The Subtle Art of not giving a F-ck

by Mark Manson

Entitlement

  • When you give a f-ck about everyone and everything—you will feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the way you want it to be. This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal.
  • Entitlement plays out in one of two ways: 1. I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment. 2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.

Don’t care too much

  • Sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it. Sometimes when you stop giving a f-ck, everything seems to fall into place. To not give a f-ck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action. Not giving a f-ck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

Choose what you care about

  • You must give a f-ck about something. It’s part of our biology to always care about something. The question, then, is, What are we choosing to give a f-ck about? And how can we not give a f-ck about what ultimately does not matter?

Suffering

  • Suffering through your fears and anxieties allows you to build courage and perseverance. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering.
  • Become comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable—that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death. Because once you become comfortable with all the shit that life throws at you (and it will throw a lot of shit, trust me), you become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way. 
  • Suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering.
  • Pain, in all of its forms, is our body’s most effective means of spurring action.
  • “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 than the question – “What do you want out of life?”
  • 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?”

Insecurities

  • Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others.

Happiness and Problems

  • Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is “solving.” If you’re avoiding your problems or feel like you don’t have any problems, then you’re going to make yourself miserable.
  • Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life.
  • True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
  • Some people deny that their problems exist. This may make them feel good in the short term, but it leads to a life of insecurity, neuroticism, and emotional repression.
  • Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could. Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances. This may make them feel better in the short term, but it leads to a life of anger, helplessness, and despair.
  • If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
  • If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.
  • When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.
  • Forcing myself to do something, even the most menial of tasks, quickly made the larger tasks seem much easier.
  • Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.
  • Pleasure is great, but it’s a horrible value to prioritize your life around. And yet, pleasure is what’s marketed to us, twenty-four/seven. It’s what we fixate on. It’s what we use to numb and distract ourselves. But pleasure, while necessary in life (in certain doses), isn’t, by itself, sufficient. Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect. If you get the other stuff right (the other values and metrics), then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product.
  • Happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelligible production.

Emotions

  • Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
  • Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. eg. “I dropped out of school and moved to Alaska just because it felt right.”

Self-worth and Achievement

  • Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.
  • Merely feeling good about yourself doesn’t really mean anything unless you have a good reason to feel good about yourself.
  • Adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.
  • The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.
  • The ticket to emotional health comes from accepting the bland and mundane truths such as “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.” Knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.
  • Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make or what kind of car they drive or whether their front lawn is greener and prettier than the next-door neighbor’s. 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.
  • People who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. 
  • 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.

Responsibility

  • 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 more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.

Failure

  • If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.” Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. 
  • 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 percent defined by the actions of others, not by my own actions.

Commitment and Love

  • The only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or one person.
  • Most elements of romantic love that we pursue—the dramatic and dizzyingly emotional displays of affection, the topsy-turvy ups and downs—aren’t healthy, genuine displays of love.
  • The mark of an unhealthy relationship is two people who try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves. You both should support each other only because you choose to support and be supported. Not because you feel obligated or entitled.
  • Demonstration of love: taking responsibility for your own problems and not holding your partner responsible for them.
  • If you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing so. 
  • It’s unreasonable to expect two people to accommodate each other 100 percent and fulfill every need the other has.
  • If two people who are close are not able to hash out their differences openly and vocally, then the relationship is based on manipulation and misrepresentation, and it will slowly become toxic.
  • Trust is the most important ingredient in any relationship, for the simple reason that without trust, the relationship doesn’t actually mean anything.
  • There is freedom and liberation in commitment.

Death

  • Once we become comfortable with the fact of our own death—the root terror, the underlying anxiety motivating all of life’s frivolous ambitions—we can then choose our values more freely, unrestrained by the illogical quest for immortality, and freed from dangerous dogmatic views.
  • Death confronts all of us with a painful and important question: What is your legacy? How will the world be different and better when you’re gone? What mark will you have made?
  • The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. 
  • Reminding myself of my own death repeatedly over the years 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 thought 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.

And…

  • All the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time is actually fixating on what we lack. For instance, you learn about the best ways to make money because you feel you don’t have enough money already.
  • Sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it.
  • Giving too much importance to too many things (such as the TV you have, the vacation you take, etc.) is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. The key to a good life is giving a f-ck about only what is true and immediate and important.
  • The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. For instance, the more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make. The more you desperately want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you come to see yourself, regardless of your actual physical appearance. And so on.
  • People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.
  • 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.
  • Many people become so obsessed with being “right” about their life that they never end up actually living it. Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.
  • Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.
  • The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. eg. You avoid telling your friend that you don’t want to see him anymore because ending the friendship would conflict with your identity as a nice, forgiving person.

Disclaimer: The key points of the book presented here are not a substitute for reading the book. To get the entire holistic message the author has offered requires reading the book.

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