The subtle art of not giving free download

Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Topics the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fuck , Mark Manson Collection opensource Language English. In it Manson argues that life's struggles give it meaning, and that the mindless positivity of typical self-help books is neither practical nor helpful.

Focusing on the things we can control is what Manson believes to be the only way of achieving profound and meaningful changes in our lives.

Honesty is given as an example here — we can choose whether to lie or not. Financial wealth on the other hand — not so much. We can work 12 hours a day and still never get rich. Yes, we need a resilient system of beliefs to successfully move through life, but what if our limited knowledge keeps us blindfolded to other aspects of reality? Doubting what we think we know, Manson believes may help us not only obtain and embrace new and valuable knowledge but also to dispose of self-restricting concepts that are holding us back.

This idea would be hard-wired into your mind. But what if you are not that bad of a singer after all? Deep within, we are all afraid of dying and the closer we get to the end — the harder it gets to cope with it. This, however, can lock our minds onto the future, whereas we can exist only here and now. Therefore, the only zeroes and ones that break through and catch our attention are the truly exceptional pieces of information—those in the All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary.

The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average. This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal.

So more and more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and addiction. We cope the only way we know how: either through self-aggrandizing or through other-aggrandizing. Some of us do this by cooking up get-rich-quick schemes. Others do it by taking off across the world to save starving babies in Africa. Others do it by excelling in school and winning every award.

Others do it by shooting up a school. Others do it by trying to have sex with anything that talks and breathes. This ties in to the growing culture of entitlement that I talked about earlier. In fact, the tendency toward entitlement is apparent across all of society. When I was a young man, my insecurities around intimacy were exacerbated by all the ridiculous narratives of masculinity circulating throughout pop culture.

This constant stream of unrealistic media dogpiles onto our existing feelings of insecurity, by overexposing us to the unrealistic standards we fail to live up to.

Not only do we feel subjected to unsolvable problems, but we feel like losers because a simple Google search shows us thousands of people without those same problems. 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, and shame.

It has become an accepted part of our culture today to believe that we are all destined to do something truly extraordinary. Celebrities say it. Business tycoons say it. Politicians say it. Even Oprah says it so it must be true. Each and every one of us can be extraordinary. We all deserve greatness. The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory—after all, if everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be extraordinary—is missed by most people.

The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve. Many people choose this strategy: to prove to everyone that they are the most miserable, or the most oppressed, or the most victimized.

This sort of thinking is dangerous. Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population including yourself sucks and is worthless. And this mindset can quickly turn dangerous, to both yourself and others. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. 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.

Their economy was floundering, their military overstretched across half of Asia, and the territories they had won throughout the Pacific were now toppling like dominoes to U. Defeat seemed inevitable. Both he and his commander knew it was essentially a suicide mission. In February , the Americans arrived on Lubang and took the island with overwhelming force.

Within days, most of the Japanese soldiers had either surrendered or been killed, but Onoda and three of his men managed to hide in the jungle. From there, they began a guerrilla warfare campaign against the U. That August, half a year later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Japan surrendered, and the deadliest war in human history came to its dramatic conclusion. However, thousands of Japanese soldiers were still scattered among the Pacific isles, and most, like Onoda, were hiding in the jungle, unaware that the war was over. These holdouts continued to fight and pillage as they had before. This was a real problem for rebuilding eastern Asia after the war, and the governments agreed something must be done.

The U. Onoda and his men, like many others, found and read these leaflets, but unlike most of the others, Onoda decided that they were fake, a trap set by the American forces to get the guerrilla fighters to show themselves. Onoda burned the leaflets, and he and his men stayed hidden and continued to fight.

Five years went by. The leaflets had stopped, and most of the American forces had long since gone home. The local population on Lubang attempted to return to their normal lives of farming and fishing. Yet there were Hiroo Onoda and his merry men, still shooting at the farmers, burning their crops, stealing their livestock, and murdering locals who wandered too far into the jungle. The Philippine government then took to drawing up new flyers and spreading them out across the jungle.

Come out, they said. The war is over. You lost. But these, too, were ignored. In , the Japanese government made one final effort to draw the last remaining soldiers out of hiding throughout the Pacific.

Once again, Onoda refused to believe that the information was real. Once again, he believed the airdrop to be a trick by the Americans.

Once again, he and his men stood and continued to fight. Another few years went by and the Philippine locals, sick of being terrorized, finally armed themselves and began firing back.

Onoda, having now spent more than half of his life in the jungles of Lubang, was all alone. The Japanese people thought the last of the soldiers from the war had come home years earlier.

The Japanese media began to wonder: if Kozuka had still been on Lubang until , then perhaps Onoda himself, the last known Japanese holdout from World War II, might still be alive as well. That year, both the Japanese and Philippine governments sent search parties to look for the enigmatic second lieutenant, now part myth, part hero, and part ghost.

They found nothing. As the months progressed, the story of Lieutenant Onoda morphed into something of an urban legend in Japan—the war hero who sounded too insane to actually exist. Many romanticized him. Others criticized him. Others thought he was the stuff of fairy tale, invented by those who still wanted to believe in a Japan that had disappeared long ago.

It was around this time that a young man named Norio Suzuki first heard of Onoda. Suzuki was an adventurer, an explorer, and a bit of a hippie. He volunteered on farms for food, and donated blood to pay for places to stay. He was a free spirit, and perhaps a little bit nuts. In , Suzuki needed another adventure. He had returned to Japan after his travels and found the strict cultural norms and social hierarchy to be stifling. He hated school. He wanted to be back on the road, back on his own again.

For Suzuki, the legend of Hiroo Onoda came as the answer to his problems. It was a new and worthy adventure for him to pursue. Suzuki believed that he would be the one who would find Onoda. Sure, search parties conducted by the Japanese, Philippine, and American governments had not been able to find Onoda; local police forces had been scavenging the jungle for almost thirty years with no luck; thousands of leaflets had met with no response—but fuck it, this deadbeat, college-dropout hippie was going to be the one to find him.

Unarmed and untrained for any sort of reconnaissance or tactical warfare, Suzuki traveled to Lubang and began wandering around the jungle all by himself. He found Onoda in four days. Suzuki stayed with Onoda in the jungle for some time.

Onoda had been alone by that point for over a year, and once found by Suzuki he welcomed the companionship and was desperate to learn what had been happening in the outside world from a Japanese source he could trust. Suzuki asked Onoda why he had stayed and continued to fight. For nearly thirty years he had simply been following an order. Onoda had already by then given up most of his life to a phantom war. Suzuki would give his up too.

Having already found Hiroo Onoda and the panda bear, he would die a few years later in the Himalayas, still in search of the Abominable Snowman. Humans often choose to dedicate large portions of their lives to seemingly useless or destructive causes. On the surface, these causes make no sense. Or why Suzuki trekked off to his own death, with no money, no companions, and no purpose other than to chase an imaginary Yeti.

Yet, later in his life, Onoda said he regretted nothing. He claimed that he was proud of his choices and his time on Lubang. He said that it had been an honor to devote a sizable portion of his life in service to a nonexistent empire.

Suzuki, had he survived, likely would have said something similar: that he was doing exactly what he was meant to do, that he regretted nothing. These men both chose how they wished to suffer. Hiroo Onoda chose to suffer for loyalty to a dead empire. Suzuki chose to suffer for adventure, no matter how ill-advised.

To both men, their suffering meant something; it fulfilled some greater cause. And because it meant something, they were able to endure it, or perhaps even enjoy it. He was shuttled around from talk show to radio station; politicians clamored to shake his hand; he published a book and was even offered a large sum of money by the government. But what he found when he returned to Japan horrified him: a consumerist, capitalist, superficial culture that had lost all of the traditions of honor and sacrifice upon which his generation had been raised.

Onoda tried to use his sudden celebrity to espouse the values of Old Japan, but he was tone-deaf to this new society. He was seen more as a showpiece than as a serious cultural thinker—a Japanese man who had emerged from a time capsule for all to marvel at, like a relic in a museum.

At least in the jungle his life had stood for something; it had meant something. That had made his suffering endurable, indeed even a little bit desirable.

But back in Japan, in what he considered to be a vacuous nation full of hippies and loose women in Western clothing, he was confronted with the unavoidable truth: that his fighting had meant nothing.

The Japan he had lived and fought for no longer existed. Because his suffering had meant nothing, it suddenly became realized and true: thirty years wasted. And so, in , Onoda packed up and moved to Brazil, where he remained until he died. The Self-Awareness Onion Self-awareness is like an onion. My wife and I sometimes have a fun back-and-forth that goes something like this: HER.

Nothing at all. Tell me. Are you sure? You look upset. ME, with nervous laughter. We all have emotional blind spots. Often they have to do with the emotions that we were taught were inappropriate growing up. It takes years of practice and effort to get good at identifying blind spots in ourselves and then expressing the affected emotions appropriately.

But this task is hugely important, and worth the effort. The second layer of the self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. These why questions are difficult and often take months or even years to answer consistently and 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. Why do you feel angry? Is it because you failed to achieve some goal? Why do you feel lethargic and uninspired? This layer of questioning helps us understand the root cause of the emotions that overwhelm us.

Once we understand that root cause, we can ideally do something to change it. And that one is full of fucking tears. How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me? This level, which takes constant questioning and effort, is incredibly difficult to reach.

Values underlie everything we are and do. Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be. Most people are horrible at answering these why questions accurately, and this prevents them from achieving a deeper knowledge of their own values.

Sure, they may say they value honesty and a true friend, but then they turn around and lie about you behind your back to make themselves feel better.

People may perceive that they feel lonely. But when they ask themselves why they feel lonely, they tend to come up with a way to blame others—everyone else is mean, or no one is cool or smart enough to understand them—and thus they further avoid their problem instead of seeking to solve it. For many people this passes as self-awareness. And yet, if they were able to go deeper and look at their underlying values, they would see that their original analysis was based on avoiding responsibility for their own problem, rather than accurately identifying the problem.

They would see that their decisions were based on chasing highs, not generating true happiness. Most self-help gurus ignore this deeper level of self-awareness as well. They take people who are miserable because they want to be rich, and then give them all sorts of advice on how to make more money, all the while ignoring important values-based questions: Why do they feel such a need to be rich in the first place?

Much of the advice out there operates at a shallow level of simply trying to make people feel good in the short term, while the real long-term problems never get solved. This is not real progress. This is just another way to achieve more highs. Honest self-questioning is difficult. It requires asking yourself simple questions that are uncomfortable to answer.

In fact, in my experience, the more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true. Now ask yourself why it bugs you. Chances are the answer will involve a failure of some sort. My value: brothers are supposed to have a good relationship with one another. By holding on to this metric, I make myself feel like a failure, which occasionally ruins my Saturday mornings.

We could dig even deeper, by repeating the process: Why are brothers supposed to have a good relationship? So obviously there must be something wrong with me. Perhaps there just needs to be some mutual respect which there is. Perhaps these metrics would be better assessments of brotherhood than how many text messages he and I exchange. This clearly makes sense; it feels true for me.

What is objectively true about your situation is not as important as how you come to see the situation, how you choose to measure it and value it. 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. Rock Star Problems In , a talented young guitarist was kicked out of his band in the worst possible way.

The band had just been signed to a record deal, and they were about to record their first album. But a couple days before recording began, the band showed the guitarist the door—no warning, no discussion, no dramatic blowout; they literally woke him up one day by handing him a bus ticket home. As he sat on the bus back to Los Angeles from New York, the guitarist kept asking himself: How did this happen? What did I do wrong? What will I do now?

Had he missed his one and only shot? But by the time the bus hit L. He decided that this new band would be so successful that his old band would forever regret their decision. And so the guitarist worked as if possessed by a musical demon. He spent months recruiting the best musicians he could find—far better musicians than his previous bandmates. He wrote dozens of songs and practiced religiously. His seething anger fueled his ambition; revenge became his muse.

Within a couple years, his new band had signed a record deal of their own, and a year after that, their first record would go gold. Megadeth would go on to sell over 25 million albums and tour the world many times over. Today, Mustaine is considered one of the most brilliant and influential musicians in the history of heavy-metal music. Unfortunately, the band he was kicked out of was Metallica, which has sold over million albums worldwide.

Metallica is considered by many to be one of the greatest rock bands of all time. Despite all that he had accomplished, in his mind he would always be the guy who got kicked out of Metallica. And because we are apes, we instinctually measure ourselves against others and vie for status. The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves? Dave Mustaine, whether he realized it or not, chose to measure himself by whether he was more successful and popular than Metallica.

Despite all the money and the fans and the accolades, he still considered himself a failure. This is because you and I have different values than Mustaine does, and we measure ourselves by different metrics.

Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else. But this same value is also what made him miserable upon his return to Japan. His story eerily echoes that of Dave Mustaine, although it happened two decades earlier.

It was and there was a buzz around an up-and-coming band from Liverpool, England. This band had funny haircuts and an even funnier name, but their music was undeniably good, and the record industry was finally taking notice. There was John, the lead singer and songwriter; Paul, the boyish-faced romantic bass player; George, the rebellious lead guitar player.

And then there was the drummer. He was considered the best-looking of the bunch—the girls all went wild for him, and it was his face that began to appear in the magazines first. He was the most professional member of the group too. He had a steady girlfriend. There were even a few people in suits and ties who thought he should be the face of the band, not John or Paul.

His name was Pete Best. And in , after landing their first record contract, the other three members of the Beatles quietly got together and asked their manager, Brian Epstein, to fire him.

Epstein agonized over the decision. He liked Pete, so he put it off, hoping the other three guys would change their minds. Months later, a mere three days before the recording of the first record began, Epstein finally called Best to his office. There, the manager unceremoniously told him to piss off and find another band. He gave no reason, no explanation, no condolences—just told him that the other guys wanted him out of the group, so, uh, best of luck.

As a replacement, the band brought in some oddball named Ringo Starr. Ringo was older and had a big, funny nose. Ringo agreed to get the same ugly haircut as John, Paul, and George, and insisted on writing songs about octopuses and submarines.

The other guys said, Sure, fuck it, why not? Meanwhile, Best understandably fell into a deep depression and spent a lot of time doing what any Englishman will do if you give him a reason to: drink. The rest of the sixties were not kind to Pete Best.

By , he had sued two of the Beatles for slander, and all of his other musical projects had failed horribly. In , he attempted suicide, only to be talked out of it by his mother. His life was a wreck. He never became a global superstar or made millions of dollars. Yet, in many ways, Best ended up better off than Mustaine. Best explained that the circumstances of his getting kicked out of the Beatles ultimately led him to meet his wife.

And then his marriage led him to having children. His values changed. He began to measure his life differently. Fame and glory would have been nice, sure—but he decided that what he already had was more important: a big and loving family, a stable marriage, a simple life. He even still got to play drums, touring Europe and recording albums well into the s.

So what was really lost? Just a lot of attention and adulation, whereas what was gained meant so much more to him. These stories suggest that some values and metrics are better than others. Others lead to bad problems that are not easily and regularly solved.

Shitty Values There are a handful of common values that create really poor problems for people—problems that can hardly be solved. Ask any drug addict how his pursuit of pleasure turned out.

Ask an adulterer who shattered her family and 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, and more depressed.

Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose. Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect. If you get the other stuff right the other values and metrics , then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product. Material Success.

Research shows that once one is able to provide for basic physical needs food, shelter, and so on , the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero. The other issue with overvaluing material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion.

Always Being Right. Our brains are inefficient machines. We consistently make poor assumptions, misjudge probabilities, misremember facts, give in to cognitive biases, and make decisions based on our emotional whims. The fact is, people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes.

They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others. They close themselves off to new and important information. Staying Positive. Then there are those who measure their lives by the ability to be positive about, well, pretty much everything. Lost your job? Husband cheated on you with your sister? Child dying of throat cancer? Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction.

These things make us feel like shit. Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health. To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them.

The trick with negative emotions is to 1 express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2 express them in a way that aligns with your values.

Simple example: A value of mine is nonviolence. Therefore, when I get mad at somebody, I express that anger, but I also make a point of not punching them in the face. Radical idea, I know. But the anger is not the problem.

Anger is natural. Anger is a part of life. Anger is arguably quite healthy in many situations. Remember, emotions are just feedback. Not the anger. The anger is merely the messenger for my fist in your face. Blame my fist or your face. And when we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to solve them and generate happiness. Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life. Thus to duck our problems is to lead a meaningless even if supposedly pleasant existence.

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, and often unpleasant. They also require withstanding problem after problem. The point is to nail down some good values and metrics, and pleasure and success will naturally emerge as a result.

These things are side effects of good values. By themselves, they are empty highs. Defining Good and Bad Values Good values are 1 reality-based, 2 socially constructive, and 3 immediate and controllable.

Bad values are 1 superstitious, 2 socially destructive, and 3 not immediate or controllable. Popularity, on the other hand, is a bad value. Side Note: As a rule, people who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being reflected back at them.

Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.

Some examples of bad, unhealthy values: dominance through manipulation or violence, indiscriminate fucking, 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 the pagan gods. Something like creativity or humility can be experienced right now. 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.

Bad values, while sometimes fun or pleasurable, lie outside of your control and often require socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve. Values are about prioritization. Everybody would love a good cannoli or a house in the Bahamas. The question is your priorities.

What are the values that you prioritize above everything else, and that therefore influence your decision-making more than anything else? It created really shitty problems for Hiroo—namely, he got stuck on a remote island where he lived off bugs and worms for thirty years. Oh, and he felt compelled to murder innocent civilians too. So despite the fact that Hiroo saw himself as a success, and despite the fact he lived up to his metrics, I think we can all agree that his life really sucked—none of us would trade shoes with him given the opportunity, nor would we commend his actions.

Dave Mustaine achieved great fame and glory and felt like a failure anyway. On the contrary, Pete Best pulled a switcheroo. Despite being depressed and distraught by getting kicked out of the Beatles, as he grew older he learned to reprioritize what he cared about and was able to measure his life in a new light.

But when we choose better values, we are able to divert our fucks to something better—toward things that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate happiness, pleasure, and success as side effects. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.

The rest of this book is dedicated to five counterintuitive values that I believe are the most beneficial values one can adopt. These five values are both unconventional and uncomfortable. But, to me, they are life-changing. The second is uncertainty: the acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your own beliefs. The next is failure: the willingness to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that they may be improved upon.

The fourth is rejection: the ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life. That would suck. Now imagine that you bought nice shoes and running gear, trained religiously for months, and completed your first marathon with all of your closest family and friends cheering you on at the finish line.

That could potentially be one of the proudest moments of your life. Exact same Exact same person running them. Exact same pain coursing through your exact same legs. But when you chose it freely and prepared for it, it was a glorious and important milestone in your life. When it was forced upon you against your will, it was one of the most terrifying and painful experiences of your life.

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. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable. The Choice William James had problems. Really bad problems. Due to his health problems, James spent most of his time at home.