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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Don’t try

The real story of Bukowski’s success: his comfort with himself as a failure. Bukowski didn’t give a fuck about success.

Fixation on the positive only serves to remind us over and over again of what we are not. No truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy.

If you’re dreaming of something all the time, then you’re reinforcing the same unconscious reality over and over: that you are not that.

Giving a fuck about more stuff is good for business. Giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake. The key to a good life is not giving a fuck, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.

The feedback loop from hell

We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty of feeling guilty. We get angry about getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious. Not giving a fuck is key, to accept that the world is totally fucked and that’s all right, because it’s always been that way and always will be.

Wanting a positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience

You’ll never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. – Albert Camus

Everything in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires.

How to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you is based on finely honed personal values.

The subtle art of not giving a fuck

Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices. That’s why they don’t make any meaningful choices. You must give a fuck about something.

“Fuck it,” not to everything in life, but rather to everything unimportant to life. They reserve their fucks for what truly matters. Friends. Family. Purpose. People give a fuck about them in return.

To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.

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. If a person has no problems. the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.

If you don’t find that meaningful something, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.

Whether you realise it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.

Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy. Basically: our families, our best friends and our golf swing.

So Mark, what the fuck is the point of this book anyway?

When we believe that it’s not okay for things to suck sometimes, then we unconsciously start blaming ourselves.

Practical enlightenment is becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable. The only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.

Happiness is a problem

As with being rich, there is no value in suffering when it’s done without purpose.

Pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them.

The misadventures of disappointment panda

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.

This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no, our own pain and misery aren’t a bug of human evolution; they’re a feature.

Pain is what teaches us what to pay attention. Our psychological pain is not necessarily always bad or even undesirable.

And this is what’s so dangerous about a society that coddles itself more and more from the inevitable discomforts of life: we lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from reality of the world around us.

Happiness comes from solving problems

To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action.

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.

For many people, life doesn’t feel that simple:

  1. Denial. Some people deny that their problems exist, they must constantly delude or distract themselves from reality.
  2. Victim Mentality. Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems.

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.

Remember, nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.

Emotions are overrated

Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.

Emotions are merely signposts, suggestions, not commandments. We should make a habit of questioning them.

To deny one’s negative emotions is to deny the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems.

Decision-making based on emotional, pretty much always sucks.

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. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences.

Choose your struggle

Lifelong fulfilment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles. You can’t win if you don’t play.

What determines your success isn’t “What do you want to enjoy?” The relevant question is “What pain do you want to sustain?” The path to happiness is a full path of shitheaps and shame.

The truth is, I thought I wanted something (become a rockstar), but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.

I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory.

Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for. Our struggles determine our successes. If you think at any point you’re allowed to stop climbing, I’m afraid you’re missing the point. Because the joy is in the climb itself.

You are not special

Sometime in the 1960s, developing “high self-esteem”, having positive thoughts and feelings about oneself, became all the rage in psychology. People who thought highly about themselves generally performed better and caused fewer problems. Many researchers and policymakers at the time came to believe that raising a population’s self-esteem could lead to some tangible social benefits.

The paradoxical mantra: every single one of us can be exceptional and massively successful.

A generation later and the data is in: we’re not all exceptional. Feeling good about yourself doesn’t mean anything unless you have a good reason to feel good about yourself. Adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults. Teaching people to believe they’re exceptional and to feel good about themselves no matter what leads to a population full of Jimmys.

Jimmy, the delusional start-up founder. The Jimmy who spent so much talking about how good he was that he forgot to, you know, actually do something.

People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own greatness.

The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.

Entitled people, incapable of acknowledging their own problems openly and honestly, are incapable of improving their lives in any lasting or meaningful way.

Things fall apart

The pain from my adolescence led me down a road of entitlement that lasted through much of my early adulthood. I was worthy. I felt entitled to say or do whatever I wanted, to break peoples trust, to ignore people’s feelings, and then justify it later with shitty, half-assed apologies.

The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate those problems.

  1. I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
  2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.

Construing everything in life so as to make yourself out to be constantly victimised requires just as much selfishness as the opposite.

There is no such thing as a personal problem. Other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. You are not special.

The easier and more problem-free our lives become, the more we seem to feel entitled for them to get even better.

The tyranny of exceptionalism

We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people. There’s no way we can process the tidal waves of information flowing past us constantly. The pieces that break through and catch our attention are the truly exceptional.

The inundation of the exceptional makes people feel worse about themselves, makes them feel that they need to be more extreme, more radical, and more self-assured to get noticed or even matter.

B-b-b-but, if I’m not going to be special or extraordinary, what’s the point?

We all deserve greatness. “Average” has become the new standard of failure. Better to be at the extreme low end of the bell curve than to be in the middle, because at least there you’re still special and deserve attention.

People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great – they are mediocre, they are average – and that they could be so much better.

The pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. Ordinary things. They are ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.

The value of suffering

Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who fought for many years refusing to believe the war did not end, choose to suffer for loyalty to a dead empire. Suzuki, the guy who discovered him, chose to suffer for adventure, no matter how ill-advised. Their suffering meant something. And because it meant something, they were able to endure it, or perhaps even enjoy it.

The question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering, for what purpose?”.

The self-awareness onion

  1. First layer of self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of one’s emotions. “This is when I feel happy.” “This makes me feel sad.” “This gives me hope.”
  2. The second layer of self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. This layer helps us understand the root cause of the emotions that overwhelm us. We can ideally do something to change it.
  3. The third level is our personal values: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? Our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.

Much of the advice out there simply tries to make people feel good in the short term, while the real long-term problems never get solved.

Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not.

Rock star problems

The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?

Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else.

If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Shitty values

  1. Pleasure. Ask to a drug addict or an adulterer if they are happy. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose. Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather it is the effect. If you get the values and metrics right, then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product.
  2. Material success. Research shows that once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food, shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero. Another issue with this value is the danger of prioritising it over other values such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion.
  3. Always being right. As humans, we’re wrong pretty much constantly, you’re going to have a difficult time rationalising all of the bullshit to yourself. People who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot.
  4. Staying positive. 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.

To deny negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them. The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way that aligns with your values.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful – Freud

Defining good and bad values

Good values are 1) reality based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable.

Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable.

People who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being reflected back.

Good, healthy values are achieved internally. Bad values are generally reliant on external events.

What self-improvement is really about: prioritising better values, choosing better thing 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.

Five counterintuitive values:

  1. Responsibility. Taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who’s at fault.
  2. Uncertainty. The acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your own beliefs.
  3. Failure. The willingness to discover your own flaws and the mistakes so that they may be improved upon.
  4. Rejection. The ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life.
  5. Contemplation of our own mortality. Paying attention to one’s own death keep all our other values in proper perspective.

You are always choosing

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.

The choice

Individually, we are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances.

We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how to interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. We are always responsible for our experiences.

“With great responsibility comes great power”. The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives.

We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense.

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.

Responding to tragedy

Pain of one sort of another is inevitable for all of us, but we get to choose what it means to and for us.

Genetics and the hand we’re dealt

A lot of people treat being born with a disadvantage as though they were screwed out of something highly valuable. They feel that there’s nothing they can do about it, so they avoid responsibility for their situations.

The beauty of poker is that while luck is always involved, luck doesn’t dictate the long-term success of the game.

Victimhood chic

The responsibility/fault fallacy allows people to pass of the responsibility for solving their problems to others.

One side effect of the Internet and social media is that it’s become easier than ever to push responsibility onto some other group or person.

The public sharing of “injustices” garners far more attention and emotional outpouring than most other events on social media, rewarding people who are able to perpetually feel victimised with ever-growing amounts of attention and sympathy. Anyone is offended about anything.

“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.

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

People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.

Part of living in a democracy and a free society is that we all have to deal with views and people we don’t necessary like.

We should pick our battles carefully. We should prioritise values of being honest, fostering transparent, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge.

There is no “how”

You are already choosing, in every moment of every day, what to give a fuck about, so change is a simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else. It’s just not easy.

You’re going to feel uncertain. Giving up a value you’ve depended on for years is going to feel disorienting.

You’ll feel like a failure. When you change your priorities, change your metrics, and stop behaving in the same way, you’ll fail to meet that old, trusted metric and this immediately feel like some sort of fraud or nobody.

You’ll weather rejections. Many of the relationships in your life were built around values you’ve been keeping. Many of them will blow up in your face.

You’re wrong about everything (but so am I)

I’m always wrong about everything, over and over and over again, and that’s why my life improves.

Growth is an endlessly iterative process. We are always in the process of approaching the truth and perfection without actually ever reaching truth or perfection.

We should seek to chip away at the ways that we’re wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow.

Many people become so obsessed with being “right” about their life that they never end up actually living it.

It’s easier to sit in a painful certainty than to actually test those beliefs to find out for sure.

Certainty is the enemy of growth. We should be in constant search of doubt. Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change.

We don’t actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences.

Architects of our own beliefs

Experiment: you give people a bunch of buttons and if a light turns on you give them points. After 30 minutes every user of the experiment comes up with an “algorithm” to determine how the light turns on. Candidates don’t realise that the lights turn on randomly.

The point of the experiment is to show how quickly the human mind is capable of coming up with and believing in a bunch of bullshit that isn’t real.

Our minds are constantly whirring, generating more and more associations to help us understand and control the environment around us. There are two problems. We mistake things we see and hear.

Once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning. Even if we see evidence that contradicts the meaning we created, we keep believing anyway.

Be careful what you believe

We’re in perpetual state of misleading ourselves and others for no other reason than that our brain is designed to be efficient, no accurate.

Our brain is always biased toward what we feel to be true in that moment.

In an effort to achieve coherence, our mind will sometimes, invent false memories. By linking our present experiences with that imagined past.

Our beliefs are malleable and our memories are horribly unreliable.

If our hearts and minds are so unreliable, maybe we should be questioning our own intentions and motivations more.

The dangers of pure certainty

The fact that people do everything “right” doesn’t make them right. Worst criminals felt pretty damn good about themselves. In spite of the reality around them that gave them the sense of justification for hurting and disrespecting others.

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

The more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.

The more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing you don’t know. Uncertainty removes our judgments of others.

Uncertainty is the root of all progress and growth.

Before we can look at our values and prioritisations and change them into better, healthier ones, we must first become uncertain of our current values.

Manson’s law of avoidance

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

I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering.

Kill yourself

There is little that is unique or special about your problems. My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways.

The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.

Giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.

How to be a little less certain of yourself?

  • What if I’m wrong? We’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves. The goal is merely to ask the question and entertain the thought at the moment, not to hate yourself. It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen, you must be wrong about something.
  • What would it mean if I were wrong? The potential meaning behind our wrongness is often painful. It does call into question or values and forces us to consider what a different, contradictory value could potentially look and feel like.
  • Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others? The goal here is to take a look at which problem is better. If it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.

Failure is the way forward

The failure/success paradox

The magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at.

My self-worth is based on my own behaviours and happiness.

Shitty values involve tangible external goals outside of our control.

Better values are process-oriented. “honesty”, is never completely finished. The value is an ongoing, lifelong process that defies completion.

Pain is part of the process

Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient, more grounded. Only when we feel intense pain when we’re willing to take a look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us.

You call it “hitting bottom” or “having an existential crisis”.

VCR (Videocassette Recorder) problem: we sit and stare and shake our heads and say “But how?” When really, it’s as simple as just doing it.

VCR questions are funny because the answer appears difficult to anyone who has them and appears easy to anyone who does not.

Life is about not knowing and then doing something away.

The “do something” principle

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

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

We assume that the steps occur in sort of chain reaction, like:

Emotional inspiration -> Motivation -> Desirable action

But the thing about motivation is that it’s not only a three-part chain, but an endless loop

Inspiration -> Motivation -> Action -> Inspiration -> Motivation -> Action -> Etc.

So we can reorient the thing to be

Action -> Inspiration -> Motivation

If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something – anything, really – and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself.

When inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite we propel ourselves ahead. We feel free to fail, and the failure moves us forward.

The importance of saying no

The only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom.

In Western cultures people learn to pretend to be friends with people they don’t actually like, to buy things they don’t actually want. The economic system promotes such deception.

Rejection makes your life better

We all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something.

We are defined by what we choose to reject. If we reject nothing, we essentially have no identity at all.

Having honesty in our lives is becoming comfortable with saying and hearing the word “no”.

Boundaries

Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other.

Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.

Unhealthy or toxic relationships have a poor sense of responsibility in both sides, inability to give and/or receive rejection.

A healthy relationship have clear boundaries, there will be an open avenue of giving and receiving rejection when necessary.

The mark of an unhealthy relationship is two people who try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves.

A healthy relationship is when two people solve their own problems in order to feel good about each other.

You both should support each other. But only because you choose to support and be supported.

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

How to build trust

When your highest priority is to always make ourselves feel good, or to always make our partner feel good, then nobody ends up feeling good.

Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits. No one trusts a yes-man.

Without trust, the relationship doesn’t actually mean anything.

If people cheat, it’s because something other than the relationship is more important to them.

Other factor in regaining trust after it’s been broken is a practical one: a track record.

Freedom through commitment

We are actually often happier with less. Paradox of choice. The more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose.

There are some experiences that you can have only when you’ve lived in the same place for five years, when you’ve been with the same person for over a decade, when you’ve been working on the same skill or craft for half your lifetime. Commitment, in its own way, offers wealth of opportunity and experiences that would otherwise never be available.

There is freedom and liberation in commitment. Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few degree of success that you otherwise would. The rejection of alternatives liberates us.

…And then you die

Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.

Something beyond our selves

The denial of death (book) essentially makes two points:

  1. Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualise and think about ourselves abstractly. We’re blessed with the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations. That we all, at some point, become aware of the inevitability of our own death.
  2. We essentially have two “selves”. The physical self, and the conceptual self. Our identity, or how we see ourselves. We are all aware on some level that our physical self, so we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. “Immortality projects”, projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death. Human civilisation is basically a result of immortality projects. All the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die.

When the prospect of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death terror creeps back into our mind. This one is described in the book as mental illness. Our immortality projects are our values.

Once we become comfortable with the fact of our own death, we can then choose our values more freely, unrestrained by illogical quest for immortality.

The sunny side of death

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life.

Death confronts an important question: What is your legacy?

This is arguably the only truly important question in our life.

The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself.

Happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity.

Entitlement strips this away from us. Entitlement sucks attention inward, toward ourselves. Entitlement isolates us.

The pampering of modern mind has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something.

We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t. We are terrorised and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eating up by nothing – Bukowski

The primary lesson was this: there is nothing to be afraid of. Ever.