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

by Mark Manson

The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more.

We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty. We get angry about getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious.

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

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

The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure.

in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give.

This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal.

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

I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.

life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention.

Happiness is not a solvable equation.

After all, the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.

Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded.

Happiness comes from solving problems.

Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress—the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems, and so on.

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

Highs also generate addiction. The more you rely on them to feel better about your underlying problems, the more you will seek them out.

Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.

Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it is good. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad.

Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.

Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose.

It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.