Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Embracing the negative

• Principle: 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.
  
• Paradigm: all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time—is actually fixating on what you lack. It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for you; while pursuing and surmounting the negative will usually deliver positive results
  
• Practice: The key then is not on obsessing on more, but on obsessing less and obsessing on the things that truly matter
  

2. Happiness is the problem
   

• Principle: Problems never stop. They merely get exchanged or upgraded.
  
• Paradigm: Don’t hope for a life without problems. Hope for a life with good problems. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Happiness is wanting the problems you have and wanting to solve them.
  
• Practice
  
  1. Solve problems be happy! Unfortunately, for many people, life doesn’t feel that simple. That’s because they fuck things up in at least one of two ways:
  
  – Denial. Some people deny that their problems exist in the first place. And because they deny reality, they must constantly delude or distract themselves from reality. This may make them feel good in the short term, but it leads to a life of insecurity, neuroticism, and emotional repression.
  
  – Victim Mentality. Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could. Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances. This may make them feel better in the short term, but it leads to a life of anger, helplessness, and despair.
  
  We all have our chosen methods to numb the pain of our problems, and in moderate doses there is nothing wrong with this. But the longer we avoid and the longer we numb, the more painful it will be when we finally do confront our issues.
  
  2. Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change. Negative emotions are a sign that something is going unaddressed . They are a call to action. Positive emotions are the reward for taking the correct action
  
  Don’t ask yourself what you want out of life. It’s easy to want success and fame and happiness and great sex. Everybody wants those things. A much more interesting question to ask yourself is, “What kind of pain do I want?” What you are willing to struggle for is a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
  

3. You’re not that special
   

• Principle: To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate shit-tons of time and energy to it. And because we all have limited time and energy, few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing, if anything at all
  
• Paradigm: Accept your mediocrity. 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.
  
• Practice
  • The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative aspects of themselves
    
  • 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. Don’t use your problems as an excuse
    
  • Beware of social media. This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough. So more and more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and addiction.
    
  • Accept that “Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.”
    

4. The value of suffering
   

• Principle: Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be.
  
• Paradigm: If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success. Self improvement is about prioritizing better values and choosing better things to give a fuck about
  
• Practices to set your values
  
  1. Our values are constantly reflected in the way we choose to behave.
  
  2. Our values are extensions of ourselves. They are what define us. When something bad happens to something or someone you value, you feel bad, or in this case, angry. If after you’ve managed to retain your objectivity, you still can’t discover the reason behind your anger, then it’s a good sign that you’ve lost touch with your values
  
  3. Here are some exercises to discover your life values
  
  a. Make a list of everything you care about in life. List the specific (I want Indonesian literature to be recognized by the world) and the abstract (I care about Indonesian literature).
  
  i. You can also ask yourself: What does a successful and meaningful life look like to you? What is it that I want from this life? Does the value you say you have match what you do? Is there a disconnect? And if there is, what is it that you truly value?
  
  ii. Lump the values you’ve listed into the categories below
  – Career
  – Relationships
  – Self Improvement
  – Artistic expression
  – Entertainment
  – Important causes
  
  b. Think of meaning and purpose like an investment portfolio. So if you notice that one category is vastly outstripping the other categories, that is a red flag.
  
  c. Look at the list of everything you care about in life and imagine that you’ve had a cancer and you can only choose to live 5 values from the list. What were they be?
  
  d. Look at the 5 values and ask why you care so much about them. Keep asking why until you’ve drilled down to the core of underlying values.
  
  e. A good value should be pursued and retained as an end in itself, not by other people’s validation. For example if you set personal growth as an important value, but discovered that you chose it in order to please other people, then probably you should set your motivation right. Ask yourself these 3 questions:
  i. If nobody knew about this, would I still do it?
  ii. If doing this resulted in no money, prestige or fame, would I still do it?
  iii. If I had an infinite amount of money and resources, would I still do it?
  
  Any time you answer ‘no’ to one of these questions, that’s a red flag. That’s something that you should investigate and start asking ‘why’
  
  e. Having a lot of values can make your life very confusing
  
  Voila, there goes your top 5 values! 4. Now evaluate the values you have. Are they good values are bad values? If they are bad ones, we suggest that you pick out 5 better values. Use the following guideline from Mark Manson to see if your values are any good
  
  Good values are
  
  a. reality-based- values based on emotions often lead to destructive consequences. Our values must not just feel good, they must be considered and reasoned. We must accumulate evidence supporting it. Otherwise, we’ll spend our lives chasing a mirage.
  
  b. socially constructive- We don’t want to value things that harm ourselves or others. We do want to value things that enhance ourselves and others.
  
  c. *immediate and controllable- When you value things that are outside your control, you essentially give up your life to that thing. (ie. money, reputation)
  
  4.2 You’ll notice that good, healthy values are achieved internally. You simply have to orient your mind in a certain way to experience it. These values are immediate and controllable and engage you with the world as it is rather than how you wish it were.
  
  4.3. Bad values are generally reliant on external events. Bad values, while sometimes fun or pleasurable, lie outside of your control and often require socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve.*
  
  5. The art of value change
  
  5.1. Step 1: The value must fail: values are based on experience. You cannot argue someone out of their values. You cannot threaten them to let go of their most deeply-held beliefs. That just makes them defensive and even more resistant to changing themselves. Instead, you must approach them with empathy.
  
  The only way to change someone’s values is by presenting them with an experience contrary to their value. To let go of a value, it must be contradicted through experience. Sometimes this contradiction happens by taking the value to its logical conclusion. Other times, a value is contradicted by the real world.
  
  5.2. Step 2: Have the self awareness to recognize that our values have failed: Other times, a value is contradicted by the real world.
  
  Few people stop to consider that the value itself is at fault. That valuing money got you into this situation, therefore there’s no way it can get you out.
  
  5.3. Step 3: Question the value and brainstorm what values do a better job: maturity is replacing low-level, material values, with higher-level, abstract values. So instead of chasing money all the time, you could chase freedom.
  
  Ultimately, abstract values are values you can control. You cannot control if people like you. But you can always control whether you’re being honest or not. You can’t always control if and when you win or not. You can always control whether you’re giving your best effort. In a career, you can’t always control how much you’ll get paid. But you can always control if you’re doing something you find meaningful
  
  6. Live out your values.
  
  Sitting around thinking about better values to have is nice. But nothing will solidify until you go out and embody that new value. Values are won and lost through life experience. Not through logic or feelings or even beliefs. They have to be lived and experienced to stick.
  
  6.1. Pick a value—this could be a value you found you already have, or a new one you’ve decided to embody.
  
  6.2. Set goals that are aligned with that value. a. Create big long term goal around the truly meaningful values you chose b. Work backwards from your goals. What need to be true for this to happen? c. Write your action plans. What are some things you can do this week to move you towards those goals?
  
  6.3. Make decisions in such a way that it takes you closer to those goals.
  
  6.4. Experience the emotional and physical benefits of that value—these will then inspire you to pursue it further.
  

5. You are always choosing
   

• Principle: 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.
  
• Paradigm: 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.
  
• Practice
  – A lot of people hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your problems is to also be at fault for your problems. But we are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life.
  
  Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re currently making, every second of every day.
  
  – Pain of one sort or another is inevitable for all of us, but we get to choose what it means to and for us.
  
  – Remember that people who consistently make the best choices in the situations they’re given are the ones who eventually come out ahead in poker, just as in life. And it’s not necessarily the people with the best cards.
  
  – Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because 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.
  

6. You’re wrong about everything
   

• Principle: When we learn something new, we don’t go from “wrong” to “right.” Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. Most of our beliefs are wrong. Or, to be more exact, all beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others.
  
• Paradigm: Our values are our hypotheses: this behavior is good and important; that other behavior is not. Our actions are the experiments; the resulting emotions and thought patterns are our data.
  
• Practice
  – 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?
  
  – Beware of Manson’s law of avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
  
  – To combat this, never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others. When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.
  
  • Some questions to evaluate your beliefs
  • what if I’m wrong?
  • But it’s important to note that just because you ask yourself if you have the wrong idea doesn’t necessarily mean that you do
  • It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something
  • what would it mean if I’m wrong?
  • Being able to look at and evaluate different values without necessarily adopting them is perhaps the central skill required in changing one’s own life in a meaningful way.
  • Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?
  • if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.
    

7. Failure is the way forward
   

• Principle: 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 someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.
  
• Paradigm: Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway
  
• Practice
  – Learn to sustain the pain you’ve chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life. Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act despite it.
  
  – Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow. Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.
  
  – If we follow the “do something” principle, failure feels unimportant. When the standard of success becomes merely acting—when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite—we propel ourselves ahead.
  
  Develop boundaries
  

• Principle: 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.
  
• Paradigm: rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all.
  
• Practice
  – There are some experiences that you can have only when you’ve lived in the same place for five years, when you’ve been with the same person for over a decade, when you’ve been working on the same skill or craft for half your lifetime.
  
  – When you’re pursuing a wide breadth of experience, there are diminishing returns to each new adventure, each new person or thing.
  
  – *A healthy relationship is when two people solve their own problems in order to feel good about each other. The setting of proper boundaries doesn’t mean you can’t help or support your partner or be helped and supported yourself. You both should support each other. But only because you choose to support and be supported.
  
  – So here’s a litmus test: ask yourself, “If I refused, how would the relationship change?” Similarly, ask, “If my partner refused something I wanted, how would the relationship change?”*
  

8. And then you die
   

• Principle: rather than attempting to implement, often through lethal force, their conceptual self across the world, people should question their conceptual self and become more comfortable with the reality of their own death.
  
• Paradigm: Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life. While most people whittle their days chasing another buck, or a little bit more fame and attention, or a little bit more assurance that they’re right or loved, death confronts all of us with a far more painful and important question: What is your legacy?
  

Practice
– How will the world be different and better when you’re gone? What mark will you have made? What influence will you have caused?

– 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