Book Summary: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson

This summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck explains what the book is truly about — priorities and values. It’s not saying you shouldn’t give any fucks; but giving fucks about the right things.

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Key Takeaways from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

• Happiness comes from solving problems. Problems are inevitable. The most worthwhile things in life involve surmounting a problem. A good life is one with good problems, rather than a life with no problems.
• Suffering, pain, conflict and negative emotions can give us useful feedback and motivate change. Don’t ignore or avoid them.
• This is a book about priorities and values. To fix your problems you need to understand your own values. There are three different layers of self awareness:
  • What you feel.
  • Why you feel what you feel.
  • What standard you’re applying to judge yourself.
• What we value is important, because we can’t give a fuck about everything:
  • Our values determine how we see the world, how we measure things.
  • Pursuing good values improve our lives and increase our wellbeing.
  • Pursuing bad values does not tend to increase wellbeing. Bad values create bad problems which can’t really be solved or depend on external events.
• Bad values are generally reliant on external events and not immediate or controllable.
  • Common examples of bad values include: pleasure, material success, always being right, and staying positive.
  • Things like pleasure, success and feeling good should come as natural side-effects of having good values. If you try to pursue them directly, it can backfire.
• Good values are achieved internally and are socially constructive.
  • Examples of good values include honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for yourself or others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility and creativity.
  • Manson also talks about 5 counterintuitively good values in depth:
    • taking responsibility – focusing on what we can control. This is not the same thing as accepting fault;
    • uncertainty – which allows us to learn and grow;
    • failure – fear of failure stops us improving;
    • rejection – setting boundaries and clearly defining what we will and will not accept;
    • contemplating your mortality – putting things in perspective.

Detailed Summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

The art of not giving a fuck is about values and priorities

• The subtle art of not giving a fuck doesn’t mean you don’t give any fucks. Instead it means you should choose your fucks carefully.
  • A person who gives no fucks is a psychopath. Don’t be a psychopath.
  • Not giving a fuck doesn’t mean being indifferent. People who are indifferent actually give way too many fucks. They are afraid of the world, so don’t make any meaningful choices.
• We can’t give a fuck about everything. Society constantly encourages us to do so, because that’s good for business. But we will all die soon, so we only have a limited amount of fucks to give.
• The subtle art of not giving a fuck is about focusing and prioritising your thoughts, and choosing what really matters to you. It’s incredibly difficult, but also incredibly important. Some things are not worth giving a fuck about.
  • In pursuing or valuing things that truly matter, you shouldn’t give a fuck about unimportant things standing in your way – e.g. pride, ego, discomfort, adversity.
  • If you give too many fucks, you will feel entitled. You’ll feel like everything should be just the way you want it to be.
  • If you can’t find something meaningful to give your fucks to, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous things.
• Whether you realise it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about. When we’re young, everything is new and exciting so we give tons of fucks. As we get older, we notice that most things don’t have much lasting impact on our lives. So we become more selective about the fucks we give.

Happiness comes from solving problems

• Happiness is something we actively do; it is not given to us passively. It is a constant work-in-progress because there are always problems to solve.
• When people think what they want out of life, they think about all the good things – e.g. career success, loving family, fame and fortune. A better question to ask is what pain do you want in your life. What struggles are you content to bear? [This really resonated with me – I think it was perhaps the most profound point in the book.]
  • For example, Manson thought he wanted to be a rock star when he was younger. He liked the idea of being on stage, rocking out, with people cheering. But it turns out he didn’t like the difficulties involved – the practice, finding a group, finding gigs, hauling gear around, etc.
  • It’s not a question of willpower or grit. People who enjoy going to the gym are the ones who are super-fit. Those who enjoy office work and politics will succeed in a corporate environment.
• Positive thinking reminds us of what we lack.
  • If you’re dreaming of being rich, or famous, or smart, that just reinforces that you are not rich, famous or smart.
  • When you care less about something, you tend to do better at it. [This is sometimes true but I’m not sure it’s true more often than not. I think caring too much can make you perform worse but so can caring too little. There’s probably a “sweet spot” of caring that is optimal.]
  • This is what philosopher Alan Watts called the “backwards law”:

• Some people avoid solving their problems by denying that the problems exist, or by believing that they are outside their control (e.g. blaming others). Denial and blame give us quick, temporary highs but are harmful in the longer run.
• Everything worthwhile in life involves surmounting some negative experience. Bypassing those negative experiences will therefore backfire.

Problems are inevitable

• Don’t hope for a life without problems as there’s no such thing. Instead, you should just hope and strive for a life full of good problems.
• Our values determine the nature of our problems, which in turn determines the quality of our lives.

• When a person has no problems, the mind finds a way to invent some. Manson thinks that most people’s life problems (especially those of “educated, pampered, middle-class white people”) are simply because they have no real problems.

Your problems are not that special

• Entitlement can play out in one of two ways:
  • I’m awesome and everyone else sucks, so I deserve special treatment.
  • I suck and everyone else is awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
• These two are ultimately the same, and entitled people will often flip back and forth between them.
• When we feel like we have problems that we cannot solve, we become entitled. Because if our problems are unsolvable, that must mean we’re unique in some way – the rules that apply to us are different from those that apply to everyone else. [This sounds like bragging about one’s misfortune in The Courage to be Disliked.]
• But in reality, no problems are unique. If you have a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it, or will have it, at some point. That doesn’t minimise the problem, it just means you’re not that special.
• Realising that your problems are not special is often the first and most important step to solving them.

Suffering, pain, emotions and conflict can be useful feedback

• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is not intended to fix your problems or pain, but to get you to accept them.
  • Once you get comfortable with all the shit life throws at you, you become sort of invincible.
  • The central tenet of Buddhism is that pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them.
• Suffering is biologically useful. It’s nature’s way of inspiring change. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have, and this has helped our species thrive.
• Pain is also useful.
  • It teaches us what’s good or bad for us, and what our limitations are. This is true not only of physical pain but also psychological pain.
  • Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the end of our worst moments. [I think this is because it gives us a different perspective. Everything is relative so, once we see how bad things can get, everything else looks better.]
  • Pain gives us motivation to change. If we try to numb our pain and just get back to “feeling good”, we won’t learn from it.

Don’t repress your emotions, but do question them

• We evolved to have emotions because they are useful feedback mechanisms:
  • Negative emotions are a call to action.
  • Positive emotions are rewards for taking good actions.
• We shouldn’t repress our emotions because that denies a feedback mechanism that can help you solve problems.
• But we shouldn’t fully trust them either. Emotions are merely suggestions that our neurobiology give us. They are temporary because our biology always needs something more. That’s why the hedonic treadmill exists – even when we manage to change or improve our life situation, we don’t feel all that different.
• Feeling bad about feeling bad, or feeling guilty about feeling guilty can send us into Feedback Loops of Hell. But if you stop giving a fuck about feeling bad, you can short-circuit that whole loop.

Conflict builds trust

• Trust is the most important thing in a relationship. Without trust, a relationship means nothing.
• Trust cannot exist without conflict. Conflict shows us who is there for us unconditionally and who is a fair-weather friend or partner.
• Once trust is broken, it’s hard to get it back. It takes time to build up a track record. The reason cheating is so destructive because it destroys trust. But the above applies to all relationships, not just romantic ones.

Why values are so important

• Values are about prioritisation. Your values are things that you prioritise, and they influence your decisions.
• Your values determine how you see a situation, how you measure it. What is objectively true about your situation is less important than how you value it.
  • For example, Dave Mustaine was a guitarist kicked out of Metallica. He went on to form Megadeth, a very successful heavy metal band. But because his measure of success was “doing better than Metallica”, he couldn’t appreciate his accomplishments for what they were and still felt like a failure.
  • In contrast, Pete Best was kicked out of the Beatles just before they made it big. He took it hard initially, and even attempted suicide in 1968. Unlike Mustaine, he never became famous or made millions. But by 1994, Best had realised he was probably happier than if he’d been with the Beatles. He met his wife after getting kicked out of the Beatles, and started a family with her. Best prioritised simple family values over fame and fortune.
• When we choose good values, we give our fucks to thing that matter and improve our wellbeing.
  • Good values are reality-based, socially constructive, and immediate and controllable. They are achieved internally.
  • Examples of good values include honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for yourself or others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility and creativity.
  • Manson talks about 5 counterintuitively good values in depth.
• When we choose bad values, we prioritise the wrong things. We give fucks about things that don’t matter, or that actually make our lives worse.
  • Bad values are superstitious, socially destructive, and not immediate or controllable. Bad values are generally reliant on external events.

Work out what your values are

• Self-awareness is like an onion, with multiple layers. As you peel back layers, you’re likely to cry.
  • The first layer is understanding your own emotions – e.g. “This makes me happy.” “I feel sad.” This sounds simple but some people suck even at this – and Manson claims to be one of them. We all have emotional blind spots, often because we were taught certain emotions were inappropriate while growing up. Identifying and addressing these blind spots takes years of practice and effort, but is worth it.
  • The second layer is being able to ask why you feel certain emotions. This is important because it helps identify what you consider to be success or failure.
  • The third level is your personal values – e.g. why do I consider this to be success or failure? What standard am I using to judge myself and others? This level takes constant questioning and effort and is incredibly difficult to reach. But it’s the most important.
• People who can’t answer these why questions accurately can’t achieve a deeper knowledge of their own values, and so can’t fix their problem.
  • For example, if someone feels lonely and blames others for their loneliness, they won’t be able to solve that problem.
  • Another example is someone cheating in a relationship. People cheat when something other than the relationship is more important to them – e.g. validation through sex, giving in to their own impulses. The cheater needs to figure out what those values were and whether they still value the relationship at all. If the cheater doesn’t admit this, they lack the self-awareness to solve any relationship problems.

Common bad values

• Manson suggests that the following are commonly “shitty values”: pleasure, material success, being right, and positivity.
• The reason these values are poor ideals for life is because they create bad problems for people which can’t really be solved or depend on external events.
• As explained later, happiness comes from solving problems. Some of the greatest moments in life are not pleasant, successful, known, or positive. When we have good values, happiness, pleasure, and success should follow as side effects.

Pleasure

• It is easy to obtain pleasure but also easy to lose it.
• Pleasure should be a side effect of good values – if you have good values, happiness and pleasure will follow.
• Research shows that people who focus on pursuing superficial pleasures are more likely to be anxious, emotionally unstable and depressed.

Material success

• Material success describes things like money and wealth.
• Research shows that once people are able to meet their basic physical needs (food, shelter, etc), the correlation between happiness and material success disappears. [Would be nice if he’d referred to some specific studies here. My recollection based on other sources this level was around USD$70,000 although that figure could well be higher now due to inflation.]
• There is a danger that people prioritise this over other values such as honesty, non-violence and compassion.

Always being right

• As humans, we’re pretty much wrong constantly. People who value being right will therefore have a hard time.
• Moreover, this value prevents people from learning from mistakes and taking on new perspectives.

Staying positive

• Constant positivity is a form of avoidance. Sometimes life does suck.
• If we deny our negative emotions, we won’t see the chance to solve them (and recall, solving problems leads to happiness). Denial is therefore likely to lead to deeper and more prolonged negative emotions.
• In the 1960s and 1970s, developing high self-esteem and positive thinking became popular in psychology. But feeling good about yourself doesn’t mean anything unless you have a good reason to feel good.
• A more accurate measure of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves, rather than how they felt about themselves generally.
  • A person who actually has high self-esteem can recognise their weaknesses and flaws and try to improve on them.
  • Other people can feel good about themselves out of a sense of delusion and entitlement. But they can only maintain their high self-esteem by hiding from their problems. They cannot improve since they cannot acknowledge their own problems.

Counterintuitively good values

• Manson discusses 5 good values in depth:
  • Taking responsibility. This means taking responsibility for everything that happens in your life, regardless of who is at fault.
  • Uncertainty. Acknowledging your own ignorance and constantly questioning your beliefs.
  • Failure. Being willing to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that you can improve on them.
  • Rejection. Both saying and hearing “no”. Rejection helps us clearly define what we will and will not accept in life.
  • Contemplating our own mortality. This keeps all our other values in perspective.

1. Taking responsibility

• Each of us is individually responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances. We don’t always control what happens to us, but we always control how we interpret what happens to us and how we respond. The same event can often be good or bad, depending on the metric we choose to use.
• Taking responsibility is a good thing because it empowers us. The more we choose to accept responsibility for things in our lives, the more power we exercise over our lives. In other words, with great responsibility comes great power.
• Often if we feel miserable, it’s because we feel like some part of it is outside our control. If we feel our problems are being forced on us, we feel victimised.
  • For example – someone puts a gun to your head and forces you to run 26.2 miles else he’ll kill you and your family. Compare that to you choosing to run a marathon, with your family and friends cheering you on. The distance is the same and the amount of physical pain is the same. But whether we choose to run or whether it’s forced on us makes a world of difference.

Responsibility and fault are not the same thing

• People often conflate responsibility and fault, but they are different things.
• Some examples:
  • If you found a baby on your doorstep, that’s not your fault. But the baby would still become your responsibility.
  • Manson’s ex-girlfriend cheated on him and dumped him. While she was to blame for how he felt, she was never responsible for that. He was. And he was responsible for making himself happy again. (Manson views this experience as being one of the most painful in his life, but also one of the most important and influential. He says he learned more from that one problem than dozens of his successes combined.)
  • If you get robbed, you’re not at fault. But how you respond is your choice – do you panic? Fight back? Freeze up? Acquiesce?
  • William James wasn’t to blame for his health problems. But he was responsible for how he responded to them.
  • People are born with more or fewer abilities than others. It’s like poker. We can only play with the cards we are dealt. The people who consistently make the best choices with the cards they get eventually come out ahead in poker, as in life.
• Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from choices you’re currently making.
• Nobody is ever responsible for your situation but you. Others may be at fault, but nobody is ever responsible for your happiness or unhappiness, because you the only one who chooses how you see things and react to things.

Blaming others may only give you a temporary high

• Blaming other people may give you a temporary high and a feeling of moral righteousness.
• The Internet and social media seem to have exacerbated this. Manson wonders if this is the first time in human history that every single demographic group feels unfairly victimised at the same time.
• Manson thinks the biggest problem with “victimhood chic” (as he calls it) is that it sucks attention away from actual victims.

2. Uncertainty

• We’ve all been wrong about many things in the past, and we will continue to be wrong about many things going forward.

Our brains make mistakes

• Our brains try to make meaning of things by forming associations and inferring causality, trying to understand and control the world around us. But our brains are imperfect. We mistake what we see and hear, and we easily misinterpret things.
• Memory is particularly fallible – we fill in gaps when we recall something, and over time we come to believe those gaps we filled in as much as the original memory.
  • In the 1980s, repressed memory therapy became very popular. People started “remembering” abuses that never occurred, believing that their brains had repressed the memories. There was even a name for it – false memory syndrome.
• Once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning. It’s confirmation bias. Brains are designed to be efficient, not accurate. Unfortunately, that means most of what we “know” is actually formed from inaccuracies and biases in our brains.

Uncertainty allows for growth

• Certainty is the enemy of growth. Instead of certainty, we should strive for doubt. Because we are wrong all the time and being wrong opens us up to change.
• Growth is an endless iterative process. We don’t go from “wrong” to “right”; we go from “wrong” to “slightly less wrong”. We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without ever reaching that point.
• Uncertainty removes our judgments of others, and of ourselves. If we don’t know how smart, lovable or attractive we are, we can remain open to finding out through experience.
• The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
  • There is comfort in knowing how you fit into the world. Anything that disrupts that – even if it could improve your life – is scary.
  • People are often afraid of success because it threatens who they believe themselves to be. For example, Manson had a friend who dreamt of becoming a professional artist but never tried to make a real go of it. He thinks the reason is because the idea of becoming “An Artist Nobody Likes” was scarier than remaining “An Artist Nobody’s Heard Of”.
  • “Knowing yourself” or “finding yourself” can therefore be dangerous, because it keeps you in a certain role with certain expectations.

Practise questioning yourself

• Three questions to help you question yourself more:
  1. Is it possible I’m wrong? In many cases, just asking this question gives us the humility and compassion we need to resolve our issues. And just because you ask yourself this question, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are wrong. But remember that for change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something.
  2. If I’m wrong, what would that mean? The potential meaning behind us being wrong can be painful. It calls our values into question and forces us to consider what a different, contradictory value might look like.
  3. Which causes a bigger problem, being right or being wrong? The goal is to look at which problems are better, since life’s problems are endless.

3. Failure

• Failure is a good value for a similar reason to why uncertainty is a good value – it helps us grow. Improving at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures. If someone’s better than you at something, they probably failed at it more too.
• Many people reach a point where they’re afraid to fail and stick to what they know. This confines and stifles us.
  • Fear of failure often comes from shitty values, involving things outside our control. Shitty values also create anxiety, because of the possibility of failure.
  • Better values are process-oriented. For example, “express myself honestly to others” is a process that never finishes, and success is entirely within your own control.
  • Manson thinks he was fortunate because he graduated college during the Great Financial Crisis, and started adult life as a failure. Everyone’s biggest fear is hitting rock bottom, but since he got that over with at the outset, things could only get better.

Do something; don’t wait for motivation

• Manson believes that one of the most important things he’s learned in life is:

• Most people sit around waiting for motivation and inspiration to strike before they act. They think inspiration causes motivation, which in turn causes action.
• But motivation is actually a loop, rather than a one-way chain. Your actions create emotional reactions and inspirations, which can then motivate you to take further actions. [Seth Godin has written something similar.]
• Often forcing yourself to do something, even if it’s just the smallest task, makes the larger tasks seem easier.
• If you change the measure of success to be “do something”, then failure become unimportant. Any action is seen as progress, so fear won’t hold you back.

4. Rejection

• We need to reject something, else nothing means anything.
  • We are defined by what we choose to reject. If we reject nothing, we have no identity.
  • If we value everything, we value nothing.
• Our consumer culture encourages us to say yes to everything and to want more. But absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing. While freedom gives us the opportunity to find greater meaning, we have to take that opportunity.

Breadth vs depth of experience

• Pursuing breadth of experience denies us the opportunity to experience of depth of experience. Manson prefers depth.
  • There are diminishing returns to each new experience when you pursue breadth. When you first visit another country, it’s incredibly exciting and life-changing. But when you’ve been to 50 countries, the 51st adds little. This goes for experiences generally – the older and more experienced you get, the less each new experience adds.
  • There’s also the paradox of choice. When we’re given more options, we feel less satisfied with whatever we choose. [Barry Schwartz wrote a book on this called The Paradox of Choice. It’s an excellent book that changed the way I thought about things when I first read it back in 2013. I’m not sure why Manson didn’t name him here.]
• Commitment is the only way to achieve greater meaning. To commit to something you have to reject alternatives.
  • Even though commitment feels like you’re narrowing your options, it can be liberating because it frees you from unimportant distractions. It focuses you and can make decision-making easier.
  • Less is often more. There is a certain level of joy and meaning you reach only after you’ve spent decades investing in single relationship, skill or career. You cannot make those investments without rejecting the alternatives.
  • For example, Manson spent 5 years travelling the world in his 20s. He visited 55 countries, made lots of friends and had a number of lovers. It seemed profound and meaningless at the same time. He learned a lot at some points but also wasted a lot of time and energy at other points. He found greater meaning when he settled down and committed to a place and person. [I went through something similar, though I didn’t spend as much time travelling as Manson did.]

Healthy relationships involve rejection

• Healthy relationships involve boundaries and rejection. This goes for all relationships, not just romantic ones.
• The difference between healthy and unhealthy relationship comes down to two things:
  • How well each person in the relationship accepts responsibility. In a toxic relationship, people regularly avoid taking responsibility for their own problems and/or take on responsibility for their partner’s actions. [This is like the idea of separating your tasks.] Since happiness comes from solving your own problems, other people can’t – and shouldn’t – solve your problems for you.
  • The willingness of each person to reject and be rejected by their partner. By “rejection”, Manson isn’t talking about wholesale rejection, but about setting boundaries.
• You can still help and support each other, provided you do it because you want to, not because you feel obligated to.
  • To work out whether you’re doing something voluntarily or out of obligation, ask yourself “If I refused, how would the relationship change?” If the refusal would cause a drama, it suggests your relationship is conditional and based on benefits received from each other, rather than unconditional acceptance.
  • It’s unreasonable to expect two people to accommodate each other fully. You shouldn’t care about everything your partner gives a fuck about. You should just give a fuck about your partner regardless of what he or she gives a fuck about.

5. Contemplate your mortality

• Death gives life meaning. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential.
  • The ancient Stoics told people to keep death in mind at all times, to appreciate life more and remain humble in the face of adversities.
  • In various forms of Buddhism, meditation is taught as a way to prepare oneself for death while remaining alive.
• If there’s no reason to do anything, then there’s also no reason to not do anything. Since we’ll all die, there’s no point to give in to fear, embarrassment or shame and avoid living. [This doesn’t really feel like a “value” or “priority” to me.]
  • Manson talks about how the death of a close friend, Josh, when he was 19 transformed him. Before, he was inhibited, unambitious and insecure. After Josh’s death, he became responsible, curious and hardworking. While he still had insecurities and baggage, he no longer let them stop him from living. The main thing he learned from Josh’s death was that there was nothing to be afraid of. Ever.
  • Mark Twain said: “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

Death terror and immortality projects

• Ernest Becker, an anthropologist, wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death. The book became one of the most influential works in psychology and anthropology. Its two main points are:
  • Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualise and think about ourselves abstractly. Because of this, at some point we become aware that we will die. Becker calls this realisation “death terror”, an existential anxiety that underlies everything we think or do.
  • We essentially have two selves: a physical self and a conceptual self. We all know our physical self will inevitably die, and this inevitability scares us. To compensate, we try to make our conceptual selves immortal – e.g. putting names on buildings and statues. Becker calls these our “immortality projects”.
• Religion, politics, sports, art and innovation are all the result of immortality projects.
• Wars and mass murders occur when one group’s immortality projects conflict with another group’s.
• When our immortality projects fail, death terror comes back into our minds. Manson argues our immortality projects are our values. When our values fail, so do we.
  • Becker realised on his deathbed that people’s immortality projects were the problem, not the solution. If we became comfortable with our deaths, we could then choose our values freely, unconstrained by our irrational desire for immortality.

Death should lead us to choose values beyond ourselves

• We generally avoid thinking about our death and our legacies because it’s hard and scary. That lets trivial values take over.
• Death is the only thing we know with any certainty, so it should be the compass that guides all our other values and decisions.
• The only way to be comfortable with death is to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself. Aristotle, Jesus, the Beatles and Harvard psychologists all say that happiness comes from caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are part of a much larger entity. [The sceptic in me thinks that they may have said this not because it’s true, but because it’s a good way to control people. Also, didn’t Manson say happiness comes from solving problems?]
• We can’t reach this state if we feel entitled. Entitlement isolates us, making us feel we are the centre of the universe. [Again, it’s like The Courage to Be Disliked and the idea of community feeling.]

Changing your values

• Changing your values may be painful, but that is a normal and necessary side effect of choosing different values.
  • When you give up a value you’ve depended on for years, it will feel disorienting, like you don’t know right from wrong anymore.
  • You’ll also feel like a failure, or some sort of fraud or nobody.
  • You will also face some rejections. Relationships built around old values may terminate – or at least change – once your values change.
• Travel is a good self-development tool because it extricates you from the values of your culture. It shows you that other societies can function with entirely different values, which forces you to re-consider things that you may have thought were obvious or universal.

Most of us are pretty average, and that’s okay

• Most of us are average at most things we do. Even if we’re exceptional at one thing, we’re probably average or below average at most other things.
• Yet the extremes – the outliers – get all the publicity. This can make us feel insecure.
• But if you think a life is only worthwhile if it is exceptional, then you’re basically saying most of the human population (including yourself), is worthless. This is dangerous.
• People who actually become exceptional don’t believe that they are. They become exceptional through constant improvement – driven by their belief that they’re not that great.
• Once you accept truths such as: your actions don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things; and the vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy; you won’t feel constant pressure to be amazing. That will then give you the freedom to accomplish what you truly want, without judgment or unrealistic expectations.

Other Interesting Points

• Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese lieutenant in WWII who received instructions to go to the Philippines and “never surrender”. He took this very literally and lived in the Philippines’ jungle, refusing to surrender for almost 30 years – well after the war had finished. He was only found in 1972.
  • Manson uses Onoda’s story as an example of someone who chose to suffer out of loyalty, because of it meant something to him. When Onoda finally returned to modern Japan, he was confronted with the fact that he had suffered for nothing.
• Russian culture is apparently very blunt. If you say something stupid, Russians will tell you it’s stupid to your face.

My Thoughts

The title is provocative and “read-baity” and – not gonna lie – it was definitely a factor in my choosing to read this book over others. But at its core, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is simply a book about priorities.

There seems to be a certain flavour to books by bloggers – or at least the bloggers I’ve read lately such as The Practice and Show Your Work. They tend to be on the short side. And their goal is quite modest. The authors are not trying to introduce any truly new ideas discovered after years of careful research, like in Noise, Guns, Germs and Steel, or Evicted. Instead, the books are usually just attempts to synthesise a variety of interesting ideas (often ideas the writer has blogged about) and present them in an entertaining way.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck achieved this. I found it surprisingly good. It wasn’t just that the book was entertaining. Manson also gives clear explanations of some pretty deep (and subtle!) philosophical ideas. For example, Manson seems to draw a distinction between “positive thinking” (which involves denying your problems), and choosing good values. Manson is quite scathing of the former, pointing out that sometimes life does suck and we shouldn’t deny that. At the same time, he points out that objective situation is often less important our subjective interpretations of it (see e.g. Dave Mustaine getting kicked out of Metallica vs Pete Best getting kicked out of the Beatles).

It’s a tough needle to thread but I think what he’s saying is:

• We choose our own values. When we choose good values, we’ll give a fuck about the right things, which are things that reliably lead to happiness.
• However, even when we choose good values, life will still throw us problems. We shouldn’t try to “think positively” and deny that these problems exist. Nor should we find ways to numb ourselves to pain and get back to “feeling good” as quickly as possible. Rather, we should accept that we may have to suffer and go through pain for a bit. Then take responsibility for our problems and do what we can to solve them.

It’s important to point out that Manson differs from classic Stoic philosophy here (as Manson is not a Stoic). He is not saying that objective truth does not exist at all, as the Stoics might. He’s just saying that the objective truth is often less important than your subjective perception – which is a much more “mild” claim.

As noted above, some of the points made in the book were quite similar to points made in The Courage to Be Disliked. I’m not sure if part of that was a translation issue with The Courage to Be Disliked, but I found Manson’s writing a lot clearer and easy to understand.

My main criticism of the book was that there were a couple times where Manson referred to things I knew were backed up by research, or even saying “Research shows that…”, without identifying that research. I wasn’t sure if this was deliberate. Footnotes and references may have come off too “academic” and inconsistent with the general vibe of the book. But Manson did refer to particular scientists and studies at other points in the book so perhaps he just couldn’t be bothered looking things up? If so, this is lazy. It also runs counter to his suggestions to be always questioning what we think we know.

I also found the last chapter – especially the discussion about immortality projects – a bit weird. I get that his friend’s death was a transformational point in Manson’s life, and that the way he thinks about death informs much of his philosophy. So I understand why he wrote it. But it didn’t really fit in with the rest of the book, and I really don’t see how contemplating one’s mortality is itself a “value”.

Overall, I enjoyed The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. It was a very accessible and entertaining explanation of some deep philosophical ideas about how we should live.

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Have you read this book? Disagree with my thoughts? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, you may also like:

• Book Summary: Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
• Book Summary: Atomic Habits by James Clear
• Book Summary: Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert