A sarcastic approach to self-improvement and calculated indifference in a social media-saturated era. Mouthy, encouraging, but also at times cloying and forced.
There are a few different ways to describe this book: "Viktor Frankl with a potty mouth" and "Buddhism lite" both come to mind, but at the same time it's also quite beautiful to watch this young author work out his own morality and his own code for how to live. You get to walk alongside on his journey--albeit at the cost of seeing more of his inner mind than you might want. And the book's central message is worth reiterating: we all have a limited number of "fucks to give" in this life, so don't waste them: think carefully about where and how you deploy your energy, your effort and your emotional attachment.
This book is a competent introduction to domains like Stoicism and Buddhism, and it addresses a number of cognitive blind spots and fallacies, thus it's a useful resource to curious readers new to these topics. This book didn't resonate with me particularly, but it might with you.
Notes:
Ch 1: Don't Try
1) Opens with an anecdote about Charles Bukowski, who failed for a long time before stumbling on a success, and his tombstone has the epitaph Don't Try. "...he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it."
2) "Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're the same thing." This is a striking pair of sentences, but is it insightful? Is it a word salad? What does it really mean? What are the implications of these sentences? The author leaves hanging a lot of threads like these.
3) On our culture's obsession with "happier, healthier, the best!, smarter... all positive expectations.
4) "You are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time." This is good for those marketing to you, not good for you.
5) Saying "Who gives a fuck?" as a cheat code for evading/not facing down worry, hatred, disappointment in yourself, etc.
6) "...and we're too busy watching porn and advertisements for ab machines that don't work, wondering why we're not banging a hot blonde with a rocking six-pack, to notice." Amusing grammar problems here! To start, who has the six-pack?
7) "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." Lifted this right out of stoicism (and Buddhism, and Christianity).
8) When the author says "don't give a fuck" what he really means is self-acceptance. It's quite an interesting rhetorical end-run around the problem. When you care less about something, for example, you'll do better at it, it with threaten you less, you lower the stakes, etc.
9) "Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience." On running towards pain, running towards your fears, etc., instead of avoiding pain. "To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you're able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable." Again, this is good rhetoric, an interesting end-run around a problem.
10) The following "bag of burritos" quote is an example of writing that will either bother or amuse you: if the latter you'll likely enjoy this book.
"Now, while not giving a fuck may seem simple on the surface, it’s a whole new bag of burritos under the hood. I don’t even know what that sentence means, but I don’t give a fuck. A bag of burritos sounds awesome, so let’s just go with it." Note, however, this quote is literal copypasta from his original blog post where he first began fleshing out this idea. An author who doesn't a fuck for sure.
11) What I'm talking about is learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts, where to give fucks and where not to.
12) Also a nuance to not giving a fuck is also in the sense of "damn, watch out, Mark Manson just don't give a fuck" meaning he actually does give a fuck, he just doesn't give a fuck about the adversity in the face of what he wants to achieve, and doesn't care about pissing people off to do what he feels is right. Interesting point here: this is separate from deciding to deploy your emotional energy, this actually goes to the extent to which you will fight to get to your goals, the level of adversity you'll plow through, the level of discomfort you will remain totally indifferent to, etc.
Ch 2: Happiness Is a Problem
13) The story about the Buddha, and then a biological discussion of suffering. "We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature's preferred agent for inspiring change." A feature, not a bug, of human evolution.
14) Happiness comes from solving problems, which means, counterintuitively, you want problems, preferably good problems.
15) Negative emotions are calls to action, positive emotions are rewards for taking the proper action. Useful way to think about it here.
16) We shouldn't always trust our own emotions, in fact "I believe we should make a habit of questioning them."
17) Everybody wants good things, but a more interesting question is "what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?" Totally agreed on this: whatever happiness or satisfaction that "ensues" (in the Viktor Frankl sense) to us in life is it function of our ability to take pain, to handle adversity.
18) On the author's delusional dreams of being a rock and roll star: he loved the dream but he didn't like the climb, finding it easier to "imagine the summit" in his mind; wanting the reward but not the struggle, and the result not the process.
Ch 3: You Are Not Special
19) On the self-esteem movement, the trophy generation, grade inflation, etc., all of which obscure the fact that adversity and failure are useful and necessary, while teaching people to believe they're exceptional and that they should feel good about themselves no matter what. This isn't the good thing we thought it was! [It's as if the self-esteem movement had its own "food pyramid" moment.]
20) Note also our "specialness": On feeling like a loser, but in the "special" sense that you have special unsolvable problems, you have some sort of special unworthiness or inferiority, your problems are unique and nothing can be done about them, etc. An interesting nuance to think of specialness in the "secret king"/gamma personality context. Once again: you are not special, whether you think you're an amazing winner or if you think you're a loser.
21) The tyranny of exceptionalism: everyone around me seems so amazing, but if I'm not going to be extraordinary, what's the point? Also the idea of being terrified (or resistant to the idea) of our own mediocrity.
22) Instead of trying to be so "special" and exceptional: know instead that your actions don't matter that much, most of your life is not noteworthy and that's okay. This takes all this pressure of being amazing off your back, then you're free to do what you want to do without judgment or lofty expectations. You'll also have a growing appreciation for life's basic experiences.
Ch 4: The Value of Suffering
23) Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese army, unaware the war was over, stationed on a small island in the Philippines, holding out for 25 years, regretting nothing. (Of course he regrets nothing--what else could he say?) Returns to Japan and is horrified with his country's capitalist, consumerist, superficial culture, its loss of tradition and honor, he becomes more depressed than ever.
24) Instead of asking "How do I stop suffering?" (avoidant, passive, looking for "analgesic-type" solutions) asking "Why am I suffering? For what purpose?" (getting at the root of it, or seeing value in the suffering itself, applying agency to it rather than avoidance).
25) [The irony I see here about Onoda: his suffering moved from the physical domain (war/privation) to an existential domain (disturbed by what he considered terrible changes in his culture), in reality it shouldn't have meant any less, emotional suffering is no different from physical suffering, is it?]
26) Suddenly we move to the topic of self-awareness [I don't see the sequitur here!] On asking why questions, starting with understanding/perceiving one's emotional state, then asking why to get the root cause, then asking why am I choosing such a standard for myself?
27) The self-evident irony of Dave Mustaine, considering himself a failure even though he went on to found Megadeth, because he was kicked out of Metallica. This is quite a funny story actually, worth ruminatng on this a little bit: is it wrong that he would believe he's a failure? Maybe his standards are not normal "regular person" standards. Maybe the metric here is reaching your potential?
28) And the point the author leaves untouched here is you have to be iterative in terms of how you measure your values, how you define success, and what that is relative to your life situation at any given time as the arc of your life introduces you to new situations. Maybe you might have an injury and you have to learn how to run all over again on a knee after ACL surgery, thus your standards are going to be much different from what they were before, but they still must be incrementalist and relative to where you are.
29) Shitty values:
1) pleasure
2) material success
3) always being right
4) staying positive
30) Constant positivity as a form of avoidance.
31) Good values are:
1) reality-based
2) socially constructive ["eucivic"] and
3) immediate and controllable
versus bad values which are
1) superstitious
2) socially destructive ["dyscivic"] and
3) not immediate nor controllable
32) Good values as intrinsic, bad values as extrinsic. The author then gives "eating a cannoli while getting blown by three strippers" as a bad value. I wonder, would Viktor Frankl agree here?
33) Something about the authors conclusions about Hiroo Onoda's values isn't quite right: that is, service to the Japanese empire was a terrible value (something that probably couldn't have been known except in retrospect, or at least late in the game, long after WWII began), later his comeuppance comes from returning to Japanese society and finding it decadent.
34) [Also note the dangers of declarative values and declared emotions versus actual revealed preferences: this is a fallacy where we put value on what things we see and hear about people versus their internal states.]
35) Now we learn the reader isn't technically supposed to not give a fuck: rather the reader should give better fucks, or at least take his fucks from things of lesser value and divert those fucks to something with more value. So, readers are supposed to give fucks after all. This is one of the things about this book that make it somewhat of a word salad, it's not always coherent and it is not really a book-type work but rather a collection of catchy extended blog posts.
36) The next five chapters will be five counterintuitive values:
1) radical responsibility
2) uncertainty
3) failure
4) rejection
5) contemplation of one's own mortality
Ch 5: You Are Always Choosing
37) William James deciding in his diary after reading lectures by Charles Peirce (see books below in the To Read section), that "he would spend one year believing that he was 100 percent responsible for everything that occurred in his life, no matter what." An experiment that led to a personal rebirth.
38) We are responsible for interpreting our experiences, the events that happen to us, and choosing our responses and choosing the values by which we live. [This is Viktor Frankl's idea: we can't always choose our experiences or what happens to us, but we can always choose the nature of our response and reaction to those experiences.]
39) "We are responsible for experiences that aren't our fault all the time. This is part of life." Differentiating between fault and responsibility. Also differentiating your response to a life situation versus who is to blame for it. Also the central agency of being able to choose how you react to things.
40) On how the author realize that his ex-girlfriend who cheated on him and dumped him was "never going to pop up and fix things for me. I had to fix them for myself." She was at fault, she was to blame, but it was his responsibility to handle himself going forward: later he credits this experience for a significant amount of his personal growth. Another good example of how this book is Man's Search For Meaning-lite, and this is not a pejorative at all.
41) On "victimhood chic" in the modern era of virtue signaling; getting moral righteousness out of injustice and victimhood, gaining attention and sympathy by sharing instances of your being a victim, what Ryan Holiday calls outrage porn. Obviously the more people who claim themselves as victims the harder it becomes to see actual victims and to apply appropriate attention and help toward them.
42) A good quotation from the author as he quotes Tim Kreider in the New York Times: "[O]utrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but, over time, devour us from the inside out. And it's even more insidious than most vices because we don't even consciously acknowledge that it's a pleasure." Well put.
Ch 6: You're Wrong About Everything (But So Am I)
43) This chapter explores in a superficial way what Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong explores in a profound and beautiful way. Or what Dan Gilbert's book Stumbling On Happiness explores in a amusing and yet psychologically rigorous way. That said, it never hurts to get a little reminder of the ideas here.
44) Growth is iterative, being wrong is something desirable, so we can become a little less wrong in the future
45) Don't trust your perception of a positive or a negative experience.
46) Our brains generate meaning by producing associations between two or more experiences, and our minds are biased to (emotionally, egoically) attach to those meanings, those conclusions.
47) See Meredith Maran's autobiography My Lie: A True Story of False Memory about her false memory/belief that her father sexually abused her as a child, then her recanting of that belief eight years later. See also the contagion of these cases throughout the 1980s. [How can someone like this be "contagious"? And yet it literally is: and the "vector of contagion" was therapists using repressed memory therapy, which fell into vogue in the 80s, was later fully therapeutically debunked, and then fell totally out of fashion in therapeutic circles. What's sobering is every generation has contagions just like this, including today's contagion, which we might describe as "the disease of 'fear of coronavirus'" and the vehement embracing an mandating of novel genetic biotherapies to deal with those fears.]
48) A fundamental takeaway here is to trust yourself less: the author advocates epistemic humility about all of our beliefs--as well as our beliefs about our beliefs.
49) See Roy Baumeister's Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty where he argues that the idea that people "did bad things because they felt horrible about themselves and had low self-esteem" was totally not true--in fact it was the exact opposite: the worst criminals felt great about themselves despite the reality around them.
50) Unfortunate yet again to see yet another book citing the now fully debunked Stanley Milgram experiments. Why does the author not know that the Milgram experiments have been debunked? Perhaps we can have some sympathy because the debunking became widely known around 2015, probably when this author was finishing up his book for publication.
51) And a larger question: When are we going to wipe these debunked studies from our knowledge base so we can stop seeing them cited ad nauseam in pop literature?
52) Embracing uncertainty as a hack to remove our judgments of others, and limit stereotyping and biases; it's also a hack to relieve us of our judgment of ourselves. See, however, the existential suffering most people have to go through either to experience uncertainty about their current beliefs and values, or to go about doubting and changing their beliefs and values... I suspect this discomfort is something that's too difficult for most people to embrace, thus likely most people will be unable to employ this hack.
53) On how Buddhism encourages you to not give a fuck. [Gee I think Manson might have lifted this idea right out of the Lotus Sutra!]
54) It's also liberating, per the author, to not be special and not be unique, and to lose your attachment to those conceptions of the self. It's liberating because it can take away self-limiting beliefs and fears about the things we're capable of. It's also quite a good cure for grandiosity.
55) Three questions to ask yourself to work on your uncertainty skills:
1) What if I'm wrong?
"As a general rule, where all the world's worst observers of ourselves."
2) What would it mean if I were wrong?
A meta-question to 1). People don't pursue this question either because being wrong is painful.
3) Would being wrong create--a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?
This is a really interesting collection of questions and thought experiments.
56) "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
--Aristotle
Ch 7: Failure Is the Way Forward
57) The Picasso story about charging a woman $20,000 for a napkin drawing ("it took me over 60 years to draw this") is ill-placed here.
58) How most of us reach a place where we're afraid to fail, we stick only to what we're already good at.
59) Kazimierz Dabrowski and his studies of World War II survivors: discovering many found the trauma they experienced caused them to become better, more responsible and even happier people, it caused them to transcend the petty problems that life brings us and helped them be less fazed by life's trivialities and annoyances.
60) [It's unfortunate but clear that this author is mostly--perhaps exclusively--using secondary sources, not primary sources/original texts, as source documents for many of his ideas and examples. It would be nice if Manson would talk about some of the primary sources themselves: for example Dabrowski's major work Positive Disintegration sounds like it might be fascinating.]
61) More from Dabrowski: "one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally happier life."
62) On taking action as a route toward motivating yourself, finding answers, getting inspiration etc. The "do something" principle.
Ch 8: The Importance of Saying No
63) The author starts making modest money selling courses and PDFs online in the 2009 era, decides to try the digital nomad life, then discovers freedom isn't all it's cracked up to be, that in fact freedom only comes from a narrowing of your choices and a rejection of alternatives.
64) What he's talking about here is redirecting your fucks to specific areas and giving fucks where you want them to be given.
65) On boundaries in relationships: the author summarizes it as: "It's not about giving a fuck about everything your partner gives a fuck about; it's about giving a fuck about your partner regardless of the fucks he or she gives. That's unconditional love, baby." Not the best writing, but the central idea is sound: the point is to exercise agency over where you direct your attention and effort, and likewise support your partner to do the same.
66) This is the weakest chapter so far, it's all over the place, it doesn't have a coherent topic, it leaps from making choices to relationship boundaries, to cheating, to consumer culture, all without coherent transitions and without a coherent central thread.
Ch 9: ...And Then You Die
67) He loses his friend to an accident, then much later he discovers "that if there really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do anything"... thus the idea of death becomes freeing: "it's all just a bunch of nothing anyway." His friend's death marks a major before/after point in his life.
68) On Ernest Becker's life, and his 1974 work The Denial of Death which makes two essential points:
1) Humans can conceptualize themselves abstractly and thus can become aware of our own death, which produces "death terror" a deep anxiety underlying everything.
2) This terror of death causes us to create a conceptual self that will live forever: this is why we put our names on buildings, on statues and books, why we try to influence people via our conceptual self. Becker calls these "immortality projects" and all of human civilization is basically a result of immortality projects.
69) This chapter basically tells the reader to spend a lot more time contemplating your own death, or the death of your egoic "self": this is again Stoicism-lite/Buddhism-lite, but nothing wrong with that: this is a practice that has tremendous merit and value. Our death is inevitable, we have no choice but to come to terms with it, so we might as well get used to the idea. By this we will face down "the root terror, the underlying anxiety motivating all of life's frivolous ambitions."
70) It's interesting to think about what he's getting at here: that the eucivic behavior of the generations before us and their efforts to build something that endured beyond themselves has led to, in our generations, a dyscivic period of decadence, self-absorption, entitlement, adversity, avoidance, comfort-seeking and short-term thinking. This should bring to mind many of the central concepts in The Fourth Turning. It's why we're likely heading towards some sort of geopolitical crisis and why so many systems and institutions are corrupted and decayed today. And--although I'm not sure this was the author's intent--he gives us a paradigm for us to consider our behavior: Is it dycivic or eucivic, will it lead to lasting uncorrupted institutions or is it corrupted in some way and therefore won't last? Or: Will we comport ourselves like great men or will we comport ourselves like weak men who feel they need to be seen as great?
To Read:
Charles Bukowski: Post Office
Charles Sanders Peirce: Lectures on Pragmatism
Charles Sanders Peirce: The Essential Peirce, Vols 1, 2
James Campbell: William James, Charles Peirce and American Pragmatism
Meredith Maran: My Lie: A True Story of False Memory
Roy Baumeister: Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty
***Kazimierz Dąbrowski: Positive Disintegration
Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death