Review - The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck

About:

This book is all about finding something important and meaningful in your life that might be one of the most productive uses of your time and energy. This is true because every life has problems associated with it and finding meaning in your life will help you sustain the effort needed to overcome the particular problems you face. Thus, we can say that the key to living a good life is not giving a fuck about more things, but rather, giving a fuck only about the things that align with your personal values(no bullshit approach to living a life that might not always be happy, but meaningful and centered only around what's important to you).

Who Would I recommend This Book?

The 24-year-old software engineer(basically me), who thinks about quitting his first job after six months, because it's not fun, and basically anyone who cares less about self-help, and anyone who hopes to become a mega-successful artist.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck:

For as much as I love positive psychology, something it just doesn't work, even for me. We are told to always striving for more - more happiness, money, experience, friends, possessions. The self-help movement urges us to focus on being positive and feeling good. But all that focus on positively actually emphasizes what we lack - and so we keep striving.

As a result, we become addicted to phoniness and constantly pursue superficial things. This creates temporary highs rather than true happiness. We end up frustrated and feel that we are falling short in comparison to what we see in social media, which celebrates only the most extraordinary. Or, we develop this belief that we are entitled to always feel good.

How this book intended to help you:

1. Clarify what is important and unimportant to you.
2. Realize that giving an f*ck about fewer and different things changes your direction in life.
3. Understanding that it's ok to feel bad, or for the things to go badly in life.
4. Accept that pain is inevitable, and you can use it as a catalyst for improvement.
5. Learn how to care about fewer things(give fewer f*cks).

Hurdles to Giving Fewer Fucks & Some Key Lessons:

The challenges we face while choosing to give fewer f*cks is to reprioritize what we care about and what we don't which includes:

• A misunderstanding of happiness:
• Contrary to what society tells us, happiness isn't an equation to be solved or an achievement attained when we do the right things. Being unhappy and dissatisfied is part of life and also a necessary counterweight to happiness, so happiness isn't the avoidance of unhappiness.
• Happiness comes from solving problems and challenges. It's an action or ongoing activity because there are constant problems to solve; each problem you solve plants the seed of another one.
• Everyone wants to believe that the secret to a good life is to have a nicer job or a better car or a prettier girlfriend.
• Because there's an infinite amount of things we can now see or know, that is also an infinite number of ways we can discover that we don't measure up, that we're not good enough, that things aren't as great as they could be.
• We are no longer facing a material crisis. We have plenty of resources: TVs and clothes and goods that we don't need. The problem we are facing is existential and spiritual. We have so much stuff and so many opportunities that we don't know what to give a fu*k about anymore.
• A desire for a more positive experience itself is a negative experience. And paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience.
• The moments when we don't give a fuck and take action are often the moments that most define the course of our lives.
• You are going to die someday. Everyone you know is going to die soon. And in your short life, you only have a certain amount of fucks to give.
•  Most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you're exceptional at one thing chances are you're average or below average at most other things.
• Problems are inevitable, but what they mean is flexible. We get to control what our problems mean to us based on how we choose to think about them and how we choose to measure them. The way we measure success influences how we view the problem we face.
• Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and easiest to lose. etc.

In short, Prioritize your fuck wisely:

  "The pampering of the modern mind has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something, a population that feels they have a right to something without sacrificing for it. And they do it because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary."