This content summarizes Mark Manson's book, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck," arguing that true fulfillment comes not from avoiding negative experiences or seeking constant happiness, but from choosing what struggles and values are worth caring about.
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what's up everybody mark manson here
number one new york times
best-selling author of the subtle art of
not giving a [ __ ]
it's funny i was actually looking around
youtube and google and i found that
dozens of people have posted summaries
of my book
well [ __ ] you if there's going to be a
summary of the book
it should come from the master
non-fucking himself
moi so gather round children prepare
yourselves as i take you chapter by chapter
chapter
through this modern self-help masterpiece
so before i actually get into the book
and kind of summarize each chapter in a
few minutes
i want to zoom out a little bit and just
tell you
briefly what my goal is by writing this book
book [Music]
[Music]
first of all contrary to most people's
perceptions the book is not about
not caring about things in fact it's
about the opposite of that
it's essentially it makes the argument
that you have to give a [ __ ] about something
something
therefore the most important question is
what are you giving a [ __ ] about
and why now that's a pretty cute little
concept on the surface and i think it's
why a lot of people bought the book or
enjoyed the book initially
but my goal with this book is that it's
essentially a book
about values i very intentionally wanted
to be
contrarian to the self-help industry
most self-help
takes for granted what your values are
it takes for granted what your
definition of success is
it assumes you want a big mansion and a
fancy car and
a perfect marriage with three and a half
kids in a guitar-shaped swimming pool
most self-help books just assume that we
all want the same thing
whereas in my book i wanted to point out
that a lot of these
cultural definitions of success a lot of
these cultural values
may not be the right fit for us and so
the real important question
of getting ahead in life or improving
our lives
is not necessarily figuring out how to
accomplish every single goal we have
it's more in asking what sorts of goals
should we have in the first place
what sorts of things should we give a
[ __ ] about so you'll see as we go
through it that there are a lot of
points in the book where i'm very
intentionally contradicting
most typical self-help advice part of
this i'm doing for effect
it's to grab people's attention and to
to make them
think a little bit more critically about
some of their assumptions
but some of it is legitimate some of it
i do
strongly believe uh is more correct
than the general self-help advice out
there so
without further ado let's get into it
chapter one
don't try i start the book off with a
story about charles bukowski he was a
very famous
fiction and poetry writer but he was a
total drunk
he was a low life he was in and out of prison
prison
he had drug problems he had prostitute problems
problems
i mean he was just he was a total mess i
actually wanted to open the book with him
him
because he is kind of a counter argument to
to
most of the examples that you see in
books like this you know you're used to
opening a
a book about how to improve your life
and seeing a story about like steve jobs or
or
elon musk or something like that and i
wanted to start with bukowski
because it shows that you can actually
become conventionally successful in life
despite yourself you can become successful
successful
while seemingly doing all the wrong
things and
committing all the biggest errors so
even beginning on the first page i'm
starting to undermine the reader's
assumed definition of what success is or
what is a good life or a desirable life
for themselves
now the big idea to take away from
chapter one and
this is the most underlying thing in the
book and
one of the most underlying things on
amazon kindle
ever is something called the backwards
law and the backwards law originally
comes from alan watts but i rephrase it
my own way and i say that the pursuit of
positive experience
is itself a negative experience and the
acceptance of a negative experience
is itself a positive experience so i go
on and give a number of examples of the
backwards law
i say that the idea is that the more
that you pursue feeling better all the
time the less satisfied you become as
pursuing something only reinforces the fact
fact
that you lack it in the first place the
more desperately you want to be rich
the more poor and unworthy you will feel
regardless of how much money you have
the more desperately you want to be sexy
and desired the uglier you will come to
see yourself
regardless of your actual physical
appearance the more you desperately want
to be happy and loved
the lonelier and more afraid you will
become regardless of those who surround you
you
the more you wish to be spiritually
enlightened the more self-centered and
shallow you become in trying to get there
there
i then follow that up with it's like
that one time i tripped on acid and it
felt like the more i walked towards the
house the farther away the house got for me
me
good times good times so the backwards
law introduces
the central theme of the book which is
that negativity
is actually the path to positivity
most people's assumption is they just
want the positive experiences from life
but it's actually the tolerance and
acceptance of the negative experience
that leads to the positive experience
and i will end up spending
pretty much the entire book expanding
upon this so i go on to finish chapter
one by introducing the the give a [ __ ]
framework and i
i have uh three subtleties of not
giving a [ __ ] so subtlety number one is
not giving a [ __ ] does not mean being indifferent
indifferent
it means being comfortable with being
different one point that i make
throughout the book and i dispel
very early on is that indifference is impossible
impossible
if you give a [ __ ] about nothing then
you are giving a [ __ ] about giving a
[ __ ] about nothing
it is impossible to not give a [ __ ]
about something
therefore the question is what do you
give a [ __ ] about
and kind of the conclusion that arises
is that
if you give a [ __ ] about a few very
important things
then the small things cease to bother
you so much subtlety number two
is to not give a [ __ ] about adversity
you must first give a [ __ ] about
something more important than adversity
so if you're always worrying about what
people think about you
the problem is not what people think
about you the problem is you don't have anything
anything
better to worry about if you're always
worried about how much money you have
the problem is not how much money you have
have
the problem is that you don't have
anything better to worry about
subtlety number three whether you
realize it or not you are
always choosing what to give a [ __ ]
about this concept of choosing will come
back and enforce in uh chapter five
pretty much the entire chapter is about
it all right so that's chapter one
kind of lays the groundwork starts off
very contrarian
drops a lot of f-bombs a lot of people
like that some people don't
uh chapter two is called happiness is a problem
problem
so chapter 2 opens up with the story of
the buddha and
focuses on the central buddhist doctrine
of dukkha or
the fact that life is suffering that no
matter what you do
where you go who you hang out with what
you pursue there
is some facet of suffering associated
with it
simply because our mind becomes attached
to things and attachment leads to
suffering but
instead of kind of going down the
buddhist rabbit hole with it i take it off
off
in another direction and i explain i say
you know it's not
like we're doomed to suffer it's that
suffering has
a certain evolutionary usefulness to it
like if you think about evolution over
the course of
hundreds of thousands of years a
creature that is happy
all the time that creature is not gonna
survive it's actually the creature that is
is
a little bit dissatisfied all the time a
little bit anxious all the time
a little bit paranoid a little bit
pissed off at the people around him
like that's the creature that's gonna do
the most work to actually survive and replicate
replicate
i think this this modern idea that we
shouldn't have to feel bad
ever is completely misguided not only is
it misguided but it goes against
our evolutionary nature our genetic
nature negative emotions have an
inherent purpose to them
and they help us and so a lot of this
chapter is describing how
a lot of the anxiety that we wish to
escape from or the anger we wish to overcome
overcome
these emotions are actually signals
within our body
to do something they are important
signals and if we ignore them or if we
train ourselves to ignore them
then we are actually limiting ourselves
in a lot of ways
i also talk about a psychology concept
called the hedonic treadmill this idea that
that
happiness is it's like a treadmill it's
like you know
you think if i get a boat i'll be happy
and then you get the boat and it's like
you've got to pay docking fees you're
like man if i could just find a better
dock i'd be happy and then you find a
better dock
then you realize that none of your
friends want to drive out to that new
dock you're like man if i could just
have some friends to hang out on my boat
then i'd be happy and then you get
friends on your boat
but then they get too drunk and they
fall overboard and you have to like
throw in life preservers and save them
and call the coast guard and you're like man
man
if i didn't have to call the coast guard
then i'd be happy and it's like
happiness is
it's like this carrot always dangling in
front of you no matter what you do
so if the point of chapter one is to
kind of undermine our expectations about
positive and negative experience
chapter two's point is to undermine our
expectations about positive and negative emotion
emotion
negative emotions have a lot of utility
they have a lot of purpose
they help us they grant us meaning in a
lot of situations
and they signal to us that we have
challenges or problems that must be overcome
overcome
happiness happiness is great we all want
to be happy it's not the only thing in
life there are bad forms of happiness
doing cocaine all day that'll make you
happy for a while doesn't mean you
should go
do it serial killers seem to be very
pleased with themselves while they're
killing people
over and over again doesn't mean they
should do it the the emotions themselves
are not necessarily good or bad it's the
context around them it's the meaning
around them and so i end up kind of
creating this framework
where i say that happiness comes from solving
solving
problems if you either pretend you have
no problems in your life to solve
then you won't be happy but if you also
have problems in your life that you feel
you can't solve
then you won't be happy so kind of the
secret sauce is finding problems
that you kind of want to have or kind of
enjoy having
and that's how i wrap up the chapter
with a section called choose your struggle
struggle
now i'll actually read the first couple
paragraphs of that section because it's
it's one of the most important sections
of the book in it and it's it's
resonated with a lot of people
so if i ask you what do you want out of
your life and you say something like
i want to be happy and have a great
family and a job i like
your response is so common and expected
that it doesn't mean anything
everybody enjoys what feels good
everybody wants to live a carefree
happy and easy life to fall in love and
have amazing sex and relationships
to look perfect and make lots of money
and be popular and well respected and admired
admired
everybody wants that it's easy to want
that a more interesting question
a question that most people never
consider is what pain do i want in my life
life
what am i willing to struggle for
because that actually seems to be a
greater determinant of how our lives
turn out
[ __ ] sweet all right chapter three
one of my favorite chapters
you are not special
you're not nobody is
so you are not special it opens up with
a story
of a guy i knew named jimmy jimmy is
actually he's a
kind of a composite of two different
people i knew but jimmy is basically
he's a con man essentially like
pathological liar
schemer [ __ ] artist 24 7 salesman
i knew him for about a year in my in my
mid-20s back when i was starting my
first business and
and he was starting a number of
businesses too and the dude
he was just a grifter total low life
wasted money left right and center
and so i tell this story about jimmy and
i use him as an example
for a a concept i introduce of entitlement
entitlement
i define entitlement in the book as
feeling as though you deserve to be happy
happy
without sacrificing for it it's
basically that idea
of believing you deserve to have
positive experiences without
traversing the negative experiences to
get there i spent much of this chapter
pointing out
both from stories about jimmy but also
stories of me being a [ __ ] in my own life
life
that it's this belief that we shouldn't
have to go through the negative
and only have the positive that causes
us to adopt
many destructive and uh selfish behaviors
behaviors
so the middle of the chapter is the
story about how i uh i got arrested
for selling drugs if you want to hear
about that you should buy the book
so here here you go there are two forms
of entitlement
form number one is i'm awesome and the
rest of you all suck
therefore i deserve to have special
treatment form number
two is i suck and the rest of you are awesome
awesome
so i deserve special treatment so in
psychological research
this is known as grandiose narcissism
versus victim narcissism and it's basically
basically
they seem to be opposites on the surface
like one person thinks he's better than
everybody and then the other person
thinks he's worse than everybody
but the behavior ends up being the same because
because
both people have delusional beliefs
about their place in the status
hierarchy one person thinks he's at the
top one person thinks he's
at the bottom but the behavior ends up
being the same they end up being
completely self-absorbed
they think everything in the world
should be altered and catered to them
and yeah they just become unbearable to
be around and so i spend
much of this chapter probably the second
half of this chapter
describing how the growing culture of exceptionalism
