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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Manson
Read between
December 19 - December 19, 2025
“I have one of two choices—stay in the post office and go crazy . . . or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.”
Bukowski didn’t give a fuck about success.
Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired. Be perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye. Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work that’s likely to save the planet one day.
conventional life advice—all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time—is actually fixating on what you lack.
“The smallest dog barks the loudest.” A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident.
Believe it or not, this is part of the beauty of being human. Very few animals on earth have the ability to think cogent thoughts to begin with, but we humans have the luxury of being able to have thoughts about our thoughts.
Ah, the miracle of consciousness!
hey-look-my-life-is-cooler-than-yours social media,
We get angry about getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious. What is wrong with me?
This is why not giving a fuck is so key.
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.
pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.
And yes, I just used my LSD hallucinations to make a philosophical point about happiness. No fucks given.
As the existential philosopher Albert Camus said (and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t on LSD at the time): “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.”
“Mark, this is making my nipples all hard, but what about the Camaro I’ve been saving up for? What about the beach body I’ve been starving myself for? After all, I paid a lot of money for that ab machine! What about the big house on the lake I’ve been dreaming of? If I stop giving a fuck about those things—well, then I’ll never achieve anything. I don’t want that to happen, do I?”
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
In my life, I have given a fuck about many things. I have also not given a fuck about many things. And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.
To not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.
While not giving a fuck may seem simple on the surface, it’s a whole new bag of burritos under the hood.
Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices.
The problem with people who hand out fucks like ice cream at a goddamn summer camp is that they don’t have anything more fuck-worthy to dedicate their fucks to.
I believe that today we’re facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it’s okay for things to suck sometimes. I know that sounds intellectually lazy on the surface, but I promise you, it’s a life/death sort of issue.
The idea of not giving a fuck is a simple way of reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is important and what is not.
No, not that airy-fairy, eternal bliss, end-of-all-suffering, bullshitty kind of enlightenment.
suffering is always inevitable—that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death.
This isn’t to say that all suffering is equal.
pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them.
Happiness is not a solvable equation.
But pain is not merely physical. As anyone who has had to sit through the first Star Wars prequel can tell you, we humans are capable of experiencing acute psychological pain as well.
We had margaritas, and he told me all about it: problems never go away, he said—they just improve.
“Life is essentially an endless series of problems, Mark,”
Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded.
Happiness comes from solving problems.
To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action;
People deny and blame others for their problems for the simple reason that it’s easy and feels good, while solving problems is hard and often feels bad.
Highs come in many forms. Whether it’s a substance like alcohol, the moral righteousness that comes from blaming others, or the thrill of some new risky adventure, highs are shallow and unproductive ways to go about one’s life.
Highs also generate addiction. The more you rely on them to feel better about your underlying problems, the more you will seek them out.
“What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”
Despite my fantasizing about this for over half my lifetime, the reality never came to fruition.
You Are Not Special
The problem with the self-esteem movement is that it measured self-esteem by how positively people felt about themselves.
self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.
But entitlement is a failed strategy. It’s just another high. It’s not happiness.
It has become an accepted part of our culture today to believe that we are all destined to do something truly extraordinary. Celebrities say it.
Business tycoons say it. Politicians say it. Even Oprah says it (so it must be true). Each and every one of us can be extraordinary. We all deserve greatness.
Being “average” has become the new standard of failure.
This sort of thinking is dangerous.
Humans often choose to dedicate large portions of their lives to seemingly useless or destructive causes. On the surface, these causes make no sense.
Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times.
Unfortunately, there are many people who suck at even this most basic level of self-awareness.
