The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Summarized by the Author

what's up everybody mark manson here number one new york times best-selling author of the subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] it's funny i was actually looking around youtube and google and i found that dozens of people have posted summaries of my book well [ __ ] you if there's going to be a summary of the book it should come from the master non-fucking himself moi so gather round children prepare yourselves as i take you chapter by chapter through this modern self-help masterpiece [Music] so before i actually get into the book and kind of summarize each chapter in a few minutes i want to zoom out a little bit and just tell you briefly what my goal is by writing this book [Music] first of all contrary to most people's perceptions the book is not about not caring about things in fact it's about the opposite of that it's essentially it makes the argument that you have to give a [ __ ] about something therefore the most important question is what are you giving a [ __ ] about and why now that's a pretty cute little concept on the surface and i think it's why a lot of people bought the book or enjoyed the book initially but my goal with this book is that it's essentially a book about values i very intentionally wanted to be contrarian to the self-help industry most self-help takes for granted what your values are it takes for granted what your definition of success is it assumes you want a big mansion and a fancy car and a perfect marriage with three and a half kids in a guitar-shaped swimming pool most self-help books just assume that we all want the same thing whereas in my book i wanted to point out that a lot of these cultural definitions of success a lot of these cultural values may not be the right fit for us and so the real important question of getting ahead in life or improving our lives is not necessarily figuring out how to accomplish every single goal we have it's more in asking what sorts of goals should we have in the first place what sorts of things should we give a [ __ ] about so you'll see as we go through it that there are a lot of points in the book where i'm very intentionally contradicting most typical self-help advice part of this i'm doing for effect it's to grab people's attention and to to make them think a little bit more critically about some of their assumptions but some of it is legitimate some of it i do strongly believe uh is more correct than the general self-help advice out there so without further ado let's get into it chapter one don't try i start the book off with a story about charles bukowski he was a very famous fiction and poetry writer but he was a total drunk he was a low life he was in and out of prison he had drug problems he had prostitute problems i mean he was just he was a total mess i actually wanted to open the book with him because he is kind of a counter argument to most of the examples that you see in books like this you know you're used to opening a a book about how to improve your life and seeing a story about like steve jobs or elon musk or something like that and i wanted to start with bukowski because it shows that you can actually become conventionally successful in life despite yourself you can become successful while seemingly doing all the wrong things and committing all the biggest errors so even beginning on the first page i'm starting to undermine the reader's assumed definition of what success is or what is a good life or a desirable life for themselves now the big idea to take away from chapter one and this is the most underlying thing in the book and one of the most underlying things on amazon kindle ever is something called the backwards law and the backwards law originally comes from alan watts but i rephrase it my own way and i say that the pursuit of positive experience is itself a negative experience and the acceptance of a negative experience is itself a positive experience so i go on and give a number of examples of the backwards law i say that the idea is that the more that 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 desperately you want to be rich the more poor and unworthy you will feel regardless of how much money you have the more desperately you want to be sexy and desired the uglier you will 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 will become regardless of those who surround you the more you wish to be spiritually enlightened the more self-centered and shallow you become in trying to get there i then follow that up with it's like that one time i tripped on acid and it felt like the more i walked towards the house the farther away the house got for me good times good times so the backwards law introduces the central theme of the book which is that negativity is actually the path to positivity most people's assumption is they just want the positive experiences from life but it's actually the tolerance and acceptance of the negative experience that leads to the positive experience and i will end up spending pretty much the entire book expanding upon this so i go on to finish chapter one by introducing the the give a [ __ ] framework and i i have uh three subtleties of not giving a [ __ ] so subtlety number one is not giving a [ __ ] does not mean being indifferent it means being comfortable with being different one point that i make throughout the book and i dispel very early on is that indifference is impossible if you give a [ __ ] about nothing then you are giving a [ __ ] about giving a [ __ ] about nothing it is impossible to not give a [ __ ] about something therefore the question is what do you give a [ __ ] about and kind of the conclusion that arises is that if you give a [ __ ] about a few very important things then the small things cease to bother you so much subtlety number two is to not give a [ __ ] about adversity you must first give a [ __ ] about something more important than adversity so if you're always worrying about what people think about you the problem is not what people think about you the problem is you don't have anything better to worry about if you're always worried about how much money you have the problem is not how much money you have the problem is that you don't have anything better to worry about subtlety number three whether you realize it or not you are always choosing what to give a [ __ ] about this concept of choosing will come back and enforce in uh chapter five pretty much the entire chapter is about it all right so that's chapter one kind of lays the groundwork starts off very contrarian drops a lot of f-bombs a lot of people like that some people don't uh chapter two is called happiness is a problem so chapter 2 opens up with the story of the buddha and focuses on the central buddhist doctrine of dukkha or the fact that life is suffering that no matter what you do where you go who you hang out with what you pursue there is some facet of suffering associated with it simply because our mind becomes attached to things and attachment leads to suffering but instead of kind of going down the buddhist rabbit hole with it i take it off in another direction and i explain i say you know it's not like we're doomed to suffer it's that suffering has a certain evolutionary usefulness to it like if you think about evolution over the course of hundreds of thousands of years a creature that is happy all the time that creature is not gonna survive it's actually the creature that is a little bit dissatisfied all the time a little bit anxious all the time a little bit paranoid a little bit pissed off at the people around him like that's the creature that's gonna do the most work to actually survive and replicate i think this this modern idea that we shouldn't have to feel bad ever is completely misguided not only is it misguided but it goes against our evolutionary nature our genetic nature negative emotions have an inherent purpose to them and they help us and so a lot of this chapter is describing how a lot of the anxiety that we wish to escape from or the anger we wish to overcome these emotions are actually signals within our body to do something they are important signals and if we ignore them or if we train ourselves to ignore them then we are actually limiting ourselves in a lot of ways i also talk about a psychology concept called the hedonic treadmill this idea that happiness is it's like a treadmill it's like you know you think if i get a boat i'll be happy and then you get the boat and it's like you've got to pay docking fees you're like man if i could just find a better dock i'd be happy and then you find a better dock then you realize that none of your friends want to drive out to that new dock you're like man if i could just have some friends to hang out on my boat then i'd be happy and then you get friends on your boat but then they get too drunk and they fall overboard and you have to like throw in life preservers and save them and call the coast guard and you're like man if i didn't have to call the coast guard then i'd be happy and it's like happiness is it's like this carrot always dangling in front of you no matter what you do so if the point of chapter one is to kind of undermine our expectations about positive and negative experience chapter two's point is to undermine our expectations about positive and negative emotion negative emotions have a lot of utility they have a lot of purpose they help us they grant us meaning in a lot of situations and they signal to us that we have challenges or problems that must be overcome happiness happiness is great we all want to be happy it's not the only thing in life there are bad forms of happiness doing cocaine all day that'll make you happy for a while doesn't mean you should go do it serial killers seem to be very pleased with themselves while they're killing people over and over again doesn't mean they should do it the the emotions themselves are not necessarily good or bad it's the context around them it's the meaning around them and so i end up kind of creating this framework where i say that happiness comes from solving problems if you either pretend you have no problems in your life to solve then you won't be happy but if you also have problems in your life that you feel you can't solve then you won't be happy so kind of the secret sauce is finding problems that you kind of want to have or kind of enjoy having and that's how i wrap up the chapter with a section called choose your struggle now i'll actually read the first couple paragraphs of that section because it's it's one of the most important sections of the book in it and it's it's resonated with a lot of people so if i ask you what do you want out of your life and you say something like i want to be happy and have a great family and a job i like your response is so common and expected that it doesn't mean anything everybody enjoys what feels good everybody wants to live a carefree happy and easy life to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships to look perfect and make lots of money and be popular and well respected and admired everybody wants that it's easy to want that a more interesting question a question that most people never consider is what pain do i want in my life what am i willing to struggle for because that actually seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out [ __ ] sweet all right chapter three one of my favorite chapters you are not special you're not nobody is so you are not special it opens up with a story of a guy i knew named jimmy jimmy is actually he's a kind of a composite of two different people i knew but jimmy is basically he's a con man essentially like pathological liar schemer [ __ ] artist 24 7 salesman i knew him for about a year in my in my mid-20s back when i was starting my first business and and he was starting a number of businesses too and the dude he was just a grifter total low life wasted money left right and center and so i tell this story about jimmy and i use him as an example for a a concept i introduce of entitlement i define entitlement in the book as feeling as though you deserve to be happy without sacrificing for it it's basically that idea of believing you deserve to have positive experiences without traversing the negative experiences to get there i spent much of this chapter pointing out both from stories about jimmy but also stories of me being a [ __ ] in my own life that it's this belief that we shouldn't have to go through the negative and only have the positive that causes us to adopt many destructive and uh selfish behaviors so the middle of the chapter is the story about how i uh i got arrested for selling drugs if you want to hear about that you should buy the book so here here you go there are two forms of entitlement form number one is i'm awesome and the rest of you all suck therefore i deserve to have special treatment form number two is i suck and the rest of you are awesome so i deserve special treatment so in psychological research this is known as grandiose narcissism versus victim narcissism and it's basically they seem to be opposites on the surface like one person thinks he's better than everybody and then the other person thinks he's worse than everybody but the behavior ends up being the same because both people have delusional beliefs about their place in the status hierarchy one person thinks he's at the top one person thinks he's at the bottom but the behavior ends up being the same they end up being completely self-absorbed they think everything in the world should be altered and catered to them and yeah they just become unbearable to be around and so i spend much of this chapter probably the second half of this chapter describing how the growing culture of exceptionalism particularly with social media consumer culture things like that they're always pushing us individually like if you think of beer commercials or like you know the way facebook algorithms are designed like everything is designed to make you feel like you're the most special [ __ ] person on the planet and my argument is that that is actually mentally and socially unhealthy because that drives an attitude and a feeling of entitlement it creates delusional beliefs that that you are somehow the exception that the world owes you something that's everything should be rearranged to cater to your desires and your happiness that you should be able to have positive experiences without accepting the negative i close out the chapter by using a metaphor that that i really like i'll just read a couple paragraphs all of this quote every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness stuff is basically just jerking off your ego it's a message that tastes good going down but in reality it's nothing more than empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated the proverbial big mac for your heart and your brain the ticket to emotional health like that to physical health comes from eating your veggies that is accepting the bland and mundane truths of life truths such as your actions actually don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things and the vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy and that's okay this vegetable course will taste bad at first very bad but once ingested your body will wake up feeling more potent and alive so that's chapter three chapter four the value of suffering so in my mind the book is actually kind of in two parts even though i didn't divide it into two parts the first three chapters are very much about this desire for positive experience and unwillingness to sacrifice or go through the negative experience to get through the positive experience starting with chapter four the book becomes a lot more about values and it becomes more about what are we willing to sacrifice for so like assuming you buy the arguments of the first three chapters that we should sacrifice for something that we should struggle for something that that's what actually what makes life more meaningful and generates a more consistent sense of happiness the next question is what is worth struggling for what is worth valuing what is worth sacrificing for and so i i opened up the book with a world war ii story about a japanese soldier who it's super interesting there was a number of japanese soldiers in world war ii like they got stranded on random islands in the pacific and nobody told them the war was over so they they continued to fight the war into the 1950s 60s and even 70s and so the last soldier who was still fighting world war ii i think he finally surrendered in like 1973 or something like that i'd have to look here anyway his name was hiro nada and i wrote his story here and i used him as an example of how like it doesn't matter how disciplined you are it doesn't matter how motivated you are it doesn't matter how strong you are how intelligent you are how much support you have if you have the wrong goal you're [ __ ] if you have the wrong value then all of that other stuff it's just going to hurt you and i use onada as an example of that he spent 27 years fighting a war that didn't exist literally killing people he was on a obscure island in the philippines he was still shooting at people killing people hiding in the jungle for 27 years and obviously he was doing an amazing job but he was like don quixote he was like chasing windmills right so the chapter opens up with that and it uses that to kind of introduce this topic of values so if we agree that we should sacrifice what is worth sacrificing for i talk about dave mustain from megadeth and metallica as an example of good and bad values and then i kind of finish the chapter up with my attempt at defining what are good and bad values and i i just lay out a few principles so good values tend to be one reality based two socially constructive and three immediate and controllable bad values tend to be one superstitious two socially destructive and three not immediate or controllable i go on to say honesty is a good value because it's something you can have complete control over it reflects reality and it benefits others even if it's sometimes unpleasant there's a whole section kind of diving into you know what makes a value good or bad and then i finished this section by saying the rest of this book the last five chapters of this book so chapters five through nine i'm going to propose five kind of classes of values or things to give a [ __ ] about that are a little bit counterintuitive but i have found to be very important and that's where chapter five picks up all right chapter five you are always choosing in my opinion this is maybe the most important chapter i would say two five and nine are the most important chapters two is the one kind of challenging notions of happiness five is about responsibility and then nine will be about death so you are always choosing i i open up the chapter with a story about william james and then i i kind of offer the reader a thought experiment and i say imagine like a mafia guy kidnaps your family and then puts a gun to their head and says if you don't run a marathon tomorrow i'm gonna kill your family and you're out of shape you haven't gotten off the couch in a week this would be horrible it would be absolutely traumatic it'd be terrifying arguably the worst experience of your life now imagine training for nine months hiring a coach buying a bunch of gear practicing getting ready for a marathon running the marathon having your family attend cheer you on crossing the finish line and then going and celebrating with everybody you care about and love in your life that would be one of the best experiences of your life now what's interesting is that the actual pain of running the marathon isn't any different the only thing that's changed is the context and what i argue in this chapter is that what has actually changed is the perception that you chose to run the marathon or not for whatever reason when we feel as though we are choosing our struggles or we are choosing what problems we have in our life they seem much more acceptable and easier for us to deal with when we feel as though our problems and our struggles are thrust upon us without our control that's when we suffer that's when we feel completely powerless the big kind of epiphany of this chapter is that you are always choosing whether you realize it or not there's no such thing as a situation where you are not choosing your struggle or not choosing your problem the only thing that changes is whether you admit it to yourself or not people don't like hearing this point they don't like hearing the idea that every problem in their life they chose it and the second section of this chapter the reason why is i point out that we tend to conflate responsibility in fault we assume that if you are responsible for something it means that it's your fault but these are two completely different things you know it's like if i get cancer it's not my fault that i got cancer but it is absolutely my responsibility to deal with the cancer you know if somebody leaves a newborn baby on my doorstep that's not my fault that somebody left it there but it is absolutely my responsibility i have to do something about it and every moment of life is this way even if the mob boss kidnaps your family makes you run a marathon you are choosing to run the marathon you are choosing for the lives of the people you care about to be more important than the pain of the marathon the thing you are choosing from moment to moment is how to value each experience so even if like let's say i go to a baseball game and i'm bored to tears i'm choosing to be bored why because i'm choosing not to be interested in the baseball game sure i could sit there and blame the baseball game like oh you're so [ __ ] boring why don't you entertain me more well why don't i change my definition of entertainment why don't i change what i find interesting why don't i develop the ability to pay more attention or appreciate the subtleties of throwing a curveball or something in each experience in life there is a component of choice embedded in it and we tend not to be aware of that choice but as soon as we become aware of it two things happen one we become way more comfortable with pain and two we actually get off our ass and [ __ ] do something because now we don't care whose fault it is anymore we don't care if it's boring or or tedious or unfair you [ __ ] do something you realize in every moment you have a choice to do something or not do something to blame somebody else or take responsibility yourself and once you develop that habit or that value of constant responsibility everything [ __ ] changes so this whole chapter i kind of lay that argument out in the first couple pages and literally the entire chapter is just knocking down objections to it so i you know i knocked down the the responsibility i called the responsibility fault fallacy um i talk about genetics i talk about life situation i talk about surviving trauma um i talk about cultural pressures it's there's there's no [ __ ] excuse i mean if there's if there's anything that i'm like an extremist about it's responsibility all right well before i start sounding too self-important chapter six why you are wrong about everything but so am i this chapter starts out with another fun little thought experiment and i actually can't take full credit for this this thought experiment was kind of brought to my attention by a friend of mine named lydia she wrote some cool stuff about it but um basically it says think back 500 years ago like what seemed cutting edge and scientifically true five years ago and i point out that like people thought you know the earth was flat they didn't even know the western hemisphere existed they thought fire was made of a thing called phlogiston and then i kind of pull that out to a personal level i say you know think about what you thought was true 10 20 years ago and then i mentioned a few stupid things i thought was true when i was a kid and then from there i say now imagine everything you think is true today and imagine how ridiculous that's going to look 20 years from now or 500 years from now like everything we think is so true and important today is going to be absolutely ridiculous to us at some point and that's actually a good thing like we should hope that our present day beliefs look ridiculous to us because that means that we've grown and become smarter like i experience this all the time with my own writing i go back and look at stuff i wrote 10 years ago and i cringe i'm like this is awful like i can't believe i published this but then i remember i'm like that's great it means i've become a better writer so this thought experiment is kind of setting us up to think a little bit more about beliefs and uncertainty and being i guess a little bit open-minded for lack of a better term from there i i go into a little bit on the research of belief formation and how arbitrary it is and then i talk about the dangers of certainty and uh oh this is one of the the more fun sections of the book i actually had a cyber stalker for a number of years she was non-violent thank god what was remarkable about her was that she had this unbelievable certainty like absolutely unshakeable certainty and completely batshit crazy beliefs i mean she literally told me to my face that angels told her that we were supposed to be together that god said that our relationship was going to cure death these were things that she said to me and whenever i tried to kind of poke holes in them or point out that maybe that didn't make a lot of sense it had absolutely no effect she met my wife no effect didn't change her mind at all to me it was fascinating in that maybe one of the most troubled people i've ever known in my life was also probably the most certain and unshakable person i've ever met in my life and so i use her as an example of the binds that certainty can get us into then i use a number of examples you know from my own life and from other people's lives and then i kind of trot out the benefits of uncertainty it opens up space for you to learn and improve it helps guard you against like extremist ideology or just becoming like a crazy zealot for some cause it opens room for dialogue with people to learn from other people to make other people feel more heard which improves relationships i've got a section in here that i call manson's law of avoidance which i decided to be cheeky and name a law after myself but manson's law of avoidance says that the more something threatens your identity the more you will avoid it and i bring this up in terms of what are the pieces of information that we protect ourselves from because ultimately like grasping onto some sense of certainty it's a means of protecting our our ego from perceived threats and so manson's law basically says that like the more threatening something is the more we will become certain in things that will help us avoid dealing with that truth an extension of manson's law of avoidance is that we should define ourselves as loosely and ambiguously as possible because the the less defined our self is uh the less we need to cling to defense mechanisms or faulty ideas to protect ourselves this is fundamentally a buddhist idea the idea of no self you know if there is no such thing as self then there's nothing to protect and there's nothing that you need to be certain about in the first place finally i finish up the chapter with a few questions to help you become more uncertain in your life question number one is what if i'm wrong question number two is what would it mean if i were wrong question number three is would be wrong create a better or worse problem than my current problem both for myself and others and that's chapter six chapter seven failure is the way forward this is actually probably the most kind of like run-of-the-mill self-help chapters if you've made it this far in the book it's not going to surprise you that a book that's just spent 150 pages arguing that negative experience is the path to positive experience uh that a willingness to sacrifice prevents entitlement a willingness to be uncertain prevents crazy beliefs that we're now going to argue that failure is actually a huge component of success so this chapter is just a series of stories about all the ways picasso failed talk about you know a little-known psychologist named kasamir dabrowski who's from poland he has some great theories from studying holocaust survivors and then the the real big gem of this chapter or the thing that everybody seems to love is something that i call the do something principle and i actually made a humorous little video about it a few weeks back if you want to check it out on the channel but the do something principle is very simple and it comes from one of the great gurus of all time my high school math teacher and my high school math teacher his name is mr packwood shout out to mr packwood what's up whenever we were taking a test he used to always tell us he'd say if you don't know what to do rewrite the problem because when you rewrite the problem it will help your mind find the next step and it was crazy because it worked like you'd look at a question you'd be like oh i'm so [ __ ] i have no idea what to do but then you'd start copying out the problem and you'd be like well i can do this one little thing here and then you do the second step and then something about it it just made you see the next thing and when i went off to university i noticed that this worked for all sorts of things you know like if i was stuck on a term paper i'd be like okay let's just write the next paragraph and i'd write a paragraph and sure enough the rest of the paper would come or if i was needed to study for an exam you know it was like all right well let's just study this chapter tonight and i'd study that chapter and next thing i know i've studied three chapters and so i kind of just adopted this little mini personal philosophy of like do something just [ __ ] do it like take the smallest thing and do it i remember when i was when i suffered from a lot of social anxiety i used to tell myself just walk towards the person you want to talk to that was it that was all i had to do just walk towards him and then what would end up happening is i would walk towards them and i would keep walking and keep walking and next thing i know i'm standing in front of this person and it's like super awkward because i'm standing there and not saying anything and so to prevent the awkwardness i would say something and next thing i know i'm like talking to somebody and i'm have like i make a new friend this principle just kind of applies universally it applies all over the place it's one of those like just real special simple pieces of advice that you can uh take and use anywhere one of the things i point out in the book too is that most people assume that you need motivation to have action but i i point out that it's the other way around action actually leads to motivation and that's to do something in principle chapter eight is the importance of saying no this is kind of the relationship chapter of the book again it logically follows that if you're willing to traverse the negative to get to the positive if you're willing to take responsibility for your struggles if you're willing to accept failure on the way to success then being able to say no to people being able to manage conflict that's probably a good thing to have for your relationships and sure enough that's pretty much how i would define a healthy relationship there's two people actually i do define it in here as two people who are comfortable saying and hearing no from each other i have a section in here called rejection makes your life better which on a more philosophical note if you think about this project of choosing what you value in order to value one thing you have to reject the other things you know it's like if i want to value my career over all else i need to be able to sacrifice other things that means i need to be able to reject other things that means i need to reject my dream of becoming a pro gamer or reject the idea that i'm going to become a software engineer or reject the idea that i'm gonna go live on a beach somewhere if i choose one value to prioritize over everything else that means by definition i must be willing to reject other things if i'm not willing to reject those things then i'm not able to actually prioritize what's important in my life and so this is why people who struggle to say no they often feel very lost and they don't know what they want from themselves i talk about this uh you know saying no is kind of like the fundamental basis of boundaries and relationships how if you want to have a healthy marriage or a healthy romantic partnership you need to be able to say no to each other tell people what you don't like tell people what your values are be willing to disappoint the other person and trust that they're going to stick with you because if you are never willing to disappoint your partner then you never actually develop trust for them you never actually know if they're gonna stick with you when [ __ ] hits the fan so this is why couples that never fight eventually end up in a very toxic place finally i finished the chapter by talking about commitment and how there's kind of a hidden freedom of commitment of finding that one thing or one or two things in your life that are more important than anything else and committing full-heartedly to them on the surface it sounds limiting and i think a lot of people particularly in my generation we avoid those sorts of commitments you know it's like i want to go everywhere i want to do all the things i want to date all the people it's like this constant effort to always keep your options open but as soon as you limit yourself to a few things in your life that you truly care about there's a new form of freedom that happens on a very subtle level which is that i don't have to give a [ __ ] about this stuff i don't have to give a [ __ ] about who i'm gonna date i don't have to give a [ __ ] about what my my gaming friends think about me these are the things i care about these are the ways i'm gonna measure my life that's what i'm gonna pursue and there's just this abundance of inner mental freedom to pursue it all right so finally chapter nine and then you die uh this chapter is maybe my favorite thing i've ever written it's about death obviously um and i open up talking about a friend of mine who died at a party when i was 19. and it was incredibly shocking and traumatic upsetting i spent pretty much that entire summer dealing with depression as the months went on it actually ended up being a very transformative experience for me maybe one of the most important experiences of my life so this chapter is about how death is actually the thing that most crystallizes what matters in life it's only when you confront death or come close to death that it's most clear to you what you should be giving a [ __ ] about and therefore it makes sense and this kind of goes back to the stoics that we should regularly question our own mortality we should regularly think about our own death this is just something i've kind of instinctually done for a lot of my life is i've wondered you know if i died a year from now what would i do with my last year if i died tomorrow or if i got diagnosed with cancer tomorrow like would i have any regrets would i feel like i wasted time if so what was the time i wasted this is a very important project for us or exercise for us to do and throughout the chapter i talk about one of my favorite philosophers and scholars his name is ernest becker and then i use a little vignette of i i i have this weird fetish i guess you could call it when i visit high places i kind of have like the opposite of a fear of heights i have like an attraction to heights i i tell a story about when i was at the tape of good hope in south africa it's just it's this massive cliff over the ocean that you can literally just walk up to the edge and you know the wind blows the wrong way you just fall off and i have this weird fetish for like walking to the edge of these things and it drives everybody in my life crazy people wonder if i'm okay it wasn't until i started writing this chapter that i kind of realized why for one it forces me to confront a lot of fear in doing it but two when you are walking up to the edge of a cliff with no intention of jumping it forces you to reckon with the question of what if i do trip and fall this could be it right now this could be it there's something a little bit intoxicating for me about that thought not not that i want to trip and fall but in that it forces me to think about my life in a way that feels very profound to me so that's what i try to communicate to the reader in that last chapter and uh you know i just i i tie up all the major concepts of the book you know i come back to tolerating negative experience taking responsibility being uncertain tolerating failure the willingness to say and hear no and kind of just like wrap it all up in this in this nice little bow about death and how death elucidates everything that is meaningful in life so that's the book that's what all the hype's about if you like this summary please check out the book i have a particular style i use a lot of humor i use a lot of profanity some people love that some people don't which is fine but if you like that and you like these ideas i encourage you to check out the book if you've read the book and this was kind of a refresher i appreciate that and you know please send this to somebody who you think would enjoy the book or find it meaningful and please subscribe to the channel i do weekly videos with life advice and i talk about all sorts of different concepts philosophers psychologists basically just practical [ __ ] that makes your life better subscribe below like this video if you love the book definitely like this video if you have any thoughts about the book leave it in the comments so until next time everybody this is mark manson and i'll catch you later

Channel: Mark Manson

Views: 1,442,708

Rating: 4.9415221 out of 5

Keywords: mark manson, markmanson, what to do with my life, life purpose, motivation, career advice, self knowledge, self development, self improvement, self improvement motivation, self improvement tips, self improvement podcast, self development motivation, self development podcast, life advice, markmanson.net, opinions, education, self awareness, productivity, book recommendations, books, psychology, happiness, balance, mastery, skills, #thesubtleartofnotgivingaf, bestsellers, booksummaries

Id: lz8sUiXAnbs

Length: 37min 45sec (2265 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Lee_keogh]

A lot of hate here. Some people (like myself) just need to hear what they already know. It helped me shape my mindset again after it was taking over by worry. If you already have a perfect view on reality then kudos to you, don’t read the book.

[u/Bardfinn]

At 37 minutes long, he needs to work on bluntly not giving a f*ck

[u/ieabu]

The title of the book has everything you need to show how cool you are reading this book.

Bright orange.

The word subtle not so subtle.

The word art.

And fuck but hey let's "censor" it.

[u/MarshallTom]

Such a terrible book.

[u/damn_nation_inc]

I REALLY thought this would be a much shorter video. Would be significantly more effective if it were.

[u/BlueChamp10]

The non-readers' book. Most people buy it just to post a pic on social media.