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Life is fucked up. Period. Whether we like it or not. We are constantly bombarded with reasons to get anxious about, worrying about what other people think of us, busy to alter and re-shape what we are, do and think in order to meet society’s expectations. And what does this lead to? Anxiety, stress, mental and physical fatigue, being unhappy, and frustration.
Many authors leverage on this bitter reality to evangelise the theory of positive thinking, making you feel like everything is going to be fine and that everything will work out somehow. Because you are special, and different, and you deserve better… oh, and your problems are unique. Well, not Mark Manson. Unlike many other authors, Mark Manson’s approach is unlike any others: blunt, straight to the point, without filters and without sugar coating the ‘Uncomfortable Truth’: you are no different than anyone else and eventually you’ll die too. With this in mind, Mark shows us how to be selective about the fucks we give, encouraging you to embrace conflict, to be comfortable feeling uncomfortable, and to help you look at life as what it really is: a fucked up, transitory mess where we need to give a meaningful sense to our short existence. And how do we do that? Not by giving more fucks, but being selecting about the fucks you give.
Everyone wants you to believe that the key to a good life is a nicer job, or a more rugged car, or a prettier partner, or a hot tub. The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more. You are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time. Give a fuck about a new TV. Give a fuck about having a better vacation than your coworkers. Give a fuck about buying that new lawn ornament. Give a fuck about having the right kind of selfie stick. The problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. 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.
If you are looking for a thought-provoking book that helps you to find out what really matters to you the most, using unconventional methods backed-up by scientific resources and lightened up by jokes, then this book is definitely for you.
☠️ “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. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.”
💩 “No matter where you go, there’s a five-hundred-pound load of shit waiting for you. And that’s perfectly fine. The point isn’t to get away from the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.”
🙅🏻♂️ “We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing we essentially have no identity at all”
👨🏻🚒 “What pain do you want in your life?”
🙉 “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.”
🫡 “Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”
💥 “Because when we give too many fucks, when we choose to give a fuck about everything, then we feel as though we are perpetually entitled to feel comfortable and happy at all times, that’s when life fucks us.”
🧚🏻♂️ “The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.”
👨🏻⚖️ “Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.”
🥰 “To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action;”
🛖 “Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”
🛼 “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.”
🛩️ “Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it’s not necessarily the best way to live.”
🪂 “Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.”
🎻 “Romeo and Juliet is synonymous with “romance” in our culture today. It is seen as the love story in English-speaking culture, an emotional ideal to live up to. Yet when you really get down to what happens in the story, these kids are absolutely out of their fucking minds. And they just killed themselves to prove it!”
💸 “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.” And”
🪃 “Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.”
🫧 “I say don’t 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 judgments and accepting of the differences in others.”
📓 **THE BACKWARD LAW -** “The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you 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 shallower you become in trying to get there.
📓 **EMBRACE FAILURE -** I have discussed this learning point in huge details [in this article](https://www.antonellovona.com/overcoming-failure/). Failure is what ultimately helps you to succeed. So embrace it and look forward to fail, because the quicker you fail the quicker you learn how to achieve your goals.
📓 **PICK YOUR FUCKS WISELY -** Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. There is no such thing as not giving a fuck. You must give a fuck about something. Its 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. Essentially, we become more selective about the fucks we’re willing to give. This is something called maturity. It’s nice; you should try it sometime. Maturity is what happens when one learns to only to give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.
📓 **DON’T FIND YOURSELF -** “I say don’t 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 judgments and accepting of the differences in others.” – I would rephrase the sentence “find yourself” to “discover yourself”. Finding yourself means to find that one, static version of yourself which comes with set traits, beliefs, and habits. Discovering yourself means to constantly challenge who you are, what you do, what you believe and what you think you know. Discovering yourself means to grow.
This book helped me with the following:
– Bring clarity around my thought process;
– Re-consider my priorities helping me to draw a line between what’s important to me and what’s not.
– Helped me to have an unfiltered relationship with myself and with others;
I never got bored reading this book, nor I felt like some pages were filled with recycled topics just to hit the word count.
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