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

by Mark Manson

We all have emotional blind spots.

We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but we’re just a bunch of finely ornamented apes.

the truth is, sometimes life sucks, 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.

We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.

The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives.

The current media environment both encourages and perpetuates these reactions because, after all, it’s good for business.

Ryan Holiday refers to this as “outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet another part of the population.

The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims.

We should pick our battles carefully, while simultaneously attempting to empathize a bit with the so-called enemy.

You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)

As a teenager, I told everybody that I didn’t care about anything, when the truth was I cared about way too much.

Sure, rejection hurts. Failure sucks. But there are particular certainties that we hold on to—certainties that we’re afraid to question or let go of, values that have given our lives meaning over the years.

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

Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.

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

“I’m the exception; I’m unlike everybody else; I’m different and special.” This is narcissism, pure and simple.

Questioning ourselves and doubting our own thoughts and beliefs is one of the hardest skills to develop. But it can be done. Here are some questions that will help you breed a little more uncertainty in your life.

Question #1: Is it possible that I'm wrong? A

Question #2: If I am wrong, what would it mean?

Question #3: Which causes a bigger problem, being right or being wrong?

I was fortunate. I graduated college in 2007, just in time for the financial collapse and Great Recession,

I say I was fortunate because I entered the adult world already a failure.

Failure itself is a relative concept. If my metric had been to become an anarcho-communist revolutionary, then my complete failure to make any money between 2007 and 2008 would have been a raving success.

Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.

Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.

Emotional inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action

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

Action → Inspiration → Motivation

The Importance of Saying No

This realization came to me slowly over the course of my years traveling.

In Russia, if something is stupid, you say it’s stupid. If someone is being an asshole, you tell him he’s being an asshole. If you really like someone and are having a great time, you tell her that you like her and are having a great time. It doesn’t matter if this person is your friend, a stranger, or someone you met five minutes ago on the street.

The downside of this is that you never know, in the West, if you can completely trust the person you’re talking to.

But we need to reject something. Otherwise, we stand for nothing.

That rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity.

Entitled people adopt these strategies in their relationships, as with everything, to help avoid accepting responsibility for their own problems.

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, because that likewise won’t make them happy.

victims and savers both use each other to achieve emotional highs.

For victims, the hardest thing to do in the world is to hold themselves accountable for their problems.

For savers, the hardest thing to do in the world is to stop taking responsibility for other people’s problems.

If you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing so.

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

It can be difficult for people to recognize the difference between doing something out of obligation and doing it voluntarily. So here’s a litmus test: ask yourself, “If I refused, how would the relationship change?” Similarly, ask, “If my partner refused something I wanted, how would the relationship change?”

“Seek the truth for yourself, and I will meet you there.”

Death scares us. And because it scares us, we avoid thinking about it, talking about it, sometimes even acknowledging it, even when it’s happening to someone close to us.

death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured.

Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metric...

Religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation are the result of people’s immortality projects.

Centuries of oppression and the bloodshed of millions have been justified as the defense of one group’s immortality project against another’s.

Groups from ISIS in the Middle East to the guerrilla communists in the Amazonian jungles of Colombia fight and kill today for their own particular flavor of imagined immortality. And you could say that our liberal, democratic governments fight back in order to protect theirs.