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

by Mark Manson

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.

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.

Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others. You just can’t.

think what most people—especially educated, pampered middle-class white people—consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.

And this is what’s so dangerous about a society that coddles itself more and more from the inevitable discomforts of life: we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us.

“The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.”

True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved.

construing everything in life so as to make yourself out to be constantly victimized requires just as much selfishness as the opposite. It takes just as much energy and delusional self-aggrandizement to maintain the belief that one has insurmountable problems as that one has no problems at all.

our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.

If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose.

When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny the existence of our life’s problems. And when we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to solve them and generate happiness.

Certainty is the enemy of growth.

Aristotle wrote, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” Being able to look at and evaluate different values without necessarily adopting them is perhaps the central skill required in changing one’s own life in a meaningful way.

We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at. If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to succeed.

Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc.

Taking advantage of this knowledge, we can actually reorient our mindset in the following way: Action → Inspiration → Motivation

you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something—anything, really—and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself. I call this the “do something” principle. After using it myself to build my business,

Acts of love are valid only if they’re performed without conditions or expectations.

People with strong boundaries understand that a healthy relationship is not about controlling one another’s emotions, but rather about each partner supporting the other in their individual growth and in solving their own problems.

Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits.