The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

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‘Tis A Gift to Be Simple

A young child of about 5 with shoulder length hair stands in nature and smiles up at the sky.
Picture by Pexels creator Jonas Mohamadi

Hymn number 116 in Singing the Living Tradition is the Shaker melody ‘Tis A Gift to Be Simple. Growing up UU, I don’t recall singing this song all that often, but its message must have certainly permeated my religious education because I just could not connect with Mark Manson’s antithetical self-help book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Or, maybe, I should say I connected with it too-much. Which is to say the book didn’t provide me with any real moments of insight or inspiration, as I had hoped. If you are unfamiliar with the book, Manson basically argues that ‘You should only care, and put effort towards those things which align with your values,’ which…. Duh?!? But, I get that my upbringing, as a UU, was unusual. So, maybe you’ll more out of the quotes and questions I have to share here (warning: profanity ahead)…

Quotes

  • The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more: it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important. p. 5
  • The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. p. 11
  • Because when you give too many fucks – when you give a fuck about everyone and everything – you will feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness. p. 14
  • I see practical enlightenment as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable – that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death. p. 21
  • Don’t hope for a life without problems. There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems. p. 30
  • Happiness comes from solving problems. p. 31
  • A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider is “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” p. 36
  • The problem with the self-esteem movement is that it measured self-esteem by how positively people felt about themselves. But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves. p. 44
  • In fact, the tendency toward entitlement is apparent across all of society. And I believe it’s linked to mass-media-driving exceptionalism. p. 59
  • We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them. p. 76
  • We are always choosing the values by which we live and the metrics by which we measure everything that happens to us. p. 95
  • Responsibility and fault often appear together in our culture. But they’re not the same thing. p. 98
  • Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt. p. 119
  • That’s simple reality: if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself. p. 140
  • 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. p. 175
  • Trust is like a China plate. If it breaks once, with some care and attention you can put it back together again. But, if you break it again, it splits into even more pieces and it takes far longer to piece together again. if you break it more and more times, eventually it shatters to the point where it’s impossible to restore. p. 180

Questions

  • What problems in your life are ‘good problems?’ How might you ‘choose to think’ about your other problems in order to reframe them?
  • How did you answer Manson’s questions…
    • What pain do you want in your life?
    • What are you willing to struggle for?
  • Manson talks about entitlement and exceptionalism. How do you think we, as a society, can combat these negative forces when every national holiday is steeped in “American exceptionalism?”
  • How might the last two quotes be applied to community?
  • What are your values?

And, that’s all for now. Next month, I hope you will join us for what was my favorite Sabbatical read “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Petersen.