The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k, by Mark Manson

 The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living the Good Life 

By Mark Manson 

Preview  

Is there a sure-shot algorithm to achieve success and happiness, or are they works-in-progress? What constitutes happiness anyway–is it the absence of failure and negative experiences like guilt, fear, and anxiety or the constant piling up of material possessions? In the face of human mortality, of the inevitability of death, and the ephemerality of all experiences, what does leading a good and meaningful life entail? It is these questions, besides others, that author Mark Manson addresses in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, and the answers he offers defy the didactic and capsuled wisdom provided by the self-help books.  

About the Author 

The works of Mark Manson, his immensely successful blog, and books like Models: Attract Women through Honesty, would be categorised under the self-help genre as it is popularly understood. However, the word counterintuitive–meaning that which counters a natural, instinctive, and common-sensical understanding –is a crucial key to approach his works which are intended to satirise the mindless and impractical positivity doled out by the self-help industry. Manson's blogs on life choices, relationships, and personal development act as antidotes to coddling and preach the counterintuitive idea of embracing one's limitations. Manson often uses autobiographical experiences and a casual, conversational tone, generously sprinkled with profane words to convey his message with a blunt frankness that has come to characterise his writing. 

The Big Idea: Taking the Unconventional Way 

This book, as Manson continually insists, is not a conventional self-help guide to overcome failures; it is, instead, a lesson in attaining “practical enlightenment”. It consoles the readers about the counterintuitive desirability of negative experiences that must be embraced. At the same time, it also urges readers to relinquish traditionally valued qualities like certainty and relentless optimism. Failure and Rejection are essential experiences that facilitate personal growth; to seek a life purged of failures and suffering is to be entitled and delusional.  

In this book, you will learn: 

• The importance of not trying in a culture that is obsessed with acquiring more and being more.  
• Negative experiences are just as significant and crucial as positive ones. 
• The importance of blunt truth-telling by the 'Disappointment Panda'. 
• The difference between good and shitty values.  
• The importance of constantly questioning our value systems, certainty, and identity. 

 

Embrace the Negative: Escape the Feedback Loop from Hell 

The successful poet and novelist Charles Bukowski was for years the textbook definition of a failure, somebody whose life narrative would not find space in a self-help book aimed at imparting sound advice. While his life might dramatise the American ideal of hard work and determination yielding lasting fame and glory, the words on his epitaph: 'Don't Try', signal the essential reason behind his success. It was an unflinching and honest acknowledgment of his shortcomings, his failures, and his identity as a loser. In contrast, conventional cultural life advice today sets unrealistically positive goals by urging people to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more successful.  

 

The obsession with having more of everything is, in essence, an underscoring of what one lacks (and therefore desires), and an unhealthy attachment to the fake, the shallow, and the superficial. The key to a happy and prosperous life is through a selective concern, not with acquiring more, but with things that matter. 

 

Alan Watts' idea of 'the backwards law' is essential to escaping from the Feedback Loop from Hell that makes twenty-first-century individuals internally berate themselves for their negative experiences–guilt, fear, anxiety, and so on. These experiences are integral to being successful; the law states that the desire for negative experiences is itself a positive experience and vice versa. The painful experiences of failure, insecurity, and anxiety have to be confronted and embraced to achieve any worthwhile success. To lead a good life is to act in the face of adversities, to give attention only to things that matter to you, things that are aligned with your code of values. To lead a meaningful life is to defend those values, to accept the inevitability of some suffering, and to channelize the negative experiences towards self-progress.   

  

Meet the Disappointment Panda! 

The insecurities and the devastating experiences of the two world wars had engendered the need to reinstate public morale and the feeling of confidence. Superheroes, with their incredibly positive outlook, were created to fulfill that need. What is needed in times of unrealistic and unsustainable optimism is a 'Disappointment Panda', the parody of a superhero who goes door to door to confront people with the harsh and unpleasant truths they constantly neglect and need to hear. It would educate people on the need to embrace pain and adversities, for it is only the insecure and the dissatisfied who innovate, create, and survive. When confronted with the unavoidable need for pain, both physical and psychological, people would hate the truth-teller, and yet they would need it too. The Disappointment Panda would be the detoxing vegetable for their minds cluttered with unhealthy, psychological junk. 

 

While a desire to live in a world purged of all pain and suffering would be a fantastical one, one cannot underestimate the crucial and inflexible role these experiences play in our innate growth and development. The crux of the matter is that instead of seeking happiness as an absence of struggle, one should aim to attain a life full of good problems to delve into. For happiness is a process, not a passively received gift. It is a product of constant problem-solving.  

Unfortunately, most people resort to denial or victim mentality to escape from, rather than solve their problems. The fundamental aim in life cannot be the attainment of complete happiness or unmediated satisfaction, for they are impossible goals. What should instead drive individuals should be the question of the kind of pain they are willing to sustain for any goal they envision.  

The values of positivity and optimism have been overemphasized in contemporary culture. It has resulted in the creation of entitled and narcissistic individuals. Some exhibit a delusional belief that their lives are perfect, that suffering is non-existent. There are still others on the opposite spectrum, those who believe that their problems are insurmountable. Both kinds of people display self-aggrandising, selfish, and entitled behaviour inconsistent with a good life. They are nurtured by a culture where mass media and the internet have created an imaginary hype around exceptional individuals and lives, and therefore, unrealistic standards of happiness while a vast majority of us remain exceptionally ordinary. Accepting this mediocrity, along with the mundane truths of life can be incredibly liberating, for it is only the un-entitled who insist upon innovation and progress. 

Identify and embrace the good values and be aware of the shitty values 

Self-awareness is like an onion; one peels off the first layer to be aware of one's emotions, the second layer reveals to us the nature of our values. Those values are our criteria for success, happiness, suffering, or failure; they are the standards we employ to evaluate our actions. They determine whether we seek superficial escape or long-term happiness. They determine how we think about problems, and cope with them.  

 

There are good values that promote self-improvement like honesty and compassion which are realistic, socially constructive, and controllable. And then there are 'shitty values' which engender delusion, are socially destructive, and uncontrollable. These include, 

• Pleasure: People tend to confuse pleasure with happiness. While happiness is the product of problem-solving, pleasure is superficial, short-lived, and addictive, a means to neglect actual problems and indulge in a temporary sense of entitled moral righteousness. 
• Material Success: To deem material success as a paradigm to judge happiness and success is to neglect good values that matter. Moreover, excessive craving for material pleasures makes one miss out on the fine experiences of life. 
• Always being right: Those who judge their self-worth by prioritising the value of always being right, relinquish the potential to learn and grow by embracing new perspectives. Assuming ignorance allows one to rectify misinformed beliefs.  
• Staying positive: The charm of positivity is disarming and overvalued; it stifles and represses the negative emotions instead of channelising them towards fruitful endeavours. To stifle negative emotions is to perpetuate and prolong them leading to emotional instability. To insist upon constant positivity in life is an escape from and avoidance of life's problems.  

 

It may not be your fault, but it is your responsibility! 

Unable to bear the weight of misfortunes, we often tend to employ a deterministic approach by displacing the blame on circumstances beyond our control. However, we always remain thinking, choosing beings and while what befalls us may be blamed on irreconcilable situations, the responsibility for interpreting our misfortunes, of deciding how we react and what values/metrics we employ to gauge our experiences falls squarely on our shoulders.  

 

Human beings may not be at fault for the situations they find themselves in, but they are still responsible. Faults are the results of already-made choices; responsibility emerges from choices we continually make, each day of our lives. Moreover, acknowledging responsibility for our problems is crucial, though it may not be as satisfying as placing blame; it leads to personal growth and improvement.   

 

This fault/responsibility fallacy may appear unsustainable and far-fetched in the face of a tragic experience. However, the fact that individuals are always responsible remains consistently true. An exceptional individual like Malala Yousufzai underwent harrowing experiences beyond her control; however, her responsibility manifested itself in the choices she made in reacting to an event she could not be blamed for. Similarly, some people might suffer from ailments like OCD, embedded beyond their control, in their genetic constitution. The cure in such cases comes from their responsibility to respond to their conditions, to be able to live their lives following the values they uphold. To cling to blame games is to play victim to achieve a temporary sense of entitled self-righteousness.  

 

Effecting a change in one's life is about changing one's values and choosing what is worthwhile; these changes might engender uncertainty and rejections, yet they are central aspects of responsible living. 

 

Embrace Uncertainty 

The value of certainty in life is overrated. While certainty breeds dogmatic thinking and entitlement, uncertainty and relentless doubt about our beliefs and feelings further growth and learning. Perfection and absolute knowledge can never be attained; all that individuals can do is acknowledge their ignorance, and become slightly less wrong through constant self-questioning. At the same time, one must accept the uncertainty of our convictions about what constitutes positive/negative experiences; for a negative experience of suffering can be positively motivational, and a positive experience can be negatively distracting.  

 

Human beliefs are uncertain too, for they have their source in the unreliable and treacherous caverns of memory and the biases central to our brains owing to our malleable prejudices and preconceptions. Amidst this uncertainty, only self-scepticism can ensure progress. The popular precepts of knowing yourself are thus fallacious, because they cement individuals in narrowly defined roles, inhibiting their potential to change. Moreover, letting go of one's fixed identity can be liberating; it introduces one to different values and ways of living. 

 

Failures and Rejections propel one towards growth 

Failures are the stepping stones to success. There is considerable wisdom in this commonplace precept. Failures mark the path towards any improvement, and they determine the magnitude of the resulting success and happiness. However, the veracity of this truism seems to be losing its functional currency in an environment where the education system frowns upon failures of any kind, and the mass media prioritises stellar achievements over the mundane tedium that yields those achievements. Studies focused on World War II survivors have shown that despite the profound emotional scars, the survivors consider their experiences as transformational in rendering them stronger, and more resilient. Thus, fear and failure, and anxiety are necessary milestones for emotional and psychological growth.  

 

Like failure, rejection too is an essential aspect of life and integral to honesty. To be accepting of everything and everybody is impractical; choosing a value in life requires the rejection of another. In relationships too, respecting each other's boundaries, acceptance of one's responsibility, and the willingness to reject and be rejected, measure whether a relationship is healthy. The presence of the victim-saviour dialectic is the mark of an unhealthy, even parasitic, relationship where instead of promoting mutual emotional growth, individuals displace responsibility onto each other to feed their entitled selves. Happiness and fulfilment in such cases are conspicuously absent. On the other hand, commitment to an individual can be liberating in offering a depth of experience, if not the breadth. 

 

But why do anything, when we all die anyway? 

It was a close brush with death, with the fact of human mortality, which brought Manson to an enlightening realisation. The circumstances of his friend Josh's death, and the depression that ensued, led him to the epiphany about the inevitability of death and the ephemerality of human life, but also of the inhibiting emotions of fear and shame and embarrassment. Ernest Becker's influential work, The Denial of Death, suggests that human beings are unique in their ability to think of themselves in abstraction and thus imagine a reality without themselves which causes an existential 'death terror'. We seek to overcome this terror through our 'immortality projects'–religion, politics, art, innovation–which seek a prolonged life for our conceptual self or identity even beyond the death of our physical being. These projects are the values that give meaning and worth to our lives. However, instead of indulging in these projects, we should question our conceptual self continually, as we suspect our values, and thereby embrace the fact of death. It will enable a deeper appreciation for life, a more profound sense of humility, a stripping away of entitlement as well as a higher clarity about the values we must embrace. 

Final Summary: When in doubt, do something! 

We hope you enjoyed this quid on "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k". A vital mantra in life, to overcome procrastination and embrace new values, is to do something. Contrary to widespread understanding, an action is not solely consequent upon inspiration and motivation; it is also an essential prerequisite to motivation.  

 

When a problem appears insurmountable, when the fear of death overwhelms and existential questions about the meaning of human life seem powerful and threatening, when you find yourself unable to act, you must do something. Any action, consistent with your values, is capable of motivating you towards your goals.  

 

To readers suffering from insecurity, lack of confidence, or relationship problems, the book holds out the counterintuitive advice of embracing these negative experiences and channelising them towards goals consistent with good values. Greatness is not a passive reward waiting to be attained through conventionally privileged notions of optimism and hard work; instead, it is a quality intrinsic to human beings, central to the human ability to invent, innovate, and confront the fact of human mortality with unabashed courage.