The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck Summary (7/10)

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson is not about giving no fucks about anything, it’s about choosing the few things to give a fuck about. A funny book with sharp insights worth remembering.

Seek Out Negative Experiences

Don’t look for positive experiences, don’t chase after pleasure mindlessly, doing that is a negative experience. Paradoxically, doing the opposite, chasing after negative experiences, experiencing suffering and pain, is a positive experience.

The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make. The more you desperately want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you come to see yourself, regardless of your actual physical appearance. The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more afraid you become, regardless of those who surround you.

This is called the ‘backwards law.’ When you give too many fucks, when you care about pleasing everyone and being successful and being happy, you will achieve none of those things. Pursue the negative instead. Go to the gym, feel pain, improve your body and health. Have honest and painful conversations to improve your relationships.

Don’t be indifferent. People who are indifferent act like they don’t give a fuck but in truth, they give the most fucks. They are afraid of being judged, so they don’t try at all, they hide behind their sarcasm and cynicism.

Give Less Fucks

You must give a fuck about something, whatever it is. And if you don’t find something worthwhile to give a fuck about, your mind will arbitrarily find other things to give a fuck about, that aren’t worthwhile.

The problem is that we are born giving too many fucks.

Ever watch a kid cry his eyes out because his hat is the wrong shade of blue? Exactly. Fuck that kid.

When we’re young, everything seems so important – from what people are saying about us, to whether our socks match, to whether that cute boy/girl called us back. But when we get older, we have less energy, and our identity solidifies.

We automatically give less fucks. We accept ourselves, even the parts we aren’t thrilled about, and this is liberating. We realize that many of our dreams won’t be realized and we make peace with that. We content ourselves with the simple things in life like family, friends, and our golf swing. Amazingly, this is enough.

Buddha’s insight: life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their wealth. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family, and people with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention.

Embrace Pain

Suffering is not equal, some are worse than others, but everyone suffers in some way.

Sometimes, suffering is good, it makes us change and improve. The creature that is dissatisfied and insecure is going to work the hardest to innovate and survive. This keeps our species fighting and conquering. Suffering is not a bug, it’s a feature.  

Pain is useful. It teaches us what to pay attention to, what to avoid doing, it helps us understand our limitations.

And problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded.

Happiness is a by product of solving problems. If you avoid problems, then you will not be happy. People fuck their lives up because they deny they have problems, or they adopt the victim mentality.

Don’t always trust your emotions.

Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.

Everyone wants things. It’s easy to want to be the best. It’s a lot harder to know what pain you want to have in your life – to know what you are willing to struggle for. That is a more important question, because that will more strongly define your life.

People want a great physique, their own business, and a partner. But not everyone is willing to put themselves through the pain of going to the gym, of experiencing the uncertainty of entrepreneurship, and the insecurity of finding love.

See: it’s a never-ending upward spiral. And 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.

The Disease of Exceptionalism

Our culture is obsessed with exceptionalism, but it is a statistical improbability that any single person is extraordinary in all areas of life, or even in many areas. Most of us are average but the extremes get all the attention. And yet, no one seems to talk about how this could be a problem. Glorifying the exceptional constantly makes us feel insecure.

We cope the only way we know how: either through self-aggrandizing or through other-aggrandizing. Some of us do this by cooking up get-rich-quick schemes. Others do it by taking off across the world to save starving babies in Africa. Others do it by excelling in school and winning every award. Others do it by shooting up a school. Others do it by trying to have sex with anything that talks and breathes.

People are afraid of mediocrity because they fear they will never achieve anything and their lives won’t matter, but this is dangerous, because it will lead you to think that most humans (including yourself) are worthless.

The few people who do become exceptional become so because they are obsessed with improvement, and that comes from believing that they are not great. Believing you are exceptional will not solve the problem of mediocrity, it will only make it worse.

Your Values Define Your Life

David Mustaine was kicked out of Metallica but started a great band (Megadeath). Since his success was not comparable to Metallica’s, he didn’t enjoy it. Mustaine’s values defined how he saw life. Pete Best was kicked out of the Beatles, but he got married, and later in life said his change of lifestyle worked out for the best.

When you choose to fight, rather than being forced to fight, you relish the experience, and you are more likely to succeed.

Responsibility

William James came from a wealthy family but was failing badly at everything. His siblings were all successful. He went to the Amazon jungle for vacation, to escape the wrath of his father after failing to succeed in medical school. He nearly died there, and barely made it out, and when he went back home, he nearly committed suicide (he had many physical problems that only got worse), but he decided to change his mindset – to take responsibility for everything that happened for just one year. James went on to become the father of modern psychology.

With great responsibility comes great power.

A short friend who was attractive and smart had decided that women would never date him because of his height, so he never bothered to try.

“But I don’t have a choice,” he would tell the bartender. “There’s nothing I can do! Women are superficial and vain and will never like me!” Yes, it’s every single woman’s fault for not liking a self-pitying, shallow guy with shitty values. Obviously.

Manson had a delusional dream of becoming a poker player in college, but realized that the emotional instability that came along with winning and losing thousands of dollars was not for him. But the experience taught him a valuable lesson: Luck is an important factor in the game, but what makes a winning player is decision-making. The more correct decisions you make, the more likely you are to succeed in the long run.

Life is similar. Everyone is dealt their cards. Some get better cards than others, and it’s easy to obsess about your cards and feel you were screwed. But the real game is knowing how to make the best choices with these cards.

Change is uncomfortable but necessary.

You are always wrong. You never do things right, only slightly less wrong over time.

People are hardwired to detect patterns, when they don’t really exist.

Manson’s law of avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.

You can be the artist who is too afraid to become the artist no one cares about rather than the undiscovered artist who never tried, or you can be the guy who wants to drink and chase women all the time. No matter how you define your identity, it will stop you from doing things to improve your life.

Buddhism argues that your idea of who “you” are is an arbitrary mental construction and that you should let go of the idea that “you” exist at all; that the arbitrary metrics by which you define yourself actually trap you, and thus you’re better off letting go of everything. In a sense, you could say that Buddhism encourages you to not give a fuck.

Broaden Your Identity

The benefits of not being constrained to an identity is freedom.

Don’t try to be special and unique. Define your metrics in broad and mundane ways: a student, partner, creator. If you narrow your identity, everything will threaten it.

We are conditioned to avoid failure but perfecting your craft can only come from a multitude of small failures.

Whether you are afraid to have a conversation with a stranger you are attracted to, or too scared to launch the business you want, you need to do something. The less you think and the more you do, the more likely you will find the answers.

During that early self-employment period, when I struggled every day, completely clueless about what to do and terrified of the results (or lack thereof), Mr. Packwood’s advice started beckoning me from the recesses of my mind. I heard it like a mantra:

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

Be Honest

Russian culture is very different from the west. Russians are brutally honest, because when times are rough, honesty becomes a valuable commodity – you need to know who you can rely on. This honesty is sorely lacking in economically successful cultures where things are going well, where lies seem to be more effective than truths.

You must learn to say no to things before embracing anything.

Love is dangerous and foolish, but sometimes love can work – only if two people draw the right boundaries and don’t engage in pathological ‘victim’ and ‘savior’ dynamics.

You are conditioned to believe that more money, more sex, more vacations is what you need. But it is only when you have less, that you finally become satisfied. It is when you choose your fucks carefully and settle down that you feel content.

Josh was Mark’s friend, who died by drowning.

Josh, in many ways, had been a person I looked up to. He was older, more confident, more experienced, and more accepting of and open to the world around him. In one of my last dreams of Josh, I was sitting in a Jacuzzi with him (yeah, I know, weird), and I said something like, “I’m really sorry you died.” He laughed. I don’t remember exactly what his words were, but he said something like, “Why do you care that I’m dead when you’re still so afraid to live?” I woke up crying.

The Denial Of Death

Ernst Becker was an oddball who wrote ‘The Denial of Death’ (summary), a profound book, where he makes two central arguments. The first is that everyone has two identities, the first is the self that eats, shits, fucks, and breathes. The other is the conceptual self. The problem with society is that everyone gives too much importance to the conceptual self, everyone wants to be remembered post mortem, so that they never really die. The second point is that humans are the only animals that can think about their lives and make value judgements. Dogs never wonder if they’re likeable or tall enough or smart enough.

Becker argues that while we are aware of our mortality, and we are afraid of it, we try to compensate for it in unhealthy ways. We construct a conceptual self that is immortal.

This is why people try so hard to put their names on buildings, on statues, on spines of books. It’s why we feel compelled to spend so much time giving ourselves to others, especially to children, in the hopes that our influence—our conceptual self—will last way beyond our physical self. That we will be remembered and revered and idolized long after our physical self ceases to exist.

But when these “immortality projects” fail, our life loses meaning. Trauma, shame, social ridicule can cause this, and so can mental illness. Our immortality projects are our values, they are what define meaning and worth in our life.

What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death. And to truly not give a single fuck is to achieve a quasi-spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one’s own existence. In that state, one is far less likely to get caught up in various forms of entitlement.

People’s immortality projects are the problem, not the solution. Rather than try to implement your self-conception across the world, people should question their conceptual self and be comfortable with the reality of their own death.

Because once we become comfortable with the fact of our own death—the root terror, the underlying anxiety motivating all of life’s frivolous ambitions—we can then choose our values more freely, unrestrained by the illogical quest for immortality, and freed from dangerous dogmatic views.

The Stoics always kept death in mind, to appreciate life and remain humble. Buddhism teaches meditation as a form of preparing for death while alive.

Dissolving one’s ego into an expansive nothingness—achieving the enlightened state of nirvana—is seen as a trial run of letting oneself cross to the other side. Even Mark Twain, that hairy goofball who came in and left on Halley’s Comet, said, “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

How will the world improve when you’re gone? That is the truly important question, yet we avoid thinking about 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 that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary.