If it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.”
“Failure itself is a relative concept.”
“A lot of this fear of failure comes from having chosen shitty values. For instance, if I measure myself by the standard ‘Make everyone I meet like me,’ I will be anxious, because failure is 100 % defined by the actions of others, not by my own actions. I am not in control; thus, my self-worth is at the mercy of judgements by others. Whereas if I instead adopt the metric ‘Improve my social life,’ I can live up to my value of ‘good relations with others’ regardless of how other people respond to me. My self-worth is based on my own behaviors and happiness.”
“Our proudest achievements come in the face of the greatest adversity. Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient, more grounded.”
“Dabrowski argued that fear and anxiety and sadness are not necessarily always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often representative of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain is to deny our own potential. Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life.
“The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me. And thus, my VCR question: ‘How do you just walk up and talk to a person?’ Because I failed to separate what I felt from what was, I was incapable of stepping outside myself and seeing the world for what it was: a simple place where two people can walk up to each other at any time and speak.”
“Endless Loop: Inspiration → Motivation → [Action → Inspiration → Motivation] → Action → Etc.”
“If you really like someone and are having a great time, you tell her that you like her and are having a great time.”
“Having lived under communism for so many generations, with little to no economic opportunity and caged by a culture of fear, Russian society found the most valuable currency to be trust. And to build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology – you had to know whom you could rely on and whom you couldn’t, and you needed to know quickly. But, in the ‘free’ West, there existed an abundance of economic opportunity – so much economic opportunity that it became far more valuable to present yourself in a certain way, even if it was false, than to actually be that way. Trust lost its value. Appearances and salesmanship became more advantageous forms of expression. Knowing a lot of people superficially was more beneficial than knowing a few people closely.”
“The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X.”
“Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other – in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support. The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy relationship comes down to two things: 1) how well each person in the relationship accepts responsibility, and 2) the willingness of each person to both reject and be rejected by their partner.”
“People in a healthy relationship with strong boundaries will take responsibility for their own values and problems and not take responsibility for their partner’s values and problems. People in a toxic relationship with poor or no boundaries will regularly avoid responsibility for their own problems and/or take responsibility for their partner’s problems.”
“The victim creates more and more problems to solve – not because additional real problems exist, but because it gets her the attention and affection she craves. The saver solves and solves – not because she actually cares about the problems, but because she believes she must fix others’ problems in order to deserve attention and affection for herself.”
“For victims, the hardest thing to do in the world is to hold themselves accountable for their problems. For savers, the hardest thing to do in the world is to stop taking responsibility for other people’s problems.”
“It’s not about giving a fuck about everything your partner gives a fuck about; it’s about giving a fuck about your partner regardless of the fucks he or she gives. That’s unconditional love, baby.”
“Trust is the most important ingredient in any relationship, for the simple reason that without trust, the relationship doesn’t actually mean anything. You don’t feel loved until you trust that the love being expressed toward you comes without any special conditions or baggage attached to it.”
“Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. Commitment gives you freedom because it hones your attention and focus, directing them toward what is most efficient at making you healthy and happy. Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again? Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would.”
“Ernest Becker – The Denial of Death: 1) Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualize and think about ourselves abstractly. As humans, we’re blessed with the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations, to contemplate both the past and the future, to imagine other realities or situations where things might be different. And it’s because of this unique mental ability that we all, at some point, become aware of the inevitability of our own death. This realization cause what Becker calls ‘death terror,’ a deep existential anxiety that underlies everything we think or do. 2) We essentially have two ‘selves.’ The first self is the physical self – the one that eats, sleeps, snores, and poops. The second self is our conceptual self – our identity, or how we see ourselves. In order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. It’s why we feel compelled to spend so much time giving ourselves to others, especially to children, in the hopes that our influence – our conceptual self – will last way beyond our physical self. Becker calls such efforts our ‘immortality projects,’ projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death. Our immortality projects are our values.”
“You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not. You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to.”
“This acceptance of my death, this understanding of my own fragility, has made everything easier – untangling my addictions, identifying and confronting my own entitlement, accepting responsibility for my own problems – suffering through my fears and uncertainties, accepting my failures and embracing rejections – it has all been made lighter by the thoughts of my own death. The more I peer into the darkness, the brighter life gets, the quieter the world becomes, and the less unconscious resistance I feel to, well, anything.”
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (Mark Manson)
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