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

by Mark Manson

Give a fuck about buying that new lawn ornament.

Now 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.

FB helps to screw up our mental health.

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

Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around

just go with it. Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given. We give too many fucks about the rude gas station attendant who gave us our change in nickels. We give too many fucks when a show we liked was canceled on TV. We give too many fucks when our coworkers don’t bother asking us about our awesome weekend.

The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.

Amen

more important to worry about. It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy. Because if you don’t find that meaningful something, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.

well. In fact, research has found that our brains don’t register much difference between physical pain and psychological pain.

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

This.

to deny one’s negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems.

obsessive-compulsive disorder or a dickhead boss who ruins half of your waking hours every day, the solution lies in the acceptance and active engagement of that negative experience—not

I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory.

A person who actually has a high self-worth is able to look at the negative parts of his character frankly—“Yes, sometimes I’m irresponsible with money,” “Yes, sometimes I exaggerate my own successes,”

attention. Many people choose this strategy: to prove to everyone that they are the most miserable, or the most oppressed, or the most victimized.

quality of our lives. Values underlie everything we are and do. If what we value is unhelpful, if what we consider success/failure is poorly chosen,

yet, if they were able to go deeper and look at their underlying values, they would see that their original analysis was based on avoiding responsibility for their own problem,

We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose

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.

The fact is, people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others.

Whoops. Me.

and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it. Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction. Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problems—problems which, by the way, if you’re choosing the right values and metrics, should be invigorating you and motivating

As a rule, people who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being reflected back at them.)

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

Giving up a value you’ve depended on for years is going to feel disorienting, as if you don’t really know right from wrong anymore. This is hard, but it’s normal.

Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don’t go from “wrong” to “right.” Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. And when we learn something additional, we go from slightly less wrong to slightly less wrong than that, and then to even less wrong

Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable. That’s why accepting the inevitable imperfections of our values is necessary for any growth to take place.

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. Every person leaves that

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

But the converse is true as well: the more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don’t know. Uncertainty removes

The only way to solve our problems is to first admit that our actions and beliefs up to this point have been wrong and

are not working.

If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your life, and until you’re able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change.

We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all.

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.

Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have