The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (Book Summary)
A counterintuitive approach to living a good life.
Don’t Try To Be Somebody You’re Not; Choose What To Give A F*ck About
Conventional life advice — all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time — is actually fixating on what you lack. It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be and then emphasizes them for you.
You learn about the best ways to make money because you feel you don’t have enough money already. You stand in front of the mirror and repeat affirmations saying that you’re beautiful because you feel as though you’re not beautiful already.
Ironically, this fixation on the positive — on what’s better, what’s superior — only serves to remind us over and over again of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be. After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is.
Either you are truly happy or you are not. Don’t try to be somebody you’re not. Our society keeps telling us to be more, more and more positive all the time. And to be positive all the time, we are constantly getting the same message again and again, which is to give a f*ck about everything, again and again. Sadly, giving more f*ck doesn’t guarantee you to be positive and live a better life.
The key to a good life is not giving a f*ck about more; it’s giving a f*ck about less, giving a f*ck about only what is true and immediate and important.
As humans, we care too much about things that don’t matter, and this makes us feel bad about ourselves. Mark Manson calls this The Feedback Loop from Hell. Simply put, you feel a certain feeling for some reason or no obvious reason at all, and having this feeling makes you feel even worse.
The feedback loop from hell has become a borderline epidemic, making many of us overly stressed, overly neurotic, and overly self-loathing. For instance, you get anxious about confronting somebody in your life. That anxiety cripples you and you start wondering why you’re so anxious. Now you’re becoming anxious about being anxious. Now you’re anxious about your anxiety, which is causing more anxiety.
The solution to the Feedback Loop from Hell is simple: Don’t give a f*ck about your negative experiences — anxiety, anger, guilt, fear, etc. Because it’s okay having these feelings. It’s okay to feel bad sometimes. Don’t make it worse by beating yourself up for feeling that way.
So what exactly does not giving a f*ck mean? Let’s look at three subtleties that should help clarify the matter.
Subtlety #1: Not giving a f*ck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
In life, not giving a f*ck is absolutely impossible. You have to give a f*ck about something, but you have to choose it right. You have to enjoy the f*ck that you give. You should be willing to be different, and not take what the society deems important as your standard. You should decide for yourself, what is truly important to you, and don’t care about what others think.
Subtlety #2: To not give a f*ck about adversity, you must first give a f*ck about something more important than adversity.
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 f*cks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.
Simply put, don’t hand out f*cks to meaningless things like you’re Santa Clause but find something really important to dedicate your f*cks to.
Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a f*ck about.
Be more selective about what you give a f*ck about. It’s called maturity. In other words, maturity is what happens when you learn to only care about things that are essential. This simplification actually makes us really happy on a consistent basis.
Happiness Requires Struggle And It Only Comes From Solving Problems
There is a premise that underlies a lot of our assumptions and beliefs. The premise is that happiness is algorithmic, that it can be worked for and earned and achieved as if it were getting accepted to law school or building a really complicated Lego set. If I achieve X, then I can be happy. If I look like Y, then I can be happy. If I can be with a person like Z, then I can be happy.
The premise is the problem. Happiness isn’t a solvable equation. Sadness, dissatisfaction, unease, etc. are part of inherent human nature and they are the necessary component to create consistent happiness.
To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is, therefore, a form of action; it’s an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you, not something that you magically discover in a TOP-10 article on the Huffington Post.
We like the idea that there’s some form of ultimate happiness that can be attained. We like the idea that we can alleviate all of our sufferings permanently. We like the idea that we can feel fulfilled and satisfied with our lives forever. But we cannot.
Happiness requires struggle, and it comes from solving problems. Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
Everybody wants the good things in life, we all want to feel good all the time. People never consider the pain they are okay with, what are they willing to struggle for. We just want the rewards, the results; nobody is willing to go through the process. Most of us don’t want to struggle and to give it some effort.
The struggle is the key to happiness and it grows from problems. The path to happiness is a path full of disappointments and shame. No matter where you go, there’s a five-hundred-pound load of sh*t waiting for you. And that’s perfectly fine. The point isn’t to get away from the sh*t. The point is to find the sh*t you enjoy dealing with.
No One Is Special Or Exceptional In Any Way
Sometime in the 1960s, developing “high self-esteem” — having positive thoughts and feelings about oneself — became all the rage in psychology. Researches revealed that people who thought highly about themselves generally performed better and caused fewer problems. Business and motivational seminars cropped up chanting the same paradoxical mantra: every single one of us can be exceptional and massively successful.
But it’s a generation later and the data is in: we’re not all exceptional. It turns out that merely feeling good about yourself doesn’t really mean anything unless you have a good reason to feel good about yourself. It turns out that adversity and failure are useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.
People with high self-esteem usually feel good about themselves. Feeling that they are doing something great, even when they are not. Well, you can’t blame anyone, that’s the movement in our society now. Being overly positive and having high self-esteem is actually a good thing, as it is contagious and it helps motivate people.
However, one thing wrong about this high self-esteem movement is that it requires people to feel good all the time. The metrics used in this movement is how positive they feel and think about themselves. Whereas, more accurate metrics would be how people feel, think, and accept their negative selves.
People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of or a threat to, their own greatness. If something good happens to them, it’s because of some amazing feat they accomplished. If something bad happens to them, it’s because somebody is jealous and trying to bring them down a notch. Entitlement isn’t impervious. People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority.
Often, the first and most important step toward solving our problems is the realization that you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain.
The high self-esteem movement is telling us to feel special all the time. Everyone says it. Celebrity, politicians, famous people, actors, and actresses all say it. Being “average” has now become the new standard of failure.
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve and that their life won’t matter.
However, what most people don’t know is that knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations. Try as much as possible to be grateful and appreciate the small things in life, and not see mediocrity as a bad thing.
Don’t Prioritize Your Life Around Useless Causes. Focus Only On Important Values
As humans, we often choose to dedicate large portions of our lives to seemingly useless or destructive causes. Sometimes, we know deep down that what we’re going to do is going to make us suffer, but we still do it anyway. Because to us, this suffering means something, and because it means something, we are able to endure, and perhaps enjoy the suffering.
In life, whether you like it or not, suffering is inevitable. Sure, you could try to avoid them, but one sure fact is that avoiding negative things will always backfire. Don’t avoid them; don’t ask questions like, “How do I stop suffering?”. You just have to accept and face them. Just face them and ask yourself this, “Why am I suffering? For what purpose?”.
However, this isn’t an easy question to answer. The author uses a metaphor to help us understand ourselves: The Self-Awareness Onion.
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.
The 1st layer of this onion is a simple understanding of your own emotion. How do I feel? What is this emotion? “I’m sad.”, “I feel happy right now.”, “I’m sad when I see that.”, etc. This is simple to some people, but to some, it is quite difficult. Sometimes you try to hide or deny your feelings.
The second layer is the ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. Why do I feel that way? Why am I sad? Why am I kind of depressed?
The third layer is our personal values: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?
This level, which takes constant questioning and effort, is incredibly difficult to reach. But it’s the most important because our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.
So clearly, knowing your values is important because, in the end, they determine the quality of your life. If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
Some values, according to the author, are “sh*tty”. They create poor problems that can hardly be solved. Some of these sh*tty values include pleasure, material success, always being right, and staying positive. These values seem right, but they are actually horrible values to prioritize your life around.
Staying positive might seem like a golden nugget, but we can’t deny the fact that things go wrong, people upset us, accidents happen. These things make us feel like sh*t. And that’s fine. Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health. To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them.
Good values, on the other hand, are reality-based, socially constructive, and immediate and controllable. Examples of good, healthy values include honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.
When we have poor values — that is, poor standards we set for ourselves and others — we are essentially giving f*cks about the things that don’t matter, things that in fact make our lives worse. But when we choose better values, we are able to divert our f*cks to something better — toward things that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate happiness, pleasure, and success as side effects.
Take Radical Responsibility For Your Life And Embrace Uncertainty: That’s How You’ll Enjoy Growth And Progress
There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerge. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances.
If we realize that we’re responsible for everything in our lives, then we get to improve ourselves. No matter the circumstances, it’s your responsibility. It doesn’t matter who’s at fault. It’s always your responsibility because you can choose what you make of it.
There’s a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person’s actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you.
Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.
Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
Also, endeavor to embrace doubt and uncertainty, because certainty is the enemy of growth. Instead of striving for certainty, you should be in constant search of doubt: doubt about your own beliefs, doubt about your feelings, doubt about what the future may hold for you unless you get out there and create it for yourself.
Instead of looking to be right all the time, we should be looking for how we’re wrong all the time. Because we are.
In most situations, we get an intuition that says something is good or bad. But in reality, we don’t know. It seems a certain way, but we don’t know. So maybe it’s good and maybe it’s bad. How about taking it as it comes? It’s okay how it is. Maybe it’ll benefit us and maybe it’ll harm us. We simply do not know for sure.
Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.
Doubt yourself, your thoughts, your belief, and always be in a constant search of doubt. Doubt that you will have a good future if you just sit around playing the victim and doing nothing but cry.
Asking yourself questions like “What if I’m wrong?”, “What would it mean if I were wrong?”, “Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?”, will help you be a little less certain about yourself.
Embracing uncertainty is a vital step towards assessing our values and prioritizations. In the end, if we want to change and let go of those values, we need to become uncertain of current values.
Success Paradox: Failure Is The Way Forward
Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have.
There is a common saying that talent is overrated. Yes, it’s overrated. Success is more about the work you put into something rather than your preconditions.
We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at. If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to succeed.
If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.” Failure and pain are part of the process. If you want to succeed at something, you will certainly have to fail many times.
As we grow older, we develop an avoidance of failure. This basically has to do with our education system, overbearing and critical parents, and with mass media. This avoidance of failure creates avoidance of the necessary actions to succeed at things.
Manson suggests setting process-oriented goals and just starting to take action with his Do Something Principle.
When Manson was in high school, his math teacher Mr. Packwood used to say: “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t just sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”
By applying this advice, Mark Manson discovered that action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it. In fact, it also has something to do with inspiration. Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions.
So, if you ever feel like you lack the motivation to do something, just start with some small actions. Anything works fine. And try to observe the results of your actions. You could then try to reap the fruit of those actions to motivate yourself.
Reject Things That Don’t Add Value To Your Life And Contemplate Your Mortality
Rejection is an important and crucial life skill. Rejection makes your life better because it let you focus on things that really matter and let go of things that don’t. We need to reject something; otherwise, we stand for nothing. If nothing is better or more desirable than anything else, then we are empty and our life is meaningless. We are without values and therefore live our life without any purpose.
When you make a commitment to something, you must say “no” to something else. This doesn’t tie you down but frees you from trivialities so you can focus on what’s most meaningful, for instance, deepening a relationship or mastering a craft.
To build healthy relationships, both parties must be able to say “no”, thrash out their differences, establish their boundaries and take ownership of their own problems: only then can true understanding trust and acceptance be established.
Also, it’s important we contemplate our mortality from time to time in order to really live life to the fullest — happy and fulfilled.
As humans, 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.
Yet, in a bizarre, backward way, death is the light by which the shadow of all life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
Thinking deeply about death helps us to put our adversities in context and to appreciate life. If you fear death or are preoccupied with making sure that people remember you after you’re gone, you won’t be able to live fully.
If you’ve confronted your mortality, however, you can accept your life as a passing grain in the timelessness of the universe and can focus on contributing to a wider cause that will outlive you, then you’ll find true peace and happiness, and become free to live each day to the fullest.
Conclusion
We try to do too much in life and this only results in stress and unhappiness. We all need to learn to stop giving a f*ck about the things that are causing us pain. Choose what it is you really want to care about and develop a more constructive approach to work, love, and life itself.
Try this: Learn to say no to things that don’t add value to your life. If you want to focus only on the things that really matter to you, it is vitally important to say “no!” to everything else.
You can’t have the perfect career, lots of family time, and countless days to spend vacationing in the Caribbean. It’s more important to miss out on the right things. So choose, and focus your attention on the essentials, and ignore the rest. Be totally ruthless with this.
Writer’s notes:
This is a summary of the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. — These are not his words but rather a re-write of what was taken away from reading the book. Reading this summary will not give you the same feel and impact as reading the full book, so if you liked what you’ve read here, it is recommended to acquire the kindle, audio, or hardcover. This will not only support the author that inspired this post but also allow you to dive into this perspective a bit more.
