The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

by Mark Manson

Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problems—problems

As Freud once said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”

Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.

You’ll notice that good, healthy values are achieved internally.

Bad values are generally reliant on external events—flying

Bad values, while sometimes fun or pleasurable, lie outside of your control and often require socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve.

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 the...

rejection: the ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly defining what you will and wi...

contemplation of one’s own mortality; this one is crucial, because paying vigilant attention to one’s own death is perhaps the only thing capable of helping us kee...

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.

Responsibility and fault often appear together in our culture. But they’re not the same thing.

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.

I didn’t choose my crappy genetics, so it’s not my fault if things go wrong.” And it’s true, it’s not their fault. But it’s still their responsibility.

We all get dealt cards. Some of us get better cards than others. And while it’s easy to get hung up on our cards, and feel we got screwed over, the real game lies in the choices we make with those cards, the risks we decide to take, and the consequences we choose to live with.

nobody makes it through life without collecting a few scars on the way out.

part of living in a democracy and a free society is that we all have to deal with views and people we don’t necessarily like. That’s simply the price we pay—you could even say it’s the whole point of the system. And it seems more and more people are forgetting that.

There is no correct dogma or perfect ideology. There is only what your experience has shown you to be right for you—and even then, that experience is probably somewhat wrong too.

how quickly the human mind is capable of coming up with and believing in a bunch of bullshit that isn’t real. And it turns out, we’re all really good at it.

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.

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.

That’s simply reality: 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.

We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at.

A sizable percentage of them believed that the wartime experiences they’d suffered, although painful and indeed traumatic, had actually caused them to become better, more responsible, and yes, even happier people.

Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient, more grounded.

Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments. It’s only when we feel intense pain that we’re willing to look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us. We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we’ve been deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.

Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they’re feeling. Their goal is to get back to “feeling good” again as quickly as possible, even if that means substances or deluding themselves or returning to their shitty values. Learn to sustain the pain you’ve chosen.

Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.

way. Because after all the years of excitement, the biggest lesson I took from my adventuring was this: absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing.

Russia had me reexamining the bullshitty, fake-nice communication that is so common in Anglo culture, and asking myself if this wasn’t somehow making us more insecure around each other and worse at intimacy.

But we need to reject something. Otherwise, we stand for nothing.

The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values.

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.

The desire to avoid rejection at all costs, to avoid confrontation and conflict, the desire to attempt to accept everything equally and to make everything cohere and harmonize, is a deep and subtle form of entitlement.

Rejection is an important and crucial life skill.

now. In fact, up until the mid-nineteenth century or so, love was seen as an unnecessary and potentially dangerous psychological impediment to the more important things in life—you know, like farming well and/or marrying a guy with a lot of sheep.

The truth is, there are healthy forms of love and unhealthy forms of love. 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.

Entitled people adopt these strategies in their relationships, as with everything, to help avoid accepting responsibility for their own problems. As a result, their relationships are fragile and fake, products of avoiding inner pain rather than embracing a genuine appreciation and adoration of their partner.

But more is not always better. In fact, the opposite is true. We are actually often happier with less.

Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life.

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.

You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived.