The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life - by Mark Manson

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Get it now on Amazon.

Not your typical book on how to live a good life, but one with a solid basis in reality. If you want to live a good life, care less about the stupid things and more about what's actually important. It's a fairly quick read that's well worth it.

Recommendation: 4/5

My Highlights

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.

What's interesting about the backwards law is that it's called "backwards" for a reason: not giving a fuck works in revers. If pursuing the positive is a negative, then pursuing the negative generates the positive. The pain you pursue in the gym results in better all-around health and energy. The failures in business are what lead to a better understanding of what's necessary to be successful. Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.


...if you're able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.



Subtlety #2: To no give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.


We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature's preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it's the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that's going to do the most work to innovate and survive. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. 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.

...research has found that our brains don't register much difference between physical pain and psychological pain.

"Don't hope for a life without problems,"..."There's no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems."

Happiness comes from solving problems

Happiness is therefore a form of action; it's an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you...


Whatever your problems are, the concept is the same: solve problems; be happy. Unfortunately, for many people, life doesn't feel that simple. That's because they fuck thing up in at least one of two ways:

  1. Denial
  2. Victim Mentality

Emotions evolved for one specific purpose: to help us live and reproduce a little bit better. That's it. They're feedback mechanisms telling us that something is either likely right or likely wrong for us—nothing more, nothing less.


...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. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it.

Emotions are part of the equation of our lives, but not the entire equation. Just because something feels good doesn't mean it is good. Just because something feels bad doesn't mean it is bad. Emotions are merely signposts, suggestions that our neurobiology gives us, not commandments. Therefore, we shouldn't always trust our own emotions.


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

...happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems.


The path to happiness is a path full of shit-heaps and shame.

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

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

A person who actually has a high self-worth is able to look at the negative parts of his character frankly...and then acts to improve upon them.




...people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes.

...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.

As Freud once said, "One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."





The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.


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

Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient, more grounded.

Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments. It's only when we feel intense pain that we're willing to look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us. We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we've been deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.


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


Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions. Taking advantage of this knowledge, we can actually reorient our mindset in the following way:

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.

The "do something" principle not only helps us overcome procrastination, but it's also the process by which we adopt new values. If you're in the midst of an existential shitstorm and everything feels meaningless—if all the ways you used to measure yourself have come up short and you have no idea what's next, if you know that you've been hurting yourself chasing false dreams, or if you know that there's some better metric you should be measuring yourself with but you don't know how—the answer is the same: Do something.

Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one's life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person.


Got to the Amazon page for more information.
