The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F by Mark Manson

July 2025 (1460 Words, 9 Minutes)

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F’ck By Mark Manson Reading session: (July 19 – July 24 2025)

Key Points

• Don’t care much about the things which are encoded by society and media. Give a f to more money, more success, bigger house, sexier body, because if you reach the certain level of success, you will still find it less in front of media. They’ll convince you to have more. And that will make you unsatisfied, unhappy. It doesn’t mean, you shouldn’t care anything. Care the things which are truly personal to you such as your passion, relationship, goals etc.

• 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.

• The philosopher Alan Watts said in “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. The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make. The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centered and shallow you become in trying to get there.

• Not giving a f does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
• To not give a f about adversity, you must first give a f about something more important than adversity.

• Finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy. Because if you don’t find that meaningful something, your f*s will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes such as remote battery, instagram likes, news, controversies, etc.

• Don’t hope for a life without problems. There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.
• Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded. Happiness comes from solving problems.

• Denial: Some people deny that their problems exist in the first place. And because they deny reality, they must constantly delude or distract themselves from reality. This may make them feel good in the short term, but it leads to a life of insecurity, neuroticism, and emotional repression.

• Victim Mentality: Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could. Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances. This may make them feel better in the short term, but it leads to a life of anger, helplessness, and despair.

• There’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. So, don’t expect for a special treatment. Understanding it is the first and most important step toward solving them.

• You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about.

• 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.

• If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.

Shitty Values: There are a handful of common values that create really poor problems for people:

1. Pleaseure: 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. 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.
2. Material Success: 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. When people measure themselves not by their behavior, but by the status symbols they’re able to collect, then not only are they shallow, but they’re probably assholes as well.
3. Always Being Right: 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.
4. Staying Positive: Denying negative emotions (eg. not being sad in accident or someone’s death) leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction. Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problems.

“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”

• 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.
• Good, healthy values are achieved internally.
• Bad values are generally reliant on external events.
• We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
• “With great responsibility comes great power.” The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.
• Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.
• Certainty is unattainable, and the pursuit of certainty often breeds more (and worse) insecurity.
• 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.
• The man who believes he knows everything learns nothing.
• 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.
• When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.

• The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible. Eg. do not think you’re so smart, genius, attractive, unattractive, too bad at math, too victiomized, etc.

• A reality: if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself. Most people act based on their own insecurities and ego.
• 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.
• Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway.
• “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”
• Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.

• If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something—anything, really—and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself. Action → Inspiration → Motivation

• There’s a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career, a single culture. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.

• To value X, we must reject non-X.

• There are healthy forms of love and unhealthy forms of love. Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other—in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.

• The paradox of choice: the more options we’re given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we’re aware of all the other options we’re potentially forfeiting.

END

One Paragraph Summary

Focus your energy on a few meaningful values—like discipline, curiosity, service, and spiritual growth—while deliberately ignoring external expectations (likes, status, wealth). Accept that discomfort, criticism, failure, and uncertainty are unavoidable and necessary stepping stones to real progress. When motivation is low, take small actions (even just 5 minutes of coding, writing, chanting, or journaling) to trigger momentum. Own your choices and problems, no blaming, so you gain agency and clarity. Let go of limiting self-stories, embrace the process (not the outcome), and orient your days around solving “good problems” aligned with your deeper purpose.

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