The Subtle Art of Not Giving A 🇫uck Part 1

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."

Two Ways to 🇫uck Up

1) 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, & emotional repression. 2) 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, & despair.

Contents

1) Don't Try 2) Happiness Is a Problem 3) You Are Not Special 4) The Value of Suffering 5) You Are Always Choosing 6) You're Wrong About Everything 7) Failure Is the Way Forward 8) The Importance of Saying No 9) And Then You Die

Negative Emotions

1) Express them in a socially acceptable & healthy manner 2) Express them in a way that aligns with your values.

Shitty Values

1) Pleasure 2) Material Success 3) Always Being Right 4) Staying Positive

Good Values

1) Reality-Based 2) Socially Constructive 3) Immediate & Controllable

Bad Values

1) Superstitious 2) Socially Destructive 3) Not immediate or controllable

Skills

Ever notice that sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it? Notice how it's often the person who is least invested in success of something actually ends up achieving it? Notice how sometimes when you stop giving a 🇫uck, everything seems to fall into place?

All Talk, No Walk

He'd pulverize you about how world-spinning his work was, how brilliant his latest ideas were, & he'd name drop so much it felt like you were talking to a tabloid reporter. Jimmy was all about positivity. The catch was that Jimmy was a total deadbeat- all talk & no walk. Stoned a majority of the time & spending as much money in bars & fine restaurants as he did on his "business ideas". Jimmy was a professional leech. He had a delusional level of self-confidence. People who pointed out his deadbeat lifestyle were "jealous"; they were "haters" who envied success.

Defining Good & Bad Values

Honesty is a good value because it's something you have complete control over, it reflects reality, & it benefits others (even if it's sometimes unpleasant). Popularity, on the other hand, is a bad value.

Contemplation of One's Own Mortality

Keep your values in perspective because you will die one day so make sure they are meaningful values that leave behind a memorable legacy.

Rejection

The ability to do both say & hear no, thus clearly defining what you will & will not accept in your life.

Uncertainty

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

Material Success

The danger of prioritizing it over other values such as honesty, nonviolence, & compassion. When people measure themselves not by their behavior but by their status symbols, they're able to collect then not only are they're shallow but they are a$$holes as well.

Failure

The willingness to discover your own flaws & mistakes so that they may be improved upon.

The Truth

Values such as pleasure, material success, always being right, staying positive, are poor ideals for a person's life. Some of the greatest moments of one's life are not pleasant, not successful not known, not positive.

Taking Responsibility

You are at fault for your own choices & the consequences that follow.

🇫uckboy Life

🖕"I chased women the same way a cocaine addict takes to a snowman made out of cocaine. I made sweet love to it then promptly suffocated myself in it. I became a player- an immature selfish, albeit sometimes charming player. And I strung up a long series of superficial unhealthy relationships for the better part of a decade." 🖕"I was often unemployed, living on a friends' couches or with my mom, drinking way more than I should have been, alienating a number of friends." 🖕The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems.

Good vs Bad People

🖕A person with high self-worth also has high self-awareness, will admit when they're wrong, & act to improve upon them. 🖕Entitled people are incapable of acknowledging their own problems openly & honestly, are incapable of improving their lives in any lasting or meaningful way.

Anger

🖕Anger is natural. Anger is a part of life. Anger is arguably quite healthy in many situations. 🖕When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny existence of our life's problems. And when we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to generate happiness. Problems add a sense of meaning & importance to our life. Thus to duck our problems is to lead a meaningless (even if supposedly pleasant) existence.

American Culture Advertisements

🖕Be the best, better than the rest. 🖕Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, & more admired. 🖕It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings & failures to already be, & then emphasizes them for you. 🖕The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more.

Subtlety #1

🖕Deadbeats are lame, scared, couch potatoes, & internet trolls. 🖕Indifferent people often attempt to be indifferent because in reality they give way too many 🇫ucks. 🖕They hide in a gray, emotionless pit of their own making, self-absorbed & self-pitying, perpetually distracting themselves from this unfortunate thing demanding their time & energy called life. 🖕The willingness to be different, an outcast, a pariah, all for the sake of one's own values. The willingness to stare failure in the face & shove your middle finger back at it. The people who don't give a 🇫uck about adversity or failure or embarrassing themselves or shitting the bed a few times. The people who just laugh & then do what they believe in anyway. 🖕Reserve 🇫ucks for what truly matters. Friends. Family. Purpose. Good Food. 🖕No matter where you go, there's a 500 lb load of shit waiting for you. And that's perfectly fine. The point isn't to get away from shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.

A Wrong Turn

🖕Do not let the weight of failures & rejection push you into deep alcohol-fueled depression or escaping reality through drug addiction. 🖕Do not let your life follow into meaningless blur of alcohol, drugs, gambling, & prostitutes.

Evil Values

🖕Dominance through manipulation or violence 🖕Indiscriminate 🇫ucking 🖕Feeling good all the time 🖕Always being the center of attention 🖕Not being alone 🖕Being liked by everybody 🖕Being rich for the sake of being rich 🖕Sacrificing small animals to pagan gods

Emotions Are Overrated

🖕Emotions evolved for one specific purpose: to help us live & reproduce a little bit better. 🖕Negative emotions are a call to action. 🖕Just because something feels good, doesn't mean it is good. Just because something feels bad, doesn't mean it is bad. 🖕Many people are taught to repress their emotions for various personal, social, or cultural reasons, particularly negative emotions. Sadly, to deny one's negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems. As a result, many of these repressed individuals struggle to deal with problems throughout their lives. If they can't solve problems, they can't be happy. Pain serves a purpose.

Choose Your Struggle

🖕Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, & easy life, to fall in love & have amazing sex & relationships, to look perfect & make money & be popular & well-respected & admired & a total baller to the point people part like the Red Sea when they walk in the room. 🖕Most people want the end result but are unwilling to go through the pain to get the end in mind. 🖕Most people want a perfect relationship but are unwilling to go through the tough conversations, awkward silences, hurt feelings, & emotional psychodrama. 🖕Happiness requires struggle.

Building Oneself

🖕Healthy values are achieved internally. 🖕You simply have to orient your mind in a certain way to experience it. 🖕Bad values are generally reliant on external events. while sometimes fun or pleasurable, lie outside of your control & often require socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve.

You're Not Always the Protagonist

🖕Highs can come from drugs/alcohol, the moral righteousness that comes from blaming others, or the thrill of some new risky adventure, highs are shallow & unproductive ways to go about one's life. 🖕Highs also generate addiction & craving. 🖕We all have chosen methods to numb the pain of our problems, & in moderate doses there is nothing wrong with this. But the longer we avoid & the longer we numb, the more painful it will be when we finally do confront our issues.

Healthy Values

🖕Honesty 🖕Innovation 🖕Vulnerability 🖕Standing up for oneself 🖕Standing up for others 🖕Self respect 🖕Curiosity 🖕Charity 🖕Humility

Bittersweet

🖕If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then question we should bee asking is not "How do I stop suffering?" but "Why am I suffering- for what purpose?" 🖕Stay up to date with current trends & evolve with society rather than stay stuck on old & outdated traditional values. 🖕Fight for something that matters to you & is meaningful for you.

Subtlety #2

🖕If you find yourself consistently giving too many 🇫ucks about trivial shit that bothers you, your ex boyfriends new Insta pic, how quickly batteries die, missing out on the sanitizer sale, chances are you don't have much going on in your life to give a legitimate 🇫ucks about.

Inner Pain

🖕In some cases, experiencing emotional or psychological pain can be healthy or necessary because it teaches us to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. 🖕We lose the benefits of experiencing healthy doses of pain, a loss that disconnects us from the reality of the world around us. 🖕You may salivate at the thought of a problem-free life full of everlasting happiness & eternal compassion, but on Earth, problems never cease. 🖕"Life is essentially an endless series of problems". 🖕Hope of a life full of good problems.

Delayed Satisfaction

🖕In the long run, completing a marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends while struggling to make ends meet makes us happier than buying a new computer. These activities are stressful, arduous, & often unpleasant. 🖕The most meaningful moments & joyous things we do involve pain, struggle, anger, & despair. Yet once they are accomplished, we go back telling our grandkids these stories.

Guidance

🖕Instead, this book will turn your pain into a tool, your trauma into power, & your problems into slightly better problems. 🖕Think of it as your guide to suffering & how to do it better, more meaningfully, with more compassion & more humility. 🖕It's a book about moving lightly despite your heavy burdens, resting easier with your greatest fears, laughing at your tears as you cry them. 🖕This book will not teach you how to gain or achieve, but rather how to lose & let go.

Practice Makes Perfect

🖕Learn how to focus & prioritize your thoughts effectively- how to pick & choose what matters to you & what does not matter based on finely honed personal values. 🖕This is incredibly difficult. Easier said than done. Takes a lifetime of practice & discipline to achieve. 🖕You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal.

The Truth Will Set You Free

🖕Like Tana Mongeau, being incredibly blunt with your shit show life can melt people's hearts & earn you deep admiration. 🖕Giving too many 🇫ucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial fake, to dedicate your life to chasing mirage of happiness & satisfaction.

Gen Z Sucks

🖕Numerous professors & educators have noted a lack of emotional resilience & excess of selfish demands in today's young people. 🖕The benefits of the Internet & social media are unquestionably fantastic. In many ways, this is the best time in history to be alive. 🖕Since technologies have been so liberated & educated, people's sense of entitlement are higher than ever.

Me & Car Crash

🖕Once upon a time I crashed my car & then later my grandma died. My parents took away my driving privileges. Getting to places was harder. So what did I do to adventure because I no longer had the freedom to drive freely on my own? I hung out with druggies cause my friends at my innocent high school also didn't drive & they took me on dangerous adventures. Ooo I love dangerous situations. It was incredibly stupid. 🖕If I had a therapist, they would've told me my senior year was "some real traumatic shit" & I would spend the next year trying to change, working & unraveling it & becoming less of a self-absorbed, entitled little prick.

Always Being Right

🖕Our brains are inefficient machines. We consistently make poor assumptions, misjudge probabilities, misremember facts, give in to cognitive biases, & make decisions based on our emotional whims. 🖕If you think you're always right, you prevent yourself from learning from mistakes. 🖕People who think they're always right lack the ability to take on new perspectives & empathize with others, closing themselves off to new & important information. 🖕It's far more helpful to assume you're ignorant & don't know a whole lot. This keeps you unattached to superstitious or poorly informed beliefs & promotes a constant state of learning & growth.

Values & Metrics

🖕Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves & everyone else. 🖕We all have different thresholds of pain & measure success differently.

Third Layer

🖕Our values determine the nature of our problems & the nature of our problems determine the quality of our lives. 🖕Everything is based upon those values- the thoughts, the emotions, the day-to-day feelings will all be out of whack. 🖕Their original analysis was based on avoiding responsibility for their own problem rather than accurately identifying the problem.

Pleasure

🖕Pleasure is great, but it's a horrible value to prioritize your life around. Ask any drug addict how his pursuit of pleasure turned out. Ask an adulterer who shattered her family & lost her children whether pleasure ultimately made her happy. Ask a man who almost ate himself to death how pleasure helped him solve his problems. 🖕Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, & more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction & therefore the easiest to obtain & easiest to lose.

The Reality to Happiness

🖕Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment & meaning have to be earned through choosing & managing of our struggles. Whether you suffer from anxiety or loneliness of obsessive-compulsive disorder or a dickhead boss, the solution lies in the acceptance & active engagement of the negative experience- not the avoidance of it, not the salvation from it. 🖕People want to start their own business. But you don't end up successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, the insane hours devoted to something that may earn absolutely nothing. You can't win if you don't play. 🖕You can't have a pain-free life. It can't all be roses & unicorns all the time.

High Self-Esteem

🖕Research found that people who thought highly about themselves generally performed better & caused fewer problems. 🖕Many researchers & policymakers at the time came to believe that raising a population's self-esteem could lead to some tangible social benefits: lower crime, better academic records, greater employment, lower budget deficits. 🖕Adversity & failure are useful & necessary for developing strong-minded & successful adults.

Entitled Kids

🖕So more and more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement addiction. 🖕We grow up in a culture of entitlement. 🖕We expose ourselves to unrealistic standards we have to live up to. 🖕Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems. 🖕The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, & shame.

The Feedback Loop from Hell

🖕Sometimes you're angry at others you get angry at yourself or you're sad & every time you think about being sad you get more sad. 🖕Our society today, through the wonders of consumer culture & hey-look-at-my-life-is-cooler-than-yours social media has bred a whole generation of people who believe that having these negative experiences- anxiety, fear, guilt, etc- is totally not okay. 🖕The Feedback Loop from Hell has become a borderline epidemic, making many of us overly stressed, overly neurotic, & overly self-loathing.

Downside to Life

🖕Staying on the sunnyside of life is not always good. Sometimes life sucks. The healthiest thing you can do is admit it. 🖕Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper & more prolonged negative emotions & to emotional dysfunction. Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life's problems- problems by the way if you're choosing the right values & metrics, should be invigorating you & motivating you. 🖕Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health. To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A 🇫uck

🖕Subtlety #1: Not giving a 🇫uck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. 🖕Subtlety #2: To not give a 🇫uck about adversity, you must first give a 🇫uck about something more important than adversity. 🖕Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a 🇫uck about.

Low Self-Esteem

🖕Th desire for more positive experiences is itself negative experience. And paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience. 🖕The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor & unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make. The more you desperately want to be sexy & desired, the uglier you come to see yourself, regardless of your actual physical appearance. The more you desperately want to be happy & loved, the lonelier & more afraid you become, regardless of those who surround you. The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centered & shallow you become in trying to get there.

Buddha's Life

🖕The King would spoil the child with riches with no knowledge of the outside world to make the child's life perfect. Buddha would not know a moment of suffering since every need & desire would be accounted for at all times. Buddha would grow up ignorant of the routine cruelties of human existence. Soon every experience felt empty & valueless. 🖕For the first time in his life when he left the palace to see the local village, the prince saw human suffering. He saw sick people, old people, homeless people, people in pain, & even people dying. He found himself in an existential crisis. 🖕Later he left the palace to search for meaning & pursue being a spiritual leader. He suffered through disease, hunger, pain, loneliness, & decay. For a while, what he was doing wasn't revealing any deeper mystery of the world or its ultimate purpose. 🖕He realized suffering totally sucks. Then he sat under the Bodhi tree, meditated, & came to a number of profound realizations. He realized life itself is a form of suffering. Years later he would build his own philosophy & share it with the world. He claimed pain & loss are inevitable & we should let go of trying to resist them.

The Misadventures of Disappointed Panda

🖕The greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear. 🖕A blunt ass friend is the proverbial vegetables to our mental diet of junk food. He'd make our lives better despite making us feel worse. He'd make us stronger by tearing us down, brighten our future by showing us the darkness. Listening to him would be like watching a movie where the hero die in the end: you love it even more despite making you feel horrible, because it feels real. 🖕This pain, as much as we hate it, is useful. Pain is what teaches us what to pay attention to when we're young or careless. Therefore, it's not always beneficial to avoid pain & seek pleasure, since pain can, at times, be life-or-death important to our well-being.

Hedonic Treadmill

🖕The idea that we're always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different. 🖕Everything comes with inherent sacrifice, whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. 🖕We like the idea that we can alleviate all of our suffering permanently. We like the idea that we can feel fulfilled & satisfied with our lives forever. But we cannot.

No Pain, No Gain

🖕The pain you pursue in the gym results in better all-around health & 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, charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust & respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears & anxieties is what allows you to build courage & perseverance. 🖕The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame. 🖕Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, & to tear it out is not only impossible but destructive.

If I'm Not Going to Be Special or Extraordinary, What's the Point?

🖕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. 🖕The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies- that is accepting the bland & mundane truths of life. Once ingested, your body will wake up, feeling more potent & more alive. 🖕You will have a growing appreciation for life's basic experiences: the pleasure of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about.

Evil in the World

🖕The world is totally 🇫ucked & that's alright because it's always been that way & always will be. 🖕Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, & cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past thirty years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat-screen TV & can have their groceries delivered. 🖕Crisis is no longer material; it's existential, it's spiritual. 🖕We have so much 🇫ucking stuff & so many opportunities that we don't even know what to give a 🇫uck about anymore.

The Self-Awareness Onion

🖕There are multiple layers to it & the more you peel theme back, the more likely you're going to start crying at inappropriate times. 🖕First Layer: Understanding emotions. 🖕Second Layer: Ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. 🖕Third Layer: Personal Values

Second Layer

🖕These why questions are difficult & often take months or even years to answer consistently & accurately. Most people need to go to some sort of therapist just to hear these questions asked for the first time. Such questions are important because they illuminate what we consider success or failure. 🖕Help us understand the root cause of emotions that overwhelm us. Once we understand that root cause, we can ideally do something to change it.

Our Parents Aren't Perfect

🖕They have their own stories & their own journeys & their own problems, just as all parents do. 🖕Our inability to solve problems make us feel miserable & helpless. 🖕The pain from my adolescence led me down a road of entitlement that lasted through much of my early adulthood.

What is the point of this Quizlet?

🖕This book will help you think a little bit more clearly about what you're choosing to find important in life & what you're choosing to find unimportant. 🖕Feedback Loop from Hell dominates Generation Z. RIP! 🖕No matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, & even death. Because once you become comfortable with all the shit that life throws at you (and it will throw a lot of shit, trust me), you become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way. After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it . 🖕Greatness is merely an illusion in our minds, a made-up destination that we obligated ourselves to pursue, our own psychological Atlantis.

The Tyranny of Exceptionalism

🖕To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate shit-tons of time & energy to it. 🖕Internet, Google, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, & 500+ television is amazing but our attention can only be so limited. 🖕We are flooded with so many extraordinary's. We have the best of the best & the worst of the worse. Mental health is shit in this generation & social media sucks the life out of us, both we are materialistically well off & have all kinds of modern advancements to accommodate our needs. From memes to bomb threats. To sharing your life with the world to having rumors about you exposed af. From rags to riches. Also easy access to drugs as much as easy access to health.

First Layer

🖕We all have emotional blindspots. Often they have to do with the emotions that we were taught were inappropriate growing up. It takes years of practice & effort to get good at identifying blind spots in ourselves & then expressing the affected emotions appropriately.

Things Fall Apart

🖕When I was young, I was smart. I was friendly. But I was also a shithead. Angry & full of resentment. 🖕Don't be that stupid kid who thinks Juuling, partying, & grinding/ 🇫ucking 8 bitches a day is cool, because it 🇫ucking isn't.

Subtlety #3

🖕When we're young, everything is new & exciting & everything seems to matter so much. 🖕As we get older, with the benefit of experience (and having seen so much time slip by), we begin to notice that most of these sorts of things have little lasting impact on our lives. Those people who opinions we cared about so much before are no longer present in our lives. Rejections that were painful in the moment have actually worked out for the best. We realize how little attention people pay to superficial details about us, & we choose not to obsess so much over them. 🖕We become more selective about the 🇫ucks we're willing to give. This is something called maturity. It's nice' you should try it sometime. 🖕When we grow older, our energy level drops. Our identity solidifies. We know who we are & we accept ourselves, including some of the parts we aren't thrilled about.

Happiness Comes from Solving Problems

🖕When you solve your health problem by buying a gym membership, you create new problems, like having to get up early to get to the gym on time, sweating like a meth-head for thirty minutes on an elliptical, & then getting showered & changed for work so you don't stink up the whole office. 🖕Sometimes you have to rediscover the chemistry & spark you two feel you've lost. 🖕Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress- the solutions to today's problems will lay foundation for tomorrow's problems & so on.

Therapy Questions

🖕Why do you feel angry? 🖕Is it because you failed to achieve some goal? 🖕Why do you feel lethargic & uninspired? 🖕Is it because you don't think you're good enough?

Fantasy vs Reality

🖕You can fantasize about being a huge star or world champion, but if you don't appreciate the pain, sacrifices, process, & journey, you're just dreaming. 🖕You have to enjoy the struggle as much as you want the reward. You have to appreciate the process, not just the result. You have to be in love with the fight, not just the victory. 🖕Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons & have chiseled abs & bench a small house. 🖕Our struggles determine our success. Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems.

Just Do It

🖕You're gonna die one day. Don't sit & complain. Just go & 🇫ucking do it. 🖕If you go around giving a 🇫uck about everything & everyone without conscious thought, you are going to get 🇫ucked