The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.

Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired.
 
Ironically, this fixation on the positive—on what’s better, what’s superior—only serves to remind us over and over again of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be.
 
After all, no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she’s happy. She just is. A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident. A rich woman doesn’t feel a need to convince anybody that she’s rich. Either you are or you are not. And if you’re dreaming of something all the time, then you’re reinforcing the same unconscious reality over and over: that you are not that.

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 desperately want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you 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 become, regardless of those who surround you. The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centered and shallow you become in trying to get there. As the existential philosopher Albert Camus said (and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t on LSD at the time): “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” Or put more simply: Don’t try.

The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.

Ever notice that sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it? Notice how it’s often the person who is the least invested in the success of something that actually ends up achieving it? Notice how sometimes when you stop giving a fuck, everything seems to fall into place?

Back in Grandpa’s day, he would feel like shit and think to himself, “Gee whiz, I sure do feel like a cow turd today. But hey, I guess that’s just life. Back to shoveling hay.”

We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty. We get angry about getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious. What is wrong with me?

"I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?"

I believe that today we’re facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it’s okay for things to suck sometimes. Because when we believe that it’s not okay for things to suck sometimes, then we unconsciously start blaming ourselves.

Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience.
 
By not giving a fuck that you feel bad, you short-circuit the Feedback Loop from Hell; you say to yourself, “I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?” And then, as if sprinkled by magic fuck-giving fairy dust, you stop hating yourself for feeling so bad.

Stress-related health issues, anxiety disorders, and cases of depression have skyrocketed over the past thirty years, despite the fact that everyone has a flat-screen TV and can have their groceries delivered. Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual.

Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.

You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give.

I see practical enlightenment as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable—that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death. Because once you become comfortable with all the shit that life throws at you (and it will throw a lot of shit, trust me), you become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way. After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.

When you give too many fucks—when you give a fuck about everyone and everything—you will feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness.

Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. Indifferent people often attempt to be indifferent because in reality they give way too many fucks.

It’s part of our biology to always care about something and therefore to always give a fuck. The question, then, is, What do we give a fuck about? What are we choosing to give a fuck about? And how can we not give a fuck about what ultimately does not matter?

Reserve fucks for what truly matters. Friends. Family. Purpose. 

And because of that, because they reserve their fucks for only the big things that matter, people give a fuck about them in return.

There’s no such thing as a lack of adversity. It doesn’t exist.

The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.

When a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some. It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy.

Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.

Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.

Life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention. This isn’t to say that all suffering is equal. Some suffering is certainly more painful than other suffering. But we all must suffer nonetheless.

Pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them.

If I achieve X, then I can be happy. If I look like Y, then I can be happy. If I can be with a person like Z, then I can be happy. This premise, though, is the problem.

Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and, as we’ll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness.

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.

We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive.

We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have.

This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no—our own pain and misery aren’t a bug of human evolution; they’re a feature.

The keyword here is “solving.” If you’re avoiding your problems or feel like you don’t have any problems, then you’re going to make yourself miserable.

If you feel like you have problems that you can’t solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable. The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.

To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action.

Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress—the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

Whatever your problems are, the concept is the same: solve problems; be happy.

Warren Buffett’s got money problems; the drunk hobo down at Kwik-E Mart’s got money problems. Buffett’s just got better money problems than the hobo. All of life is like this.

“The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.”

“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”

Highs also generate addiction. The more you rely on them to feel better about your underlying problems, the more you will seek them out.

Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.

If you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something.

Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it. Then, like everything else, the positive emotions go away, because more problems inevitably emerge.

Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it is good. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad. Therefore, we shouldn’t always trust our own emotions. In fact, I believe we should make a habit of questioning them.

A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”

Happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems. Joy doesn’t just sprout out of the ground like daisies and rainbows.

Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.

People want to start their own business. But you don’t end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, the insane hours devoted to something that may earn absolutely nothing.

You can’t win if you don’t play.

I was in love with the result—the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I was playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly.

I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.

Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems.

The joy is in the climb itself.

It turns out that merely feeling good about yourself doesn’t really mean anything unless you have a good reason to feel good about yourself.

It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.

The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.

It takes just as much energy and delusional self-aggrandizement to maintain the belief that one has insurmountable problems as that one has no problems at all.

Numerous professors and educators have noted a lack of emotional resilience and an excess of selfish demands in today’s young people.

The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement.

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.

Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.

If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”

Our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.

Important values-based questions: Why do they feel such a need to be rich in the first place? How are they choosing to measure success/failure for themselves?

Honest self-questioning is difficult. It requires asking yourself simple questions that are uncomfortable to answer. In fact, in my experience, the more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true.

Take a moment and think of something that’s really bugging you. Now ask yourself why it bugs you. Chances are the answer will involve a failure of some sort. Then take that failure and ask why it seems “true” to you.

What if that failure wasn’t really a failure? What if you’ve been looking at it the wrong way?

We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but we’re just a bunch of finely ornamented apes. And because we are apes, we instinctually measure ourselves against others and vie for status.

The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?

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

These stories suggest that some values and metrics are better than others.

1.   Pleasure. 
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 not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect. If you get the other stuff right (the other values and metrics), then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product.

2.   Material Success.
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. It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. This keeps you unattached to superstitious or poorly informed beliefs and promotes a constant state of learning and growth.

4.   Staying Positive.
While there is something to be said for “staying on the sunny side of life,” the truth is, sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it. Denying negative emotions 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—problems which, by the way, if you’re choosing the right values and metrics, should be invigorating you and motivating you.

When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny the existence of our life’s problems. And when we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to solve them and generate happiness. Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life. Thus to duck our problems is to lead a meaningless (even if supposedly pleasant) existence.

In the long run, completing a marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends while struggling to make ends meet makes us happier than buying a new computer. These activities are stressful, arduous, and often unpleasant. They also require withstanding problem after problem. Yet they are some of the most meaningful moments and joyous things we’ll ever do. They involve pain, struggle, even anger and despair—yet once they’re accomplished, we look back and get all misty-eyed telling our grandkids about them.

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

Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.

Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable. Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable.

(Side Note: As a rule, people who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being reflected back at them.)

Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.

You’ll notice that good, healthy values are achieved internally. Something like creativity or humility can be experienced right now. You simply have to orient your mind in a certain way to experience it.

These values are immediate and controllable and engage you with the world as it is rather than how you wish it were.

Bad values are generally reliant on external events—flying in a private jet, being told you’re right all the time, owning a house in the Bahamas, eating a cannoli while getting blown by three strippers.

Bad values, while sometimes fun or pleasurable, lie outside of your control and often require socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve.

When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.

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.

Whether we like it or not, we are always taking an active role in what’s occurring to and within us.

The point is, we are always choosing, whether we recognize it or not. Always.

“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.

There’s a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person’s actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you.

Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you.

This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.

Although she had done something horrible to me and she could be blamed for that, it was now my own responsibility to make myself happy again. She was never going to pop up and fix things for me. I had to fix them for myself.

To simply blame others is only to hurt yourself.

You didn’t choose the robbery, but it’s still your responsibility to manage the emotional and psychological (and legal) fallout of the experience.

How he reacted to his son’s death was his own choice. Pain of one sort or another is inevitable for all of us, but we get to choose what it means to and for us.

Jack sums up well what he learned: “I didn’t choose this life; I didn’t choose this horrible, horrible condition. But I get to choose how to live with it; I have to choose how to live with it.”

We all get dealt cards. Some of us get better cards than others. And while it’s easy to get hung up on our cards, and feel we got screwed over, the real game lies in the choices we make with those cards, the risks we decide to take, and the consequences we choose to live with.

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