The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is.

It’s a fun book to read. Let’s get into a few quotes as usual.

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.

But more importantly, and you sometimes feel that with the problems we talk about.

The Feedback Loop from Hell has become a borderline epidemic, making many of us overly stressed, overly neurotic, and overly self-loathing. Back in Grandpa’s day, he would feel like shit and think to himself, “Gee whiz, I sure do feel like a cow turd today. But hey, I guess that’s just life. Back to shoveling hay.”

Put differently.

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.

And we are living in a social media world, where somebody always seems to have it better. So positive is very inflated.

The author “once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.” And remember, you have a choice on what to give a fuck about. You are inherently dissatisfied, that is a part of like.

“Life is essentially an endless series of problems, Mark,” the panda told me. He sipped his drink and adjusted the little pink umbrella. “The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.”

So, if that is true… “True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.” Because “Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.”

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

So you need to move the goal post to be happy.

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.

Now for deeper psychology to think about.

Our brains are meaning machines. What we understand as “meaning” is generated by the associations our brain makes between two or more experiences. We press a button, then we see a light go on; we assume the button caused the light to go on. This, at its core, is the basis of meaning. Button, light; light, button.

So. Question #3: Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?

While it feels like you vs the world, it is just you vs yourself. He has an interesting example about frame of reference.

“I asked myself a simple question: “Would I rather make decent money and work a job I hated, or play at Internet entrepreneur and be broke for a while?” The answer was immediate and clear for me: the latter. I then asked myself, “If I try this thing and fail in a few years and have to go get a job anyway, will I have really lost anything?” The answer was no. Instead of a broke and unemployed twenty-two-year-old with no experience, I’d be a broke and unemployed twenty-five-year-old with no experience. Who cares?”

Life is chances.

Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. It never changes. Even when you’re happy. Even when you’re farting fairy dust. Even when you win the lottery and buy a small fleet of Jet Skis, you still won’t know what the hell you’re doing. Don’t ever forget that. And don’t ever be afraid of that.

Recently read something interesting. Picasso, did something between 50.000 and 135.000 pieces of art, depending of how you count, and only a few hundred, maybe a very few thousand, are famous. Maybe 2%.

The victim, if he really loved the saver, would say, “Look, this is my problem; you don’t have to fix it for me. Just support me while I fix it myself.” That would actually be a demonstration of love: taking responsibility for your own problems and not holding your partner responsible for them. If the saver really wanted to save the victim, the saver would say, “Look, you’re blaming others for your own problems; deal with this yourself.” And in a sick way, that would actually be a demonstration of love: helping someone solve their own problems.

Good book. Read.