The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

June 21, 2023

Table of Contents

Don’t try

Bukowski never tried to by anything other what he was. He was able to be completely, unflinchingly honest with himself - especially the worst parts of himself.

Feedback loop from Hell

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. Acceptance of one’s negative experience is a positive experience.

Happiness Is a Problem

The premise that happiness is algorithmic, that it can be worked for and earned and achieved is a problem.

The Misadventures of a Disappointment Panda

Suffering is biologically useful. It’s nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.
Pain is our most effective means of spurring action.
Life is essentially a series of endless problems.

Happiness Comes from Solving Problems

Happiness is constant work in progress. Obstacles:
1. Denial (of the existence of problems)
2. Victimhood mentality

Emotions are Overrated

Negative emotions are call to action. To make you do something.
Don’t always trust your own emotions. Make a habit of questioning them.

Choose Your Struggle

What are you willing to struggle for?
I wanted the reward and not the struggle.

You’re not Special

The problem wit entitlement is that makes people need to feel good about themselves, all the time, (even) at the expense of those around them.

Things Fall Apart

The Tyranny of Exceptionalism

Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes, because in the media business that’s what brings attention and attention is money.
Flood of extreme information makes us conditioned to think this is the new normal. This drives us to feel pretty insecure, because it makes us, the average Joes, look pretty normal.
Technology has solved economical problems by giving us psychological problems.

But, If I’m Not Going to Be Special or Extraordinary, What’s the Point?

anti-entitlement. People who became great at something become great because they understand they’re not already great.
“Every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness” is basically just jerking off your ego.
The ticket to emotional health, like to physical health, comes form eating the veggies. That is accepting that majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy and that’s OK. Once ingested, your body will wake up more potent and alive. Constant pressure to do something amazing, the next big thing, will be lifted of your back.
You’ll have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, good boing, laughing with someone… That’s what actually matters.

Value of Suffering

suffering meant something: (by) it (he) fulfilled some greater cause.

The Self-Awareness Onion

understanding one’s emotions
ability to ask why we feel certain emotions
personal values. Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be.

Rock Star Problems

Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else.
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

Pleasure is not the cause of happiness, rather it is the effect
Once you’re able to provide for basic physical needs, the correlation between happiness and worldly (material) success quickly approaches zero.
People who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes.
Staying positive is a fallacy. The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way that aligns with your values.
Freud: once day in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

Defining Good and Bad Values

Good values are 1) reality-based 2) socially constructive 3) immediate and controllable.
Bad values are 1) superstitious 2) socially destructive 3) not immediate and controllable.
“self-improvement” is really about prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a f*ck about.

You Are Always Choosing

When you chose it freely, it is a glorious and important milestone in your life. When it was forced upon you against your will, it is one of the most terrifying and painful experiences in your life.

The Choice

We don’t always control what happens to us. We always control how we interpret what happens to us and as we respond.

The Responsibility / Fault Fallacy

Responsibility and fault often appear together in our culture. But they’re not the same thing.
We’re responsible for experience that aren’t our fault.
Fault is past tense, responsibility is present tense.

Responding to Tragedy

Genetics and the Hand We’re Dealt

Victimhood Chic

The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention from actual victims.

There is no “How”

You’re Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)

Growth is an endlessly iterative process.
Many people become so obsessed with being “right” about their life that they never end-up actually living it.
Certainty is the enemy of growth. Being wrong is the opportunity for growth.
Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search for doubt: about our own beliefs, own feelings, about what the future might hold for us unless we get out there and create it for ourselves. Instead of looking to be right all the time, we should be looking for how we’re wrong all the time.

Architects of Our Own Beliefs

Human mind is capable of coming up with and believing in a bunch of BS that isn’t real.
Our brains are meaning machines.
Brains are imperfect. We mistake things we see and hear.
Once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning (=belief).
Emo Phillips: “I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”

Be Careful What You Believe

Our memories work like the telephone game - you say something in one’s person ear and it gets passed through lie ten people and then what the last person hears is completely unrelated to what you started with.
Our brain is always biased toward what we feel to be true in that moment. So when we have a great relationship with our sister, we’ll interpret most of our memories about her in a positive light. But when the relationship sours, we’ll often come to see those exact same memories differently, reinventing them in a such way as to explain our present-day anger towards her.
Our mind’s biggest priority when processing experiences is to interpret them in such a way that they will cohere with all of our previous experiences, feelings and beliefs (=Penelope’s loom).
In an effort to achieve coherence, our mind will sometimes invent false memories. By linking our present experiences with that imagines past, our mind allows to maintain whatever meaning we already established.

The Dangers of Pure Certainty

The more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.
Uncertainty removes our judgement of others. It is the root of all progress and growth.
Before we can look at or values and prioritizations and change them into better ones, we must first become uncertain of our current values. We must intellectually strip them away, see their faults and biases, see how they don’t fit in with much of the rest of thew world.

Manson’s Law of Avoidance

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
I don’t say find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgement and accepting of the differences of the others.

Kill Yourself

Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or undiscovered genius. Instead measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
Give up the entitlement and your belief that you’re somehow owed something by this world.

How to Be a Little Les Certain of Yourself

We’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves.
For any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something.
Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Entitlement is hard to admit. It hurts.
If it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.

Failure Is the Way Forward

“What? It took you like two minutes to draw that.” “No, ma’am,” Picasso said. “It took me over sixty years to draw this.”
Young child trying to learn to walk doesn’t mind about falling and hurting itself. Avoiding failure is what we’ve learned at some later point in life.

Pain Is Part of the Process

Our proudest achievements come in the face of greatest adversity. Our most radical changes in perspective happen at the tail end of our worst moments.
How? It’s as simple as just doing it.
Emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me.
When you choose a new value, you’re choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life. Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act despite of it.
Start simple You’re going to feel as though you don’t know what to do. But we’ve discussed this: you don’t know anything.
Life is not about knowing and then doing something anyway.

The “Do Something” Principle

Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation. It is also the cause of it.
If we follow the “do something” principle, failure feels unimportant.
You can become your own source of motivation. Action is always within reach.

The Importance of Saying No

Unadulterated expression. Honestly in the truest sense of the world. Communication with no conditions, no strings attached, no ulterior motive, no sales job, no desperate attempt to be liked.
In the “free” West, my Russian teacher continued, there existed an abundance of economic opportunity - so much economic opportunity that it became far more valuable to present yourself in a certain way, even if it was false, than to actually be that way. Trust lost its value. Appearances and salesmanship became more advantageous forms of expressions. Knowing a lot of people superficially was more beneficial than knowing a few people closely.

Rejection Makes Your Life Better

Avoiding rejection gives us short-term pleasure by making us rudderless and directionless in the long term.
To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. 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. And you cannot achieve those decades without rejecting the alternatives.
Rejecting is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values. If we reject nothing, we essentially have no identity at all. Rejection is an important and crucial life skill.

Boundaries

Until the mid-nineteenth century or so, love was seen as unnecessary and potentially dangerous psychological impediment to the more important things in life.
Romantic love is kind of like cocaine. It stimulates the same brain parts.
Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.
People can’t solve your problems for you. And they shouldn’t try, because that won’t make you happy.
The mark of an unhealthy relationship is two people who try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves. Healthy relationship is when to people solve their own problems in order to feel good about each other.
The victim, if he really loved the saver, would say “Look, this is my problem, you don’t have to fix it for me. Just support me while I fix it myself.”
If the saver really wanted to save the victim, the saver would say “Look, you’re blaming others for your own problems, deal with it yourself.

How to Build Trust

The last person I should ever have to censor myself with is the person I love.
When our highest priority is always to make ourselves feel good, or the partner, then nobody ends up feeling good.
Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who’s there just for the benefits.
Conflict is absolutely necessary for the maintenance of a healthy relationship.
When trust is destroyed, it can be rebuilt only if the following two steps happen 1) the trust-breaker admits the true values that caused the breach and owns up to them, and 2) the trust-breaker builds a solid track record of improved behaviour over time.

Freedom Through Commitment

There are some experiences that you can have only when you lived in the same place for five years, when you’ve been with the same person for over a decade, when you’ve been working on the same skill or craft for half of your lifetime.
I’ve chosen to reject all but the very best people and experiences and values in my life. I shut down all my business projects and decided to focus on (writing) full-time.
Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you stress about chasing more?

… And Then You Die

Something Beyond Our Selves

Ernest Becker: Denial of Death (book).
Religion, politics, sport, art, and technological innovation are the result of people’s immortality projects. Becker argues that wars and revolutions and mass murder occur when one group of people’s immortality projects rub against another group’s.
Once we become comfortable with the fact of our own death - the root terror, the underlying anxiety motivating all of life’s frivolous ambitions - we can then choose our values more freely, unrestrained by the illogical quest for immortality, and freed from dangerous dogmatic views;

The Sunny Side of Death

Mark Twain: “The fear of death follows the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
There is nothing to be afraid. Ever. And reminding myself of my own death repeatedly over the years - is the only thing that has helped me hold this realization front and center in my mind.