Mark Manson - Subtle art of not giving a fuck Flashcards
Most of us, most of the time, get sucked in by life’s mean trivialities, steamrolled by its unimportant dramas; we live and die by the sidenotes and distractions and vicissitudes
There’s absolutely nothing admirable or confident about indifference. People who are indifferent are lame and scared.
They are afraid of the world and the repercussions of their own choices. Therefore, they make none.
What we should mean is that Mark Manson doesn’t care about adversity in the face of his goals, he doesn’t care about pissing some people off to do what he feels is right or important or noble.
As we get older, we gain experience and begin to notice that most of these things have little lasting impact on our lives. Those people’s opinions we cared about so much before have long been removed from our lives.
Then, as we grow older and enter middle age, something else begins to change. Our energy levels drop. Our identities solidify. We know who we are and we no longer have a desire to change what now seems inevitable in our lives.
laconic - brief, concise, terse
bucolic - relating to the pleasant aspects of countryside living e.g. a bucolic setting
Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence — but not everyone wants to suffer through 60-hour work weeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, to navigate arbitrary corporate hierarchies and the blasé confines of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without the risk, without the sacrifice, without the delayed gratification necessary to accumulate wealth.
At the core of all human behavior, our needs are more or less similar. Positive experience is easy to handle. It’s negative experience that we all, by definition, struggle with.
You don’t end up attracting someone amazing without appreciating the emotional turbulence that comes with weathering rejections, building the sexual tension that never gets released, and staring blankly at a phone that never rings. It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.
Sometimes I ask people, “How do you choose to suffer?” These people tilt their heads and look at me like I have twelve noses. But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies. Because you have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns. And ultimately that’s the hard question that matters. Pleasure is an easy question. And pretty much all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain?
I like it when a book bitchslaps my brain. It’s like a mind orgasm.
Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert
In fact, decades of Gilbert’s research on happiness all points to the same unsettling fact: happiness has little to do with what happens to us in our lives, and more to do with how we end up choosing to see things.
Gilbert’s theory is that we each have a “psychological immune system,” basically a bullshit generator where our minds explain away our past experiences, our future projections and our current situations in such a way that we always maintain a baseline level of mild happiness. And it’s when this “immune system” fails that we fall into prolonged depression and/or existential crises.
“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy… But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.”
ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS - FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Hidden beneath the bombastic prose, the angry rhetoric, the shameless blasphemy Nietzsche wrote with a cold and stark logic.
Master/Slave Moralities have been in a kind of tension in every society for all of recorded history. Many political/social conflicts are side effects of the struggle between Master and Slave Moralities. Nietzsche believed that the ideas of guilt, punishment and a “bad conscience” are all culturally constructed and used by The Weak to chip away at the dominance and power of The Strong. He also believed that Slave Morality is just as capable of corrupting and oppressing a society as Master Morality. He used Christianity as his primary example of this. Nietzsche believed that Slave Morality stifled man’s greatest characteristics: creativity, innovation, ambition, and even happiness itself.
The True Believer - Eric Hoffer
The most to-the-point and non-bullshitty philosophical work I’ve ever read.
CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS - SIGMUND FREUD
Freud invented psychoanalysis, brought the science of psychology to the mainstream, and was highly regarded in intellectual circles around Europe. Then World War I broke out and he was deeply moved by the devastation, fell into a deep depression and secluded himself for much of the 1920s. Civilization and Its Discontents was the result of this depression.
The book makes one simple argument: that humans have deep, animalistic instincts to eat, kill or fuck everything. Freud argued that civilization could only arise when enough humans learned to repress these deeper and baser urges, to push them into the unconscious where they would fester and ultimately generate all sorts of neuroses.
Freud basically came to the conclusion that as humans, we had one of two shitty options in life: 1) repress all of our basic instincts to maintain some semblance of a safe and cooperative civilization, thus making ourselves miserable and neurotic or 2) to let them all out and let shit hit the fan.
To Freud, Hitler and World War II just proved his point a few years later. And as an Austrian Jew, he ran for the hills. The hills being London, of course. He lived out the last years of his life in a city being bombed into oblivion.
“It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct.”
The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil
The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker
Humans were given the gift of being able to imagine the future and who we want to be, but the price we pay for this gift is the realization that we will one day die. A dog doesn’t realize she’s going to die. Neither does a fish. But we do.
“What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. It means to know that one is food for worms. This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression and with all this yet to die. It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such a complex and fancy worm food?”
Ta-nehisi Coates - Between the world and me
The book doubles as both a memoir of Coates’ experiences with racism, black culture, and growing up in the ghettos of Baltimore, as well as a political commentary on the history of race in the United States.
It was what books were made for: an opportunity to inhabit, albeit briefly, the mind and experiences of another person, and to exercise our muscle to expand our empathy.
Ego is the Enemy - Ryan Holiday
The result is a book about ego that isn’t so much dramatic as it is practical. Our egos are here to stay. They are an inherent effect of our wiring. The question isn’t so much quashing the ego, as much as wrestling with it, taming it and ultimately managing it.
“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”
“Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more ‘Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.’ It’s rarely the truth: ‘I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.’”
It’s a classically-driven, philosophically-minded argument against self-absorption and entitlement.
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.
The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little.
Romance is like alcohol. It feels really fucking good. Most of the time. But there’s usually a price to pay as soon as you sober up.
“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.”
Relationship Advice
The desire to use the love of someone else to soothe your own emotional problems inevitably leads to codependence, an unhealthy and damaging dynamic between two people where they tacitly agree to use each other’s love as a distraction from their own self-loathing.
Love makes us highly irrational.
Romeo and Juliet is not a love story. It’s a 3-day relationship between a 13 year-old and a 17 year-old that caused 6 deaths.
Love is nature’s way of tricking us into doing insane and irrational things to procreate with another person — probably because if we stopped to think about the repercussions of having kids, and being with the same person forever and ever, no one would ever do it. As Robin Williams used to joke, “God gave man a brain and a penis and only enough blood to operate one at a time.”
