Transcription
My name is Mark Manson. I am the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a [ __ ] as well as some other works. I'm a YouTuber, podcaster, and my work focuses primarily on the importance of values. How to fix your life by changing your values.
I think a lot of people discount my work simply because of the profanity. They think it that it's juvenile, that I'm kind of pandering to my audience by making them giggle. And I think what a lot of people miss about my work is that the whole not giving a [ __ ] thing, it's really just a bit of a Trojan horse for discussion of values.
Because if you think about it, we all have to care about something. We all have to give a [ __ ] about something. The question is, what are we choosing to give a [ __ ] about? And what we choose to give a [ __ ] about, what we give our attention to or what we choose to focus on, ultimately that is a reflection of our values of what we are prioritizing in our lives, what we find most important uh to ourselves. And that prioritization that we we do internally and probably unconsciously ultimately has an effect on everything that we do. It becomes kind of the filter or the lens in which we see everything.
And so I think the big blind spot in the self-help industry, it's not how do I become happier or how do I become richer or how do I become more successful? It's why do you want to be happier? Why do you want to be richer? Why do you want to be more successful? Like what is success? How are you measuring that? How are you defining that? Because if you're defining it in a really terrible way, if if the underlying value is just bad, then achieving that success is actually going to be a bad thing for you. You can waste years of your life chasing this thing that's ultimately not going to make anything better.
So, this raises the question, what should you give a [ __ ] about? What what is a good value? What's a good thing to focus on? Well, I think there's a few principles that can help us figure this out.
So the first principle is are you giving a [ __ ] about something that is immediate and controllable? Is it something that you can control within your own environment? So for example, the reason people pleasing is a terrible value. Is not because it's bad to be liked. We all want to be liked. The problem is that you can't control what other people feel. And in fact, when you try to control what other people feel, that makes you an [ __ ] You're interfering with their agency. But when you focus on what you can control, your own behavior, your own honesty, your own vulnerability, that will make your relationship stronger, but it won't necessarily make you liked by everyone.
The second principle of having good values is valuing something that is reality based, something that you can verify and know to a certain degree is true. We tend to get very caught up in fantasies and invent a lot of ideas in our head about what's true about the world, the way other people should be, um different beliefs about how society should work. And it's unavoidable that we're going to be wrong about some things some of the time, but we should always be working towards some realitybased version of truth simply because believing in illusions ultimately is going to make us suffer. being attached to the illusion that, you know, everybody should say hi to me on Saturday morning is it's just going to piss me off every Saturday cuz it's unrealistic and it's based in this fantasy version of of the world that doesn't actually exist. This principle is particularly tricky because it requires us to constantly evaluate the ways that we might be wrong, the ways that we might be believing in a fantasy or have some false assumption about ourselves or other people or the way that the world should work.
And then the third principle for having good values is that it should be socially constructive. Now, this sounds very obvious and simple, but it gets very complicated because yes, you should be nice to people. you should be helpful. You should believe in things and care about things that are good for society. I think we all, the vast majority of us believe in something like that. The problem is is that we all have a tendency to delilute ourselves into thinking that what's good for us is actually good for society. And so most of the harms that we cause on the world are well-intentioned and also ignorant.
So, if we're trying to live a life where we don't give a [ __ ] and by that I mean we're trying to live a life where we're giving our attention or our focus in the right places, there are three subtleties that come along with that.
So, the first one is that not giving a [ __ ] is actually about being comfortable being different. It's being comfortable with the fallout or repercussions of having a different opinion or having a different point of view or caring about something that other people don't care about. The irony is that the people who want to stop giving a [ __ ] the most, they are the people who are trying not to be different in any way, shape, or form. They're the ones who are trying to make everybody happy all the time. They're the ones who are trying to uh uh just blend in with the crowd. And ultimately, that becomes very stressful because they don't they don't stand for anything. They don't have anything that they get to own and call their own.
Which brings us to the second subtlety, which is that the way to stop giving a [ __ ] about adversity is to give a [ __ ] about something more important than adversity. That basically the way to stop giving so many [ __ ] what everybody thinks all the time is to find something more important than what everybody else thinks all the time. It's this idea that you have to find something in your life that you're willing to struggle for, that you're willing to stick your neck out for, that you're willing to plant a flag in and say, "This is mine. this is what I care about. This is what I stand for. And if you don't like it, [ __ ] it. Deal with it. Like not giving a [ __ ] It It doesn't get rid of adversity. It just makes the adversity okay.
And then finally, the third subtlety is the realization that you are always giving a [ __ ] in every moment. You're always choosing something to give a [ __ ] about, right? Like if you're choosing to trying to not give a [ __ ] about what anybody else thinks, that is giving a [ __ ] about what everybody else thinks because you're trying to not give a [ __ ] about it. So it's giving a [ __ ] is not optional. It is something that is very much hardwired into our psychology. It is something that is always operating and dictating what we focus on and what we don't focus on. And so the question is, what are you choosing to focus on and what are you choosing to not focus on? What are you choosing to suffer for and what are you choosing to not suffer for? Where are the yeses in your life and where are the nos in your life? That ultimately is the important question.
So the tricky thing about our values is that we often lie to ourselves about what we actually value. We say to ourselves and others, "Oh, I really care about honesty." And then we turn around and lie to somebody. or we say that we really care about our health, but we are binging cheesecake on a random Thursday afternoon. So, even getting an accurate sense of what we are prioritizing, what we are giving a [ __ ] about is often a difficult process. But there are two techniques that I'm going to share with you that can help you figure out your values in the next 20, 30 minutes.
So, the first one is what I call a time audit. And it's pretty simple. You take out a sheet of paper. You write down what you spend your time on throughout the week. And try to be as honest as possible. And if you want to get really hardcore about it, you can actually track for 5 days. How much time did you spend on the computer? How much time did you spend watching Netflix? How much time did you spend talking to friends? Just doing that time audit often surprises people. They think in their head they're like, "Oh, I'm spending a lot of time at work." But then they realize they're not doing a whole lot of work. or they think that they're spending a lot of time keeping in touch and connecting with family, but they're actually not talking to their family nearly as much as they thought they were. So, when you do the time audit, you get a clear picture of how many hours are going into each activity in your life. And then you can also gauge those in terms of how much you actually value them. And you start to realize like, oh, this thing that I barely value at all, I'm spending 15, 20 hours a week doing it. Whereas the thing that I I really value and I feel like I lack in my life, I'm only I'm only investing two hours a week into it.
The second technique you can do is a classic stoic practice known as momento mori, which is you imagine your own death. You imagine that you're on your deathbed and you're looking back at your life and you ask yourself what was worth doing and what was a complete waste of time. And this practice is incredibly powerful because I think nothing gives us real clarity on the value of the things in our life the way imagining our own death does. Because most of the things that we care about on a day-to-day basis are not going to matter anymore once we're dead. Only a few things are. And what you realize when you do this exercise is that those few things that are potentially going to matter long after you're dead, those are actually the things that you wish you were spending more of your time on. And as humans, we instinctually avoid thinking about our own deaths. It's not fun. It's it's very uncomfortable, but I think it's so useful for this reason. And there's a lot of different ways you can do it. You can project into the future. Imagine when you're 80 and you're on your deathbed and you're looking back at your life. You can do it that way. Another way to do it is imagine if you have one year left to live, what would you spend the next year doing? Uh the another way to do it is what Steve Jobs did when he was alive, which is every morning he would look in the mirror and he'd say, "If this was the last day I was going to be alive, would I be happy with what I'm doing today?" And if he said no too many days in a row, then he would make a major change in his life. So there are a lot of different ways to attack it, to approach it, but what's important is that you develop some sort of regular habit of at least thinking about it.
I think we resist not giving a [ __ ] about things because we feel like if we let go of something, it's going to go wrong. It's going to fall apart. It's going to fail. But the problem is is that any sort of growth or development comes from a feeling of uncertainty. Comes from not knowing what you're doing. Uh comes from the willingness to to be unsure about what's right and what's wrong. One of the fundamental Buddhist principles is this idea of attachment that all suffering is ultimately rooted in being attached to whether it's an idea, a feeling, a view of the world. And I really see that as kind of an indictment on certainty and not doubting yourself. And actually the experience of not giving a [ __ ] about something is it's actually quite liberating. like narrowing your focus to just a handful of things that really matter in your life. It's you're not actually limiting yourself. You're freeing yourself from having to dedicate mental bandwidth to dozens and dozens of things that ultimately don't matter.
You know, it's funny. I I when I was dating my wife, um like a lot of men, I agonized o over whether I should propose to her or not. I spent months and months and months thinking about it and talking to friends and family and uh just like weighing all the pros and cons and I'm trying to like project into the future like understand like a clairvoyant like is this the woman for the rest of my life? Am I making the biggest mistake ever? And it was funny because the second that I proposed, all of the doubts and uncertainty, it just melted away because all that mattered was that commitment. It's like, do I know if she's the right person for me for the rest of my life? No, I don't. But I do know that I have control over how much I commit to trying to make her the right person for the rest of my life. And because I narrowed my focus to the one thing I had control of, it allowed me to to turn off it was like turning off a hundred television screens in my mind of like all these alternative realities, all these like ideas of like other people I could date and other lives I could live and and like what would happen if if this happened or that happened. It all just got shut off and suddenly my mind went silent and there was just this resulting peace as a result.
So it comes back to this original Buddhist idea that it's what we cling to that determines our suffering. We all have a natural instinct to crave certainty in our lives. And I think the more chaotic the world seems, the more confusion we have around what to do, the more we crave knowing something for sure. I think most of our suffering comes from our certainties about ourselves. about how the world should be, how people should treat us, about ideas other people should have. When we cling on to those things and refuse to let go, that's what causes all the tension and conflict both within ourselves and with others. And so, I actually think that we should embrace more uncertainty. I think we should know less. I think people should have fewer opinions and hold them more loosely because the way our identities work is that the more I believe myself to be something, the more I'm going to defend it with everything that I've got.
In my book, I have this concept called Manson's law of avoidance, which states that the more something potentially threatens your identity, threatens your certainty of who you are, the more you will find ways to avoid it. And what's interesting about the law of avoidance is that it applies to both good things and bad things. I think everybody's had an experience of avoiding something that could be harmful or upsetting or uh uncomfortable for us. You know, we find excuses to not go to the gym. We find reasons to not have a difficult conversation with a colleague. But a lot of us have also had experiences where we avoid things that are good for us, that we uh sabotage our own opportunities, that we mess up good relationships. And I I think at our core that happens for the exact same reason that the good thing in our lives also challenges our notion of who we are. It also potentially threatens our certainty of how we see the world. And so our instinct is to resist it and to act against it. And so I think the looser you can hold your identity, the less sure you can be about yourself or who you are, the less you can find yourself, the more open you are to all of the experiences that are going on around you. And the more objective you can be as you choose to move through the world.
So one way to actually look at this in yourself is to do a little journaling exercise. So, if you take take something in your life that you're struggling with and and take kind of the core belief behind that conflict or that struggle and just sit down and ask yourself three questions. First one is what if I'm wrong? And take a minute and write out all of the ways that you could potentially be wrong. You're not you're not necessarily saying you are wrong, but we just want to think through all the possibilities of maybe you're you're mistaken somewhere. Maybe you're missing something. Maybe there's a perspective you haven't considered yet. Then the second question is, what would it mean if I'm wrong? What would that say about me? What would that say about my life? What would that say about the world? And this is where you actually start to uncover a lot of the deep core sensitivities that you're probably avoiding dealing with, right? It's like, well, if I'm wrong about this, then that that probably means that I don't know what I'm talking about. Or if I'm wrong about that, then that means I'm actually the problem in my relationship. What you start to uncover are a lot of implications that you probably instinctively avoid. And finally, ask yourself the third question, which is, would being wrong give me a better or worse problem than being right? I think a lot of people would be surprised that being wrong, although very painful in the short term to accept, gives them a much better problem in their life than holding on to being right. But as soon as we let it go, the experience that we have is a liberation. A liberation from all of the things that we don't have to care about.
It's funny because a lot of people, they hear this and they say, "Well, that's easy for you to say, Mr. Big successful author. you didn't grow up like I did or you haven't been through what I've been through. And what's funny about this is that I think the more hardship you've gone through in your life, the more important this is, right? Like if you think about somebody who's very wealthy, like a trust fund kid or something, they can afford to not figure out their values. They can afford to kind of drift through life aimlessly and not worry about anything. Whereas like if you've grown up in poverty, if you've had a lot of tough [ __ ] handed to you throughout your life, you don't have that luxury. Like you have to get focused. It is 100 times more important that you know what you're spending your time and attention on because you you don't have the luxury of being able to waste your attention away on things that don't matter. And the other irony here is that I actually think it's easier the harder your life circumstances are. Like if you think about like a subsistence farmer in India, they don't have many options. They wake up, there's one thing to do. You go out and farm. There's no question. There's no like, oh, what am I doing with my life? Is this what I'm meant to be? Have I found my purp? It's like no, they go out and farm because if they don't farm, they're not going to eat. It's that simple. So any question of purpose or what they're valuing or what they're prioritizing, it's already solved. They don't even have to think about it. Whereas if you're like a typical upper middle class young person in United States or or Europe, you have grown up with so many options, so many opportunities, so many different paths in life that you could potentially take that it's petrifying to consider these things that you are you probably feel completely a drift because you can envision 20 different versions of your own future. And because you can imagine 20 different versions of your own future, it is terrifying to pick one because that means you have to kill the other 19.
I think this is why this message is resonating so much in this day and age and particularly with these younger generations because these are the first generations that are growing up with this much optionality with this much exposure to all the different life paths that they could take. That's when you need values the most is when is when you could see all of these different options and opportunities, but you only have access to take one.
Ultimately, in all of this, the important thing to remember is that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your values. And the quality of your values is determined by the quality of the problems that come with those values. Because no matter what you choose to care about, no matter what you give a [ __ ] about, it's going to create problems in your life. They're going to be struggles associated with that thing that you care about. And so, you want to care about the things that bring the right problems, that bring the problems into your life that you are happy to have, that feel worth having, because that ultimately is what's going to create that long-term sense of happiness, that udeimmonic happiness.
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