The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Note: Its been a while since i’ve read this book, so its just a recollection of what i remember.

Interesting start for a book where most of the self-help books start off or go along the lines of how we need to be more positive and in the process of doing so, it emphasises that we aren’t really that positive.

Dont Try

This book instead talks about just accepting the way things are, everybody is gonna feel pain or face obstacles, its just on what we choose to prioritize spending our energy on, or rather giving “f*cks” about.

Happiness is a problem

When everything is just handed down to you, you dont really enjoy them. Pain is not all that bad, we all suffer one way or the other - physically, mentally, emotionally. Its all about caring more about the good problems, hoping to have good problems in life so that we learn and enjoy them more. True Happiness comes from solving the problems.

Most people choose denial or victim mentality but we should just accept the problems and move on.

You are not special

You gotta work for it and earn it. We are all average on most things. People who are special - that is highlighted more, athletes etc have spent a lot more time on their specific sport that they are on the good extreme but guess what, they are pretty much average if not worse on most other things.

Its treated like being a failure to be an average person and not achieve the extra-ordinary. But we just need to accept not everyone can be extraordinary, which is basically contradictory.

The value of suffering

The more you suffer the more you feel satisfied achieving something. If its just there, then you wont really feel happy about it. It is a better metric to have than most metrics we pick usually:

• Pleasure: Being Drug addicts isnt good though
• Material Success: And if we dont care about honesty, integrity etc, we are just gonna be some assh*les
• Always being right: We are never right, we can only be close to being right. We are mostly wrong about most things
• Staying positive: You cant get away by denying your negative emotions, we just need to to let them out in a healthy way.

You are always choosing

We have make a choice whether intentionally or not. Even not making a choice (Oh i had no choice) is also ironically making a choice by not doing anything about it. It comes back to same thing as the start, prioritizing what we give “f*cks” about, and giving more thought into the choices around those.

You can cry about how life has been or choose to try and do something about it.

You are wrong about everything

Again like I stated earlier, we are never right, just close to being right. We cant really trust out memories too, our brains are not right they are just efficient, they store info which seem right to us but might not be right. Based on situation the same set of memories can be interpreted differently, maybe you hate the person now that all memories of him just highlight the facts about them being annoying which used to seem good before.

Its only when you accept that you can be wrong, can you learn to improve yourself.

Failure is the way forward

Improvement of anything is based on failures which preceed it. There is a direct correlation to number of failures to improvement we have.

If we are better than someone, it just means we had more failures than him to learn from. So, we shouldn’t avoid failures

The importance of saying no

We need to learn to reject things. We already do this in everyday life, i.e., when we decide to do something, it just means that we have decided to reject it’s alternative.

We should stop avoiding problems and avoiding rejections. We should instead confront them. Don’t wait on someone to take care of your problems.

Freedom is good but its useless by itself, it needs to have some meaning to it.

For the short run, trying out a breadth of things is good but it is the depth of anything which we would truly appreciate. We can think og having a commitment to something/anything, gives us the freedom from various distractions.

And then you die

In the face of the inevitability of death, we don’t need to bother about shame or fear. We should try out things.

According to Becker, it can be seen as us having two selfs, one physical and one conceptual. Since, we know that the physical self is gonna die at some point, we have this urge to let our conceptual self remain, for example, writing our names on things, statues or passing our ideals to children, for us to be idolised - with the goal to be immortalized.

In fact our civilisation, religion, tech, politics etc are just remnants of the conceptual selfs of our predecessors. All of this, just to tackle the fear of death.

But the only problem is that, we are attaching ourselves to external validations this way, which could eventually lead to dissapointment.

Accept death, prioritize what truly matters and don’t give any fks about the rest.