quotes i got from 'the subtle art of not giving a fuck' by mark manson; a necessary thread

"All the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time—is actually fixating on what you lack. It lasers in on what you perceive your personal shortcomings and failures to already be, and then emphasizes them for you."

"The smallest dog barks the loudest."

"Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing."

"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."

“I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?”

"The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience."

“The backwards law—the idea that the more 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."

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”

"Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.

"Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame."

"To not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action."

"Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different."

"You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others. You just can’t. Because there’s no such thing as a lack of adversity. It doesn’t exist."

"The idea of not giving a fuck is a simple way of reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is important and what is not. Developing this ability leads to something I like to think of as a kind of 'practical enlightenment'. "

"The only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it."

"Greatness is merely an illusion in our minds, a made-up destination that we obligate ourselves to pursue, our own psychological Atlantis."

"Pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them."

"After all, the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear."

"Pain is what teaches us what to pay attention to when we’re young or careless."

"The emotional pain of rejection or failure teaches us how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future."