# The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Mark Manson Synced: [[2023_11_30]] 6:03 AM Last Highlighted: [[2019_01_27]]  ## Highlights [[2019_01_04]] (Location 359) [[favorite]] > Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. [[2019_01_04]] (Location 383) > Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. [[2019_01_15]] (Location 553) > life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention. [[2019_01_16]] (Location 1295) > As Freud once said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.” [[2019_01_17]] (Location 1429) > “With great power comes great responsibility.” It is true. But there’s a better version of this quote, a version that actually is profound, and all you have to do is switch the nouns around: “With great responsibility comes great power.” [[2019_01_23]] (Location 1904) > It’s the backwards law again: the more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel. But the converse is true as well: the more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don’t know. [[2019_01_23]] (Location 1921) > Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill up the time available for its completion.” [[2019_01_23]] (Location 1922) > Murphy’s law: “Whatever can go wrong will go wrong.” [[2019_01_23]] (Location 1923) > Manson’s law of avoidance on them: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. [[2019_01_23]] (Location 1954) > I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others. [[2019_01_23]] (Location 2010) > Aristotle wrote, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” 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. [[2019_01_23]] (Location 2039) > if it’s down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up. [[2019_01_23]] (Location 2044) > if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself. [[2019_01_25]] (Location 2209) > Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow. [[2019_01_25]] (Location 2213) > Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it. [[2019_01_25]] (Location 2279) > absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing. [[2019_01_25]] (Location 2280) > Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person. [[2019_01_25]] (Location 2340) > The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. [[2019_01_25]] (Location 2469) > It’s not about giving a fuck about everything your partner gives a fuck about; it’s about giving a fuck about your partner regardless of the fucks he or she gives. That’s unconditional love, baby. [[2019_01_25]] (Location 2519) > When trust is destroyed, it can be rebuilt only if the following two steps happen: 1) the trust-breaker admits the true values that caused the breach and owns up to them, and 2) the trust-breaker builds a solid track record of improved behavior over time. Without the first step, there should be no attempt at reconciliation in the first place. [[2019_01_25]] (Location 2554) > there is a freedom and liberation in commitment. [[2019_01_25]] (Location 2556) > Commitment gives you freedom because you’re no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. Commitment gives you freedom because it hones your attention and focus, directing them toward what is most efficient at making you healthy and happy. Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again? Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would. [[2019_01_27]] (Location 2653) > Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualize and think about ourselves abstractly. Dogs don’t sit around and worry about their career. [[2019_01_27]] (Location 2663) > We are all aware on some level that our physical self will eventually die, that this death is inevitable, and that its inevitability—on some unconscious level—scares the shit out of us. Therefore, in order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. [[2019_01_27]] (Location 2767) > happiness comes from the same thing: caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelligible production. [[2019_01_28]] (Location 2771) > The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves, causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all of the problems in the universe, that we are the one suffering all of the injustices, that we are the one who deserves greatness over all others. As alluring as it is, entitlement isolates us. Our curiosity and excitement for the world turns in upon itself and reflects our own biases and projections onto every person we meet and every event we experience. This feels sexy and enticing and may feel good for a while and sells a lot of tickets, but it’s spiritual poison. [[2019_01_28]] (Location 2777) > We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low-level and shallow ways. People relinquish all responsibility, demanding that society cater to their feelings and sensibilities. People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others, often violently, in the name of some made-up righteous cause. People, high on a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at it. [[2019_01_28]] (Location 2781) > The pampering of the modern mind has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something, a population that feels they have a right to something without sacrificing for it. [[2019_01_28]] (Location 2782) > People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary. [[2019_01_28]] (Location 2785) > Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not. [[2019_01_28]] (Location 2798) > there is nothing to be afraid of. Ever. [[2019_01_28]] (Location 2801) > This acceptance of my death, this understanding of my own fragility, has made everything easier—untangling my addictions, identifying and confronting my own entitlement, accepting responsibility for my own problems—suffering through my fears and uncertainties, accepting my failures and embracing rejections—it has all been made lighter by the thought of my own death.