The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building

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the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems,

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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.

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negative emotions are a call to action.

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Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks.

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the idea that we’re always working hard to change our life situation, but we actually never feel very different. This is why our problems are recursive and unavoidable. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad.

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Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.

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what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the summit.

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our struggles determine our successes. Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems.

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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.

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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.

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But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.

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Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.

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If you’re miserable in your current situation, chances are it’s because you feel like some part of it is outside your control—that there’s a problem you have no ability to solve, a problem that was somehow thrust upon you without your choosing. When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered.

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When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.

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he was 100 percent responsible for everything that occurred in his life, no matter what. During this period, he would do everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood of failure. If nothing improved in that year, then it would be apparent that he was truly powerless to the circumstances around him, and then he would take his own life.

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the realization that 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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Whether we like it or not, we are always taking an active role in what’s occurring to and within us.

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“With great responsibility comes great power.” 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.

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Responsibility and fault often appear together in our culture. But they’re not the same thing.

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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.

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Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. 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.

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Ultimately, while she was to blame for how I felt, she was never responsible for how I felt. I was.

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But at least now I was taking responsibility for my own emotions. And by doing so, I was choosing better values—values aimed at taking care of myself, learning to feel better about myself, rather than aimed at getting her to fix what she’d broken.

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Pain of one sort or another is inevitable for all of us, but we get to choose what it means to and for us.

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“I didn’t choose this life; I didn’t choose this horrible, horrible condition. But I get to choose how to live with it; I have to choose how to live with it.”

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The responsibility/fault fallacy allows people to pass off the responsibility for solving their problems to others.

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You are already choosing, in every moment of every day, what to give a fuck about, so change is as simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else. It really is that simple. It’s just not easy.

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The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.

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That means the more something threatens to change how you view yourself, how successful/unsuccessful you believe yourself to be, how well you see yourself living up to your values, the more you will avoid ever getting around to doing it. There’s a certain comfort that comes with knowing how you fit in the world. Anything that shakes up that comfort—even if it could potentially make your life better—is inherently scary.

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maybe there’s nothing unique or special about my dreams or my job,” then he’s free to

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maybe there’s nothing unique or special about my dreams or my job,” then he’s free to give that screenplay an honest go and see what happens.

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This means giving up the supply of emotional highs that you’ve been sustaining yourself on for years.

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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.

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Failure itself is a relative concept.

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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.

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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.”