The Subtle Art of not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
Tara’s Notes On The Book
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Read – Sep 2021
The value of suffering:
The Self-Awareness Onion
first layer – simple understanding of one’s emotions : “this is when I feel …”
second layer – ask WHY we feel certain emotions
third layer – WHY do I consider this to be a success/failure? how am I choosing the measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?
Example: from the book:
“It bugs me that my brother doesn’t return my texts or emails.”
why? “Because it feels like he doesn’t give a shit about me.”
Why does this seem true? “Because if he wanted to have a relationship with me, he would take ten seconds out of his day to interact with me.”
Why does his lack of relationship with you feel like a failure? “because we’re brothers; we’re supposed to have a good relationship!”
You’re wrong about everything (But so am I)
The Dangers of Pure Certainty
“Uncertainty removes our judgements of other; it preempts the unnecessary stereotyping and biases that we otherwise feel when we see somebody on TV, in the office, or on the street. Uncertainty also relieves us of our judgment of ourselves. We don’t know it we’re lovable or not; we don’t know how attractive we are; we don’t know how successful we could potentially become. The only way to achieve these things is to remain uncertain of them and be open to finding them through experience.
Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.
Our values are imperfect and incomplete, and to assume that they are perfect and complete is to put us in dangerously dogmatic mindset that breeds entitlement and avoids responsibility. The only way to solve our problems is to first admit that our actions and beliefs up to this point have been wrong adn are not working.
This openness to being wrong must exist for any real change or growth to take place.
Before we can look at our values and prioritisation and change them into better, healthier ones, we must first become uncertain of our current values. We must intellectually strip them away, see their faults and biases, see how they don’t fit in with much of the rest of the world, to stare, our own ignorance in the face and concede, because our own ignorance is greater than us all.”
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Manson’s Law of Avoidance
The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
Kill Yourself
“Buddhism argues that your idea of who “you” are is an arbitrary mental construction and that you should let go of the idea that “you” exist at all; that the arbitrary metrics by which you define yourself actually trap you, and thus you’re better off letting go of everything. in a sense, you could say that Buddhism encourages you to not give a fuck.
it sounds wonky, but there are some psychological benefits to this approach to life. When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.”
Failure Is the Way Forward
The Failure/Success Paradox
“When Pablo Picasso was an old man, he was sitting in a café in Spain, doodling on a used napkin. He was nonchalant about the whole thing, drawing whatever amused him in that moment – kind of the same way teenage boys draw penises on bathroom stalls – except this was Picasso, so his bathroom-stall penises were more like cubist/impressionist awesome laced on top of faint coffee stains.
Anyway, some woman sitting near him was looking on in awe. After a few moments, Picasso finished his coffee and crumpled up the napkin to throw away as he left.
The woman stopped him. “Wait,” she said. “Can I have that napkin you were just drawing on? I’ll pay you fo it.“
“Sure,” Picasso replied. “Twenty thousand dollars.”
The woman’s head jolted back as if he had just flung a brick at her. “What? It took you like two minutes to draw that.“
“No, ma’am,” Picasso said. “It took me over sixty years to draw this.” He stuffed the napkin in his pocket and walked out of the café.
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. If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.
If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.”
Pain is part of the process
“Dabrowski argued that fear and anxiety and sadness are not necessarily always undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often representative of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain is to deny our own potential. Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life.
Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments. It’s only when we feel intense pain that we’re willing to look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us. We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we’ve been deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.”
“Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend the numbing out whatever they’re feeling. Their goal is to get back to “feeling good” again as quickly as possible, even if that means substances or deluding themselves or returning to their shitty values.
Learn to sustain the pain you’ve chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life. Relish it. Savour it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act despite it.
I won’t lie: this is going to feel impossibly hard at first. But you can start simple. You’re going to feel as though you don’t know what to do. But we’ve discussed this: you don’t know anything. Even when you think you do, you really don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. So really, what is there to lose?.”
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What books I’m reading, what podcast I’m listening to and my takeaways. What’s been happening in my life. How I’m feeling and what I’m doing to keep me going. And when something is coming up, you’ll get to know here too.
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The “Do Something” Principle
Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answer will follow
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.
“We assume that these steps occur in a sort of chain reaction, like this:
Emotional inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action
[…] The thing about motivation is that it’s not only a three part chain, but an endless loop:
Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc.“
… And Then You Die
Something Beyond Our Selves
“The Denial of Death [Ernest Becker] essentially makes two points:
1 . Human are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualise and think about ourselves abstractly. Dons don’t sit around and worry about their career. […]
2 . Becker’s second point starts with the premises that we essentially have two “selves.” The first self is the physical self – the one that eats, sleeps, snores, and poops. The second self is our conceptual self- our identity, or how we see ourselves.
Becker’s argument is this: 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.”
The Sunny Side of Death
“Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will appear superficial. Death is the only thing we can know with any certainty. And as such, it must be the compass by which we orient all of our other values and decisions. It is the correct answer to all of the questions we should ask but never do. The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. This is the basic root of all happiness. Whether you’re listening to Aristotle or the psychologists at Harvard or Jesus Christ or the goddamn Beatles, they all say that 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. This feeling is what people go to church for; it’s what they fight in wards for; it’s what they raise families and save pensions and build bridges and invent cell phones for: this fleeting sense of being part of something greater and more unknowable than themselves.”
“And entitlement strips this away from us. The gravity of entitlement sucks all attention inward, toward ourselves, causing us to feel as though we are at the center of all the problems in the universe, that we are the one suffering all of the injustices, that we are the one who deserve greatness over all others.”
“You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived.”
That’s it for my notes. Thanks for reading.
Want to read more book notes, there’s a whole category HERE
Happy Reading
Tara xx
