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Manson - Mark — The Subtle Art


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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
Mark Manson



CHAPTER 1: Don’t Try

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giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health.

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overly attached to the superficial and fake,

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chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction.

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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.

The Feedback Loop from Hell

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Feedback Loop from Hell.

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thoughts about our thoughts.

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consciousness!  -- thoughts about thoughts

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

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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.

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Don’t try.

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backwards law

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learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively—how to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you based on finely honed personal values.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck

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Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

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There’s absolutely nothing admirable or confident about indifference.

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People who are indifferent are lame and scared.

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Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices.

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What are we choosing to give a fuck about? And how can we not give a fuck about what ultimately does not matter?

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Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.

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finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy.

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Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.

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most of these sorts of things have little lasting impact on our lives.

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Essentially, we become more selective

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maturity.

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one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.

So Mark, What the Fuck Is the Point of This Book Anyway?

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

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it’s okay for things to suck sometimes.

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reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is important and what is not.

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“practical enlightenment.”

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how to lose and let go.

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not try.

CHAPTER 2: Happiness Is a Problem

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life itself is a form of suffering.

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

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premise is that happiness is algorithmic, that it can be worked for and earned and achieved as if it were

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This premise, though, is the problem.

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Happiness is not a solvable equation.

The Misadventures of Disappointment Panda
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Disappointment Panda. -- superhero no one wants but everyone needs--

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suffering is biologically useful.

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inspiring change.

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constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering.

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our brains don’t register much difference between physical pain and psychological pain.

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“Life is essentially an endless series of problems,

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

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hope for a life full of good problems.”

Happiness Comes from Solving Problems

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Happiness Comes from Solving Problems

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

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Happiness comes from solving problems.

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To be happy we need something to solve.

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Happiness is therefore a form of action;

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True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

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1.   Denial.

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2.   Victim Mentality.

Emotions Are Overrated

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Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.

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negative emotions are a call to action.

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Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.

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Emotions are part of the equation of our lives, but not the entire equation.

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pain serves a purpose.

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our biology always needs something more.

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“hedonic treadmill”:

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problems are recursive and unavoidable.

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Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad.

Choose Your Struggle

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Choose Your Struggle

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

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settle.

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

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our struggles determine our successes.

CHAPTER 3: You Are Not Special

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delusional level of self-confidence.

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Sometime in the 1960s, developing “high self-esteem”—having positive thoughts and feelings about oneself—became all the rage in psychology.

The Tyranny of Exceptionalism

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Even if you’re exceptional at one thing, chances are you’re average or below average at most other things.

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few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing, if anything at all.

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There’s no way we can process the tidal waves of information flowing past us constantly.

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Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience,

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conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal.

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more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and addiction. We cope the only way we know how: either through self-aggrandizing or through other-aggrandizing.

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culture of entitlement

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mass-media-driven exceptionalism.

The Self-Awareness Onion

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Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times.

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It takes years of practice and effort to get good at identifying blind spots in ourselves and then expressing the affected emotions appropriately. But this task is hugely important, and worth the effort.

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ability to ask why we feel certain emotions.

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Once we understand that root cause, we can ideally do something to change it.

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The third level is our personal values:

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our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.

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Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be.

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

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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.

Rock Star Problems

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We’re apes.

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

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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

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               Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect. If you get the other stuff right (the other values and metrics), then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product.

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2.   Material Success.

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

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While there is something to be said for “staying on the sunny side of life,” the truth is, sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it.

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To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them.

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Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life.

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these values—pleasure, material success, always being right, staying positive—are poor ideals for a person’s life.

Defining Good and Bad Values

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

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

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good, healthy values are achieved internally.

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These values are immediate and controllable and engage you with the world as it is rather than how you wish it were.

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Bad values are generally reliant

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outside of your control and often require socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve.

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priorities.

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What are the values that you prioritize above everything else, and that therefore influence your decision-making more than anything else?

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responsibility:

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taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who’s at fault.

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uncertainty:

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acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your own beliefs.

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failure: the willingness to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that they may be improved upon.

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rejection: the ability to both say and hear no,

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clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life.

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mortality;

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paying vigilant attention to one’s own death is perhaps the only thing capable of helping us keep all our other values in proper perspective.

The Choice

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

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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.

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What values are we choosing to base our actions on?

The Responsibility/Fault Fallacy

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We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life.

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Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense.

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Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you.

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you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.

CHAPTER 6: You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)

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doubt: doubt about our own
Kill Yourself

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define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.

How to Be a Little Less Certain of Yourself

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we’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves.

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for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something.

Pain Is Part of the Process

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Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life. Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments.

Rejection Makes Your Life Better

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to value something, we must reject what is not that something.

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We are defined by what we choose to reject.

Something Beyond Our Selves

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“immortality projects,”


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