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by
Mark Manson
It was his simple ability to be completely, unflinchingly honest with himself—especially the worst parts of himself—and to share his failings without hesitation or doubt.
Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations:
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.
Ironically, this fixation on the positive—on what’s better, what’s superior—only serves to remind us over and over again of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be.
no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is.
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 world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy
the problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health.
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.
you’re so worried about doing the right thing all the time that you become worried about how much you’re worrying.
Feedback Loop from Hell.
Our society today, through the wonders of consumer culture and hey-look-my-life-is-cooler-than-yours social media, has bred a whole generation of people who believe that having these negative experiences—anxiety, fear, guilt, etc.—is totally not okay.
The Feedback Loop from Hell has become a borderline epidemic, making many of us overly stressed, overly neurotic, and overly self-loathing.
if you feel like shit for even five minutes, you’re bombarded with 350 images of people totally happy and having amazing fucking lives, and it’s impossible to not feel like there’s something wrong with you.
By not giving a fuck that you feel bad, you short-circuit the Feedback Loop from Hell;
we really have become victims of our own success.
Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.
Because there’s an infinite amount of things we can now see or know, there are also an infinite number of ways we can discover that we don’t measure up, that we’re not good enough, that things aren’t as great as they could be.
The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
“the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
If pursuing the positive is a negative, then pursuing the negative generates the positive.
Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure.
Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.
These moments of non-fuckery are the moments that most define our lives. The major switch in careers; the spontaneous choice to drop out of college and join a rock band;
To not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.
Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given.
if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.
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.
when you give a fuck 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 fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness.
Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
indifferent people often attempt to be indifferent because in reality they give way too many fucks.
Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices.
It’s part of our biology to always care about something and therefore to always give a fuck. The question, then, is, What do we give a fuck about? What are we choosing to give a fuck about?
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.
overcoming adversity stuff, the willingness to be different, an outcast, a pariah, all for the sake of one’s own values.
say, “Fuck it,” not to everything in life, but rather to everything unimportant in life.
You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.
Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.
finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy.
Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.
today we’re facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it’s okay for things to suck sometimes.
when we believe that it’s not okay for things to suck sometimes, then we unconsciously start blaming ourselves.
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.
some suffering is always inevitable—that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death.
turn your pain into a tool, your trauma into power, and your problems into slightly better problems. That is real progress.
As with being rich, there is no value in suffering when it’s done without purpose.
