The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

by Mark Manson

summarized by Adrie Kuil

Brief summary

The key to living a good life is to care only about things that align with your personal values. Finding something important and meaningful in your life is the most productive use of your time and energy. What are you choosing to care about? What values are you choosing to base your actions on? To be comfortable with death we need to care about something greater than ourselves. The only truly important question is perhaps: How do I leave the world better than I found it?

Full summary

This summary is an informal write-up of my understanding of the key messages from the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson.

The key to living a good life is to care only about things that align with your personal values. Developing good personal values is the most important struggle in your life. We are all going to die. In our short life we can only care about a limited number of things. Finding something important and meaningful in your life is the most productive use of your time and energy. What are you choosing to care about? What values are you choosing to base your actions on?

The more we are seeking positive experiences, the more we focus on our personal inadequacies and failures, and the less satisfied we become. Thus the desire for positive experiences is a negative experience. Albert Camus: “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.”

It is inevitable to experience negative feelings sometimes, like anxiety or fear. Resisting negative feelings makes them stronger: we become anxious about being anxious, or we feel bad about feeling bad. Accepting negative feelings stops us from thinking there is something wrong with us. Thus the acceptance of negative experiences is a positive experience.

Pursuing the negative can generate the positive, like the pain in the gym that improves our health.

To fulfill our personal values, we have to act despite our fears and pain. To do something meaningful, we need to overcome the associated negative experience. If you don’t care about the pain, you are unstoppable. To overcome adversity, we must care about something that is more important to us than adversity.

Practical enlightenment is about becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is inevitable. We should ask ourselves: Why am I suffering – for what purpose? We can endure and perhaps even enjoy suffering if it means something to us, if it fulfills some greater cause. 

Emotions are biological signals that indicate what is likely right or wrong for us. You should question them as they are not always right. Negative emotions spur us into action. Emotions caused by rejection or failure teach us how to avoid making the same mistakes. We should express our emotions in a way that aligns with our values.

Happiness comes from solving problems. Happiness doesn’t come from denying problems, or from thinking that we can’t do anything about them (victim mentality). Happiness is a non-stop activity, as life gives us a never-ending series of problems to solve. Find the problems that you enjoy solving.

Choose your struggle. What you are willing to struggle for defines who you are. Ask yourself: What am I willing to struggle for? What pain am I willing to sustain?

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

A true measurement of your self-worth is how you feel about the negative aspects of yourself.

In the mass-media only the exceptional pieces of information, the extremes of the bell curve, catch our attention. The best of the best, and the worst of the worst. This makes us believe that the extremes are normal. This makes us feel insecure and not good enough, as we are all average at most things we do.

We are not all destined to do something extraordinary. You and your problems are not special or unique. Your actions are not important in the grand scheme of things. Most of your life will be ordinary and boring. And that’s all fine, because it’s the ordinary things in life that really matter.

Accepting these truths frees us from feeling not good enough.

The first level of self-awareness is understanding our emotions, like understanding what situations make us feel happy or sad. The second level is the ability to ask why we feel certain emotions, like anger or excitement. What does the situation mean to us? This level illuminates the root causes of our emotions. The third level is our personal values. These underlie everything we are and do, and determine the metrics by which we measure success and failure for ourselves and for everyone else. What we think and feel about a situation is determined by how valuable we perceive the situation to be. How we choose to value and measure a situation is more important than the objective truth. To change how we interpret situations, we have to change our values and related metrics.

Some values are better than others.

Bad values are based on superstition, socially destructive, and not immediate or controllable. They lead to unhelpful thoughts and feelings, and make us care too much about unimportant things. Bad values generally rely on external events. Examples: pleasure, material success and popularity.

Good values are reality-based, socially constructive, and immediate and controllable. They make us care more about important things. This generates happiness as a side effect. Good values are achieved internally. Examples: honesty, vulnerability and curiosity.

Self-improvement is about prioritizing better values, about choosing better things to care about. What are the values that you prioritize above everything else?

People who are afraid of what others think about them, are actually afraid of all the bad things they think about themselves being reflected back at them.

We are responsible for everything that occurs in our life, regardless of who is at fault. We feel victimized when we feel our problems are outside our control. We feel empowered when we feel that we are responsible for overcoming our problems.  Accepting full responsibility for our problems is the first step in solving them. We can’t control what happens to us, or what others do. But we always choose our interpretation of what happens to us, as well as how we react. We are always choosing the values by which we live and the metrics by which we measure our experiences.

Nobody else is responsible for your situation but you. You get to choose how you see things and how you react to them. Real learning comes from taking responsibility for your own problems and improving upon them. Some of us get dealt better cards than others. It’s all about the choices we make with those cards. We are responsible to make the best choices we can, given the circumstances.

The essence of living in a free society is that we have to deal with views and people we don’t like.

Change is about changing our values, about choosing to care about something else. Change is not easy as it will at first make us feel nervous, uncertain and disoriented.

Psychological growth is a never-ending iterative process where we go from being wrong to being slightly less wrong. Our values are hypotheses about what behavior is good and important, and what behavior isn’t. Our actions are tests of our values. The resulting emotions and thoughts are the data produced by our actions.

Certainty is the enemy of change and psychological growth. We are biased towards what we believe to be true, and we often ignore contradictory evidence. For growth we need to doubt the rightness of our values, beliefs and assumptions. Most of our beliefs are not true, so look pro-actively for how we are wrong.

Uncertainty is the source of progress and psychological growth. The more you try to be certain about something, the more insecure you will feel. The more you embrace being uncertain, the more comfortable you will feel. Before we can change our imperfect values into better ones, we must be uncertain of our current values.

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

We need to change how we view ourselves before we can change and grow. To free ourselves up to grow, we need to change the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, or we need to let them go. Ask yourself: What if I’m wrong? What would it mean if I were wrong?

Failure and success are relative concepts, they depend on our values and how we measure them. Good values and metrics are based on our own behaviors and happiness. Bad values are based on external things that are not in our control. Values based on goals can only bring a limited amount of happiness, as goals are finite. Values based on processes, like honesty, can generate lifelong happiness, as processes never end.

Pain is often necessary for psychological growth. It can make us more emotionally resilient. When we feel intense pain we’re willing to look at our values.

Our emotions define our reality. We mistake what we feel for what is.

Action is not only the effect of motivation, it can also cause motivation. Act despite your pain. When you’re stuck on a problem, don’t just sit there thinking about it, but start working on it and the answers will follow. Take the smallest viable step. By doing something we can adopt new values. If our only metric for success is doing something, and any result is perceived as progress, then we feel free to fail. Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway.

Travel is a great self-development tool because it exposes us to the different cultural values and metrics from other societies.

We achieve meaning through a narrowing of freedom, through choosing commitment to one place, one belief or one person. If we don’t reject anything, then we stand for nothing, which makes our life meaningless. To value something, we must reject what is not that something. We are defined by what we choose to reject. If we refuse to reject anything, we live a meaningless, pleasure-driven, self-absorbed life.

In a healthy relationship the two people accept responsibility for their own values and problems, with support from each other. They don’t take any responsibility for the other’s values and problems. They support each other because they want to. They are willing to both reject and be rejected by the other, they are comfortable with saying and hearing the word “no”. In an unhealthy relationship the two people try to escape their problems through emotions for each other.

Trust is the most important ingredient in a relationship, because without it the relationship doesn’t mean anything. The values of a cheater are not aligned with the values required to maintain a healthy relationship.

More is not always better. The more options we have, the less satisfied we are with our choice (the paradox of choice). If we go for breadth of experience, we won’t get the rewards of depth of experience. There are diminishing returns to each new experience. Commitment liberates us, as we are no longer distracted by unimportant things. Reject everything that does not align with your most important values.

Without death, our lives would feel unimportant, and our values and metrics would feel irrelevant.

Embrace the impermanence of your own existence. If there is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything. What do you have to lose? You’re going to die anyway, so your fears and embarrassments and failures don’t mean anything. You might as well try.

We are all aware that we will inevitably die one day. Realizing this should eliminate all superficial values from our lives. Death must be the compass by which we orient all our values and decisions.

To be comfortable with death we need to care about something greater than ourselves. We should choose values that stretch beyond only serving ourselves. The only truly important question is perhaps: How do I leave the world better than I found it?