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

by Mark Manson

Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.

realized that it was likely that I hadn’t been a great boyfriend, and that people don’t just magically cheat on somebody they’ve been with unless they are unhappy for some

reason.

That I had a role to play in enabling the shitty relationship to continue for as long as it did. After all, people who date each other tend to have similar values. And if I dated someone with shitty values for that long, what did that say about me and my values? I learned the hard way that if the people in your relationships are selfish and doing hurtful things, it’s likely you are too, you just don’t realize it.

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. People who consistently make the best choices in the situations they’re given are the ones who eventually come out ahead in poker, just as

The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims. It’s like the boy who cried wolf. The more people there are who proclaim themselves victims over tiny infractions, the harder it becomes to see who the real victims actually are.

Next, you’ll feel like a failure. You’ve spent half your life measuring yourself by that old value, so when you change your priorities, change your metrics, and stop behaving in the same way, you’ll fail to meet that old, trusted metric and thus immediately feel like some sort of fraud or nobody. This is also normal and also uncomfortable.

As a teenager, I told everybody that I didn’t care about anything, when the truth was I cared about way too much. Other people ruled my world without my even knowing.

thought love was something that just happened, not something that you worked for.

There’s a famous Michael Jordan quote about him failing over and over and over again, and that’s why he succeeded. Well, I’m always wrong about everything, over and over and over again, and that’s why my life improves. Growth is an endlessly iterative process.

We shouldn’t seek to find the ultimate “right” answer for ourselves, but rather, we should seek to chip away at the ways that we’re wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow.

Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable.

Just a light that keeps coming on with a ding, and people doing cartwheels thinking that what they’re doing is giving them points.

Sadism aside, the point of the experiment is to show how quickly the human mind is capable of coming up with and believing in a bunch of bullshit that isn’t real.

But there are two problems. First, the brain is imperfect. We mistake things we see and hear. We forget things or misinterpret events quite easily.

Second, once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning.

The human mind is a jumble of inaccuracy. And while this may make you uncomfortable, it’s an incredibly important concept to accept, as we’ll see.

Many people have an unshakable certainty in their ability at their job or in the amount of salary they should be making. But that certainty makes them feel worse, not better. They see others getting promoted over them, and they feel slighted. They feel unappreciated and underacknowledged.

This openness to being wrong must exist for any real change or growth to take place.

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

You avoid talking to your husband about being more adventurous in the bedroom because that conversation would challenge your identity as a good, moral woman.

When someone admits to herself, “You know, maybe I’m not good at relationships,” then she is suddenly free to act and end her bad marriage. She has no identity to protect by staying in a miserable, crappy marriage just to prove something to herself.

You could make plenty of money and be miserable, just as you could be broke and be pretty happy.

Instead, my value was something else. It was freedom, autonomy. The idea of being an entrepreneur had always appealed to me because I hated being told what to do and preferred to do things my way. The idea of working on the Internet appealed to me because I could do it from anywhere and work whenever I wanted.

Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. I’m sure a lot of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorously based on performance and punishes those who don’t do well.

And then we have all the mass media that constantly expose us to stellar success after success, while not showing us the thousands of hours of dull practice and tedium that were required to achieve that success.

And to deny that pain is to deny our own potential. Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally

delusional positive thinking,

If I had to redesign an entire website, I’d force myself to sit down and would say, “Okay, I’ll just design the header right now.” But after the header was done, I’d find myself moving on to other parts of the site. And before I knew it, I’d be energized and engaged in the project.

Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, 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 (gulp) one person.

Trust lost its value. Appearances and salesmanship became more advantageous forms of expression. Knowing a lot of people superficially was more beneficial than knowing a few people closely. This is why it became the norm in Western cultures to smile and say polite things even when you don’t feel like it,

There is such pressure in the West to be likable that people often reconfigure their entire personality depending on the person they’re dealing with.

It’s suspected by many scholars that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet not to celebrate romance, but rather to satirize it, to show how absolutely nutty it was. He didn’t mean for the play to be a glorification of love. In fact, he meant it to be the opposite: a big flashing neon sign blinking KEEP OUT, with police tape around it saying DO NOT CROSS.

But today, we all get brain boners for this kind of batshit crazy love. It dominates our culture. And the more dramatic, the better.

The problem is that we’re finding out that romantic love is kind of like cocaine. Like, frighteningly similar to cocaine. Like, stimulates the exact same parts of your brain as cocaine. Like, gets you high and makes you feel good for a while but also creates as many problems as it solves, as does cocaine.

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.

People can’t solve your problems for you. And they shouldn’t try, because that won’t make you happy. You can’t solve other people’s problems for them either,

Rather, a healthy relationship is when two people solve their own problems in order to feel good about each other.

The setting of proper boundaries doesn’t mean you can’t help or support your partner or be helped and supported yourself. You both should support each other. But only because you choose to support and be supported. Not because you feel obligated or entitled.

These are the yin and yang of any toxic relationship: the victim and the saver, the person who starts fires because it makes her feel important and the person who puts out fires because it makes him feel important.

These two types of people are drawn strongly to one another, and they usually end up together.

The victim creates more and more problems to solve—not because additional real problems exist, but because it gets her the attention and affection she craves. The saver solves and solves—not because she actually cares about the problems, but because she believes she must fix others’ problems in order to deserve attention and affection for herself. In both cases, the intentions are selfish and conditional and therefore self-sabotaging, and genuine love is rarely experienced.

something deep about relationships

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.

Sure, my ego gets bruised sometimes, and I bitch and complain and try to argue, but a few hours later I come sulking back and admit that she was right. And holy crap she makes me a better person, even though I hate hearing it at the time.

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.

You don’t feel loved until you trust that the love being expressed toward you comes without any special conditions or baggage attached to it.

What needs to happen is that cheaters have to start peeling away at their self-awareness onion and figure out what fucked-up values caused them to break the trust of the relationship (and whether they actually still value the relationship). They need to be able to say, “You know what: I am selfish. I

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

When we’re overloaded with opportunities and options, we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice.

But while investing deeply in one person, one place, one job, one activity might deny us the breadth of experience we’d like, pursuing a breadth of experience denies us the opportunity to experience the rewards of depth of experience.