The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

By Mark Manson

Summary

In this book, Mark Manson demonstrates a mindset that you should have in order to in essence live a better life. It’s basically a self help book. In essence the key concept is we should limit the number of things we care about, and things outside of what we care about are not that important and thus, we should not give a fuck about them.

He talks about how positivity is not necessarily the key to living a happy, rich life, but just giving a fuck about the right things and not about the wrong things.

Quotes

Notice how sometimes when you stop giving a fuck, everything seems to fall into place?

This is probably my favorite quote, because it is oh so relevant. Usually the more I give a fuck about something/someone, the worse off it ends up.

The genius in Bukowski’s work was not in overcoming unbelievable odds or developing himself into a shining literary light. It was the opposite. It was his simple ability to be completely, unflinchingly honest with himself—especially the worst parts of himself—and to share his failings without hesitation or doubt

(Bukowski was the novelist who was basically a bum until his 50’s).

My thoughts

I think a lot of the individual points he made are very valid and interesting but overall it’s just a series of scenarios explaining why something we’re doing is wrong / could be living a better life. I’d say it’s on par with any other “self improvement” book you could find, not dissimilar even to like Atomic Habits.

One particularly interesting part I thought was when he described his time living abroad in Russia (or even abroad in general was interesting to know he traveled for 5 years from ~23-28. Sounds great). In Russia, people are brutally honest, all the time. He described going on a date once and the woman he was on the date with at one point just looked at him and said “that was a really stupid thing to say” after he made some dumb comment. Basically, the sugar coating and non-confrontational nature is something specific to our generation and country. Un-intuitively, calling people out and being slightly confrontational actually makes everyone far more trustworthy because no one is hiding anything.