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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Manson
Read between
March 29 - April 28, 2025
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.
This is the real story of Bukowski’s success: his comfort with himself as a failure.
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.
giving a fuck about more stuff is good for business.
the problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health.
Welcome to the 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.
This is why not giving a fuck is so key. This is why it’s going to save the world. And it’s going to save it by accepting that the world is totally fucked and that’s all right, because it’s always been that way, and always will be.
We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.
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.
Alan Watts used to refer to as “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.
Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. 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.
The avoidance of suffering is a form ...
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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.
Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
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.
The willingness to stare failure in the face and shove your middle finger back at it.
Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
Essentially, we become more selective about the fucks we’re willing to give. This is something called maturity.
“That’s what you get for giving a fuck when it wasn’t your turn to give a fuck.”
On the contrary, I see practical enlightenment as becoming 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.
life itself is a form of suffering.
pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them.
suffering is biologically useful.
it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.
satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering.
True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
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.
Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.
but I wasn’t in love with the process.
People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it.
The Jimmy who spent so much time talking about how good he was that he forgot to, you know, actually do something.
The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future.
We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people.
All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Nonstop. Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media business that’s what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. That’s the bottom line.
Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems.
they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement.
People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better.
But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.
both chose how they wished to suffer.
Self-awareness is 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.
Values underlie everything we are and do. If what we value is unhelpful, if what we consider success/failure is poorly chosen, then everything based upon those values—the thoughts, the emotions, the day-to-day feelings—will all be out of whack.
we instinctually measure ourselves against others and vie for status.
the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?
Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose.
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.
