The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.

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.

A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident.

giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health.

The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.

“I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?”

Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual.

Because there’s an infinite amount of things we can now see or know, there are also an infinite number of ways we can discover that we don’t measure up, that we’re not good enough, that things aren’t as great as they could be.

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.

the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.

The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure.

Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.

when you give too many fucks—when you give a fuck about everyone and everything—you will feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, 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 as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal.

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

They reserve their fucks for what truly matters. Friends. Family. Purpose. Burritos. And an occasional lawsuit or two.

no matter where you go, there you are.

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

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

This book will help you think a little bit more clearly about what you’re choosing to find important in life and what you’re choosing to find unimportant.

life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. 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. This isn’t to say that all suffering is equal. Some suffering is certainly more painful than other suffering. But we all must suffer nonetheless.

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

Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and, as we’ll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful.

problems don’t end.

problems never fucking go away, he said—they just improve.

“The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.”

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, and so on.

solve problems; be happy.

Forms of blame and denial give us a quick high. They are a way to temporarily escape our problems, and that escape can provide us a quick rush that makes us feel better.

if you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved.

to deny one’s negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems. As a result, many of these repressed individuals struggle to deal with problems throughout their lives.

“hedonic treadmill”: the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different.

What we gain is also what we lose.

“What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”

happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems.

People want a partner, a spouse. But you don’t end up attracting someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. 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?”

I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it.

Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.

People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.

our struggles determine our successes.

Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems.

a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.

People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority. They keep their mental facade standing at all costs, even if it sometimes requires being physically or emotionally abusive to those around them.

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. A person like Jimmy hides from his problems by making up imagined successes for himself at every turn. And because he can’t face his problems, no matter how good he feels about himself, he is weak.

A person who actually has a high self-worth is able to look at the negative parts of his character frankly—“Yes, sometimes I’m irresponsible with money,” “Yes, sometimes I exaggerate my own successes,” “Yes, I rely too much on others to support me and should be more self-reliant”—and then acts to improve upon them.

like all parents, my parents, with the best of intentions, imparted some of their problems to me, as I probably will to my kids.

It wasn’t so much the sex I craved, although the sex was fun. It was the validation. I was wanted; I was loved; for the first time since I could remember, I was worthy. My craving for validation quickly fed into a mental habit of self-aggrandizing and overindulgence.

What most people don’t correctly identify as entitlement are those people who perpetually feel as though they’re inferior and unworthy of the world. Because construing everything in life so as to make yourself out to be constantly victimized requires just as much selfishness as the opposite. It takes just as much energy and delusional self-aggrandizement to maintain the belief that one has insurmountable problems as that one has no problems at all. The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future.

The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. Likely people you know too. That doesn’t minimize the problem or mean that it shouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean you aren’t legitimately a victim in some circumstances. 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.

It’s strange that in an age when we are more connected than ever, entitlement seems to be at an all-time high.

The more exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those other viewpoints exist.

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

Perhaps these same technologies that have liberated and educated so many are simultaneously enabling people’s sense of entitlement more than ever before.

Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media business that’s what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. That’s the bottom line. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average. This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal.

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.

Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems.

The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.

Being “average” has become the new standard of failure.

Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population (including yourself) sucks and is worthless.

The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all.

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.

If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”

We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them.

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

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

Pleasure is great, but it’s a horrible value to prioritize your life around.

Pleasure is a false god.

Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed.

Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose.

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.

When people measure themselves not by their behavior, but by the status symbols they’re able to collect, then not only are they shallow, but they’re probably assholes as well.

It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. This keeps you unattached to superstitious or poorly informed beliefs and promotes a constant state of learning and growth.

Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction.

things go wrong, people upset us, accidents happen. These things make us feel like shit. 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.

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”

Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.

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 at them.)

honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.

when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.

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.

There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, 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 we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.

people who date each other tend to have similar values. And if I dated someone with shitty values for that long, what did that say about me and my values?

We all love to take responsibility for success and happiness. Hell, we often fight over who gets to be responsible for success and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important, because that’s where the real learning comes from. That’s where the real-life improvement comes from. To simply blame others is only to hurt yourself.

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

“Do, or do not; there is no ‘how.’ ”

You are already choosing, in every moment of every day, what to give a fuck about, so change is as simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else.

Many of the relationships in your life were built around the values you’ve been keeping, so the moment you change those values—the moment you decide that studying is more important than partying, that getting married and having a family is more important than rampant sex, that working a job you believe in is more important than money—your turnaround will reverberate out through your relationships, and many of them will blow up in your face.

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

We shouldn’t seek to find the ultimate “right” answer for ourselves, but rather, we should seek to chip away at the ways that we’re wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow.

Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable.

Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt: doubt about our own beliefs, doubt about our own feelings, doubt about what the future may hold for us unless we get out there and create it for ourselves.

“I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

all beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others.

We all do this. You do. I do. No matter how honest and well-intentioned we are, we’re in a perpetual state of misleading ourselves and others for no other reason than that our brain is designed to be efficient, not accurate.

our brain is always trying to make sense of our current situation based on what we already believe and have already experienced.

Every new piece of information is measured against the values and conclusions we already have. As a result, our brain is always biased toward what we feel to be true in that moment.

Our mind’s biggest priority when processing experiences is to interpret them in such a way that they will cohere with all of our previous experiences, feelings, and beliefs.

In an effort to achieve coherence, our mind will sometimes, in cases like that, invent false memories. By linking our present experiences with that imagined past, our mind allows us to maintain whatever meaning we already established.

Meredith’s story is not unique. In fact, in the 1980s and early 1990s, hundreds of innocent people were wrongly accused of sexual violence under similar circumstances. Many of them went to prison for it.

For people who were dissatisfied with their lives, these suggestive explanations, combined with the sensationalizing media—there were veritable epidemics of sexual abuse and satanic violence going on, and you could be a victim too—gave people’s unconscious minds the incentive to fudge their memories a bit and explain their current suffering in a way that allowed them to be victims and avoid responsibility.

There’s a lot of conventional wisdom out there telling you to “trust yourself,” to “go with your gut,” and all sorts of other pleasant-sounding clichés. But perhaps the answer is to trust yourself less. After all, if our hearts and minds are so unreliable, maybe we should be questioning our own intentions and motivations more.

If we’re all wrong, all the time, then isn’t self-skepticism and the rigorous challenging of our own beliefs and assumptions the only logical route to progress?

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

the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing.

The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.

openness to being wrong must exist for any real change or growth to take place.

to stare our own ignorance in the face and concede, because our own ignorance is greater than us all.

Murphy’s law: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”

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

people are often so afraid of success—for the exact same reason they’re afraid of failure: it threatens who they believe themselves to be.

never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering.

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.

As a general rule, we’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves. When we’re angry, or jealous, or upset, we’re oftentimes the last ones to figure it out. And the only way to figure it out is to put cracks in our armor of certainty by consistently questioning how wrong we might be about ourselves.

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

remain humble and admit ignorance.

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.

If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to succeed.

We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at.

pain is part of the process.

Learn to sustain the pain you’ve chosen.

Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway.

“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t 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.”

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

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.

Do something.

Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves.

We are defined by what we choose to reject.

romantic love is kind of like cocaine. Like, frighteningly similar to cocaine. Like, stimulates the exact same parts of your brain as cocaine. Like, gets you high and makes you feel good for a while but also creates as many problems as it solves, as does cocaine.

Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other—in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.

People can’t solve your problems for you. And they shouldn’t try, because that won’t make you happy.

Entitled people who blame others for their own emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they constantly paint themselves as victims, eventually someone will come along and save them, and they will receive the love they’ve always wanted.

For victims, the hardest thing to do in the world is to hold themselves accountable for their problems. They’ve spent their whole life believing that others are responsible for their fate.

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

The last person I should ever have to censor myself with is the woman I love.

honesty in my relationship is more important to me than feeling good all the time.

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.

pursuing a breadth of experience denies us the opportunity to experience the rewards of depth of experience.

When you’re pursuing a wide breadth of experience, there are diminishing returns to each new adventure, each new person or thing.

I’ve chosen to reject all but the very best people and experiences and values in my life.

there is a freedom and liberation in commitment.

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 metrics and values suddenly zero.

“immortality projects,” projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death.

Whether it be through mastering an art form, conquering a new land, gaining great riches, or simply having a large and loving family that will live on for generations, all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die.

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

What is your legacy?

The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you.

Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing.

This acceptance of my death, this understanding of my own fragility, has made everything easier—untangling my addictions, identifying and confronting my own entitlement, accepting responsibility for my own problems—suffering through my fears and uncertainties, accepting my failures and embracing rejections—it has all been made lighter by the thought of my own death.