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Notes from "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck"

Updated: Jan 17

by Mark Manson



We have become victims of our own success. Stress related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past 30 years despite the fact that everyone has a flat screen TV and can have their groceries delivered. Our crisis is no longer material, it's existential. It's spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities we don't even know what to give a fuck about anymore.


Wanting positive experience is a negative experience. Accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It's the backwards law. The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become.


These moments of non-fuckery are the moments that most define our lives. To not give a fuck is to stare down life's most difficult challenges and still take action.


Most of us struggle throughout our lives giving too many fucks when fucks do not deserve to be given.


You're going to die one day. You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice, well, then you're going to get fucked. There is a subtle art to not giving a fuck. What I'm talking about here is essentially learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively. How to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you based on finely honed personal values.


When you give too many fucks, when you give a fuck about everyone and everything, you will feel that you are perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, and that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness and it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice every challenge is a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal. You will be confined to your own skull-sized hell, burning with entitlement and bluster, running circles around your very own personal feedback loop from hell, in constant motion yet arriving nowhere.


Like our physical pain, our psychological pain is not necessarily always bad or undesirable. This is what's so dangerous about a society that coddles itself from the emotional discomforts of life. We lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain—a loss that disconnect us from the rest of the world around us.


This is what self-improvement is really about. Prioritizing values, choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.


Everybody wants all the great things in life. But a more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is "what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?" Because that seems to be a greater determinate of how our lives turn out.


Our values determine the nature of our problems. And the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives. Values underly everything we are and do. If what we value is unhelpful, if what we consider success or failure is poorly chosen, then everything based upon those values—the thoughts, the emotions, the day to day feelings—will all be out of whack.


The truth is that there's no such thing as a personal problem. If you've got a problem chances are that a million other people have had in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. It just means that you're not special. Often, it's this realization, that you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain, that is the first and most important step toward solving them.


Imagine somebody put a gun to your head and says you need to run 26.2 miles in under five hours or else he'll kill you and your family. That would suck. Now imagine that you bought nice shoes and running gear, trained religiously for months and completed your first marathon with all of your closest family and friends cheering you on at the finish line. That could potentially be one of the proudest moments of your life. When you chose it freely it was an important and glorious milestone in your life. When it was forced upon you it was one of the most terrifying and painful experiences of your life. Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it and are responsible for it.


Travel is a fantastic self development tool because it extricate you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and not hate themselves. Is exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life, and to consider that perhaps it's not the best way to live.


People, high a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at it. The pampering of the modern mind has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something. A population that feels they have a right to something without sacrificing for it.


People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches, without any real life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else. They do it because they feel they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary. Our culture today confuses great attention with great success, assuming them to be the same thing, but they are not.

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