The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (Book Summary)
Book Cover
Introduction:
One of Mark Manson’s many books another modernized self-help type book that is mainstream for a pretty good reason. Noted in my previous post pretty much all self help content now isn’t new, they have been condensed forms from old philosophies and spiritual practices.
The summary (With my own personal flair):
Don’t Try
The book starts off outlining its goal of helping readers to discern what is most important in their lives. With that they will function more clearly. It is not about not caring about anything at all, but by understanding core values.
Mark is an excellent storyteller and write, in each section he either recounts historical or his personal stories introducing main points.
The concept of not trying is similar to Yoda’s famous quote “Do or do not. There is no try”. There is no just trying out things in life. The simple analogy is giving full commitment to everything one does in life itself. With doing/performing will come the positive and negative experiences. Acknowledge that both outcomes can happen and are a necessary part of life. We can only accept them for what they are as part of the process of moving forward.
In the introduction of the book he hammers in a harsh lesson of life is to accept who you are and just being, not trying to fit into a general sense of public expectations.
There are three subtleties we should pay attention to:
- Not giving a fuck means being comfortable with being different (being yourself, know yourself)
- To not give a fuck about adversity, you must care about something more than adversity
- You are always choosing what you care about, whether you realize or not
Realizing that happiness it the problem and that you are not special
The author emphasizes that our society has happiness all wrong. We should not be doing X or getting Y to be happy. In fact happiness is not a solvable generic equation, nor is everyone’s level of happiness and suffering equal. Akin to philosophy, stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, he makes the point that life itself is a form of suffering. Individual suffering actually gives us the drive to solve problems and move forward. Temporary happiness comes from solving these problems. It is a constant work in progress and not the end all be all goal. This concept does not come easy to us for two reason:
- Everyone is in denial of their problems
- When people acknowledge their problems, they usually have a victim mentality
But we should know that our problems are not unique, hence we do not deserve any special treatment.
A better way to look at this is the power to choose your own suffering/struggle. Instead, ask yourself: What pain are you willing to endure to get what you want? This is the lesson to enjoy the process.
Regarding feeling unique and special, most people have the delusion of their own important and the need to feel/be special all time. They develop the problem of always seeking positive experiences.
A cold hard pill to swallow is understanding that we are no more special than anyone else. About our problems, we always view them as unique to ourselves which gives us the sense of entitlement that others should solve our situation.
Unfortunately it is more visible today for Millennials and Gen Z, because well, it is super visible with the internet. I would say that these two generations are wrongfully attributed to be the only entitle generation because of this.
To really work towards positive growth and gain a sense of maturity is by reflecting on our negative experiences and take ownership of our responsibilities and problems.
I will repeat that again: Take ownership of OUR responsibilities and ourselves.
The value of suffering
Humans have the incredible ability to endure through the worse or even the strangest of experiences. Some people even dedicated their whole lives to crazy, even destructive causes but can endure it since it provides them meaning.
… This was back when suffering had meaning
Let’s think of the exercise of examining your underlying values as peeling away at an onion. The first layer is our surface level feelings, the next layer of the onion is to look at why we feel them. When you keep reducing down these ideas and concepts to their first principles that last layer is our personal values.
With understanding our base values and principals we begin to understand at what metric we measures ourselves by.
The author of the book gives two great examples of two separate musicians wrongfully ousted from their groups.
I won’t repeat it as I want you to read the actual book.
One person after a life crisis found new values to live by, while still having an interest in music he perform and enjoyed his passion on the side but chose to live a simpler life after meeting his wife and having a family. Another took it differently, he started his own band which also became wildly successful but he always compared his band and music career’s success to the success of his former bandmates. Do you think the second person was happier? No, of course not. His notion of success was based on a shitty value. “I will be happy once I have sold X number of albums/records more than Y” That was his train of thought. He didn’t let go at all. Whereas the person in the first example through his personal struggles gradually recovered and found new values.
To be fair since the second musician chose to do this it gave him insane drive to perform in this direction.
Here are some shitty values:
Pleasure, material success, always being right, staying positive.
Categorizing good and bad values
Good Values: reality based, socially constructive, immediate and controllable
Bad Values: superstitious, social destructive, not immediate or controllable
Good values are achieved internally, bad are reliant on external events
Determining values require prioritization. Which do you put before others? Your values determine your actions. When we choose better values, they divert our attention to better things that matter. Usually good values improve our state of well being. Generating happiness, pleasure and success are their side effects, not the goal.
The following next section summaries focus on core tenants that Stoic, Daoist, Buddhist – w.e any other spiritual discussion cover deeply.
Responsibility (Emphasis on our choices)
A shortened concept of stoicism that is addressed is that we only have control over our thoughts and actions. We do not have any control over the circumstances that happen to us. Whether good or bad things happen to us, turn around the perspective that the event was objective and our interpretation of the event is subjective. Therefore we always have control over our interpretation and response.
We only have responsibility and power over ourselves.
Careful, note in your head that responsibility != fault.
You do not want to develop a victimhood mentality. Like earlier, we all think our problems are unique to us, therefore we all feel victimized. It takes away real problems from actual victims. Just use your judgment and pick your battles carefully.
Remember that with anything we are doing, we always have a choice.
Uncertainty: Understanding that you can and will be wrong
Another layer of true growth in character is understanding that you are always wrong about something. Accept that and instead of being Mr. or Mrs. Right, seek to challenge your own ideas and base assumptions. Our brains are internally wired to associated meaning to everything, even when things don’t have to have meaning. Once we’ve created our own meaning these are internal biases that we latch onto. It was a way to ensure our survival from ages ago.
Looking and evaluating different values with adopting them is an essential skill to change your life in a meaningful way.
Develop the openness to know your capacity of being wrong. Seek to find the truth.
I love his changeup of the typical millennial escapism phrase of “Finding yourself”, “Never know who you are”.
Usually this lack of self-reflection is that we aren’t very good at being observers of ourselves.
He gives 3 questions to ask yourself when we are feeling uncertain:
- What if I’m wrong?
- What would it mean if I’m wrong?
- Would being wrong could create a better or worse problem than my current problem for myself and others?
Failure is necessary
Failure is another metric of comparison. We see another individuals’ success but we do not see their many little failures before. Improvement involves many little failures. The magnitude of success depends on the amount of times they have failed. This is compound interest at work.
Babies and young kids have no notion of failure, they just continue trying.
The idea of avoiding failure is learned later in our lives by critical parenting and how our school system is built. Failure comes with the pain, but the pain is part of the process when it comes to getting better at anything.
We are initial afraid to take action because of the fear of pain, even for trivial things such as asking a girl out in fear of rejection. These emotions are all in our head. We just have to DO it. Just like Yoda says: “There is no try, only do”
We have to actually just DO. Mark Manson coins the “Do something Principle”
Being forced into urgency is a good cause for self action. Well usually things we have to do aren’t very urgent right? When there is no way around it you just have to do it. The truth is… action isn’t just an effect from motivation, but it is actually the cause of it. We can’t wait and rely on some external force to encourage us to do something.
We correlate action as a consequence of motivation and inspiration but actually it is the other way around:
Action -> Inspiration -> Motivation
Rejection and the importance of saying No
Furthermore on what you choose to care about, you have to come to terms that you must be selective and there will be things you have to be frank and say no to.
On one stay in Russia, Mark was surprised by how blunt Russians are with their speech. It is different than how the West behaves. After going through strict communism in Russia trust and honesty became their highest value. In western society there was economic freedom but to gain this freedom one had to present themselves in a certain way, foregoing trust and honesty.
In other words many people had to put on a farce and become “Yes men” we have compromised our own values for material gain.
Rejection makes your life better
Emphasizing current west culture has the backwards thinking must accept and affirm everything. That means we do not stand for any value other that superficial vanity.
- Rejecting ideas means you stand for some value
- To value something it to reject somethings
- Avoiding rejection to avoid confrontations
- Comes from fear of making ourselves or others feel bad
Love as the ultimate example of commitment and rejection
Current modern idealized romantic love we see in TV, movies and other media Mark says is kind of like cocaine, it creates problems like cocaine too.
There are healthy and unhealthy forms of love
Unhealthy: escapism use each other as excuses
Healthy: each partner addresses their problems
This stems from a bad case of boundaries. Bad boundaries happen when one person either accepts too much of their partners problems and responsibilities or they expect the other to take on their problems and responsibilities.
Another sign of unhealthy relationship is when one person tries to solve other persons’ problems.
There are two types of people in a bad relationship, the Victim and the Saver. For the two to repair their relationship, the victim has to learn how to accept responsibility and the saver needs to let go of the need to fix the others problems.
Of course you should support each other, when you choose to. With strong boundaries we will not be afraid of temper tantrums.
On how to rebuild trust when it is destroyed (From a betrayal like cheating)
- Trust breaker admits true fault, assesses core values owns responsibility
- Trust breaker starts building up improved behaviour over time
Commitment leads to freedom
He notes that as we are younger breadth of experiences, like career, travel, relationships are nice to have. We need those to learn from and takeaway as knowledge investments in ourselves. Afterwards more of the same experience as a dopamine hit has diminishing returns.
It is counterintuitive, but later in life Freedom and Liberation comes with commitment. After solely focusing on one thing comes clarity. We no longer will have the paradox of choice or indecision of too many options.
And then you die (Memento Mori)
This is very much a fundamental tenant in Stoicism, pondering on ones own mortality.
Being afraid to die prevents you from living. Understand, knowing or coming close to death will mark a turning point in your life. Hopefully that urges you to assess your values closely and determine how you live.
We actually have a built in awareness of death, lying deep in our subconscious we do many things as a way to immortalize ourselves, like getting our names on stuff, posting endlessly on social media, building a legacy, starting a family and having kids - all examples of leaving something behind to prove that we existed.
Know that death will make you understand your life
Understand the shortness, fragility of life gives clarity, responsibility, fears uncertainties.
Knowing death forces you to live intentionally in the the present.
FIN
That’s it! What have you learned and taken away from this condense/simplified/modernized wisdom? Do let me know if was useful. Please also feel free to comment about this sort of content and my writing. I am always looking to improve.
You can purchase the book here: Amazon
* Note that I have no affiliate links. Just looking to share this gem of a self-help book