*Some excerpts from the book 'The subtle art of not giving a fck'- A counterintuitive approach to living a good life by Mark Manson.**
Human beings are flawed and limited. Not everybody can be extraordinary- there are winners and losers in society, and some of it is not fair or your fault.The real source of enpowerment is to know our limitations and accept them. Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties- once we stop running from avoiding, and start confronting painful truths- we can begin to find the courage and confidence we desperately seek.
Self improvement and success often occur together but that does not necessarily mean they are the same thing.
The fixation on the positive on what's better, what is Superior- only serves to remind us over and over again of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be.
Because there is an infinite amount of things we can now see or know, there are also an infinite number of ways we can discover that we don't measure up, that we are not good enough that things are not as great as they could be and this rips us apart inside. The desire for more positive experiences is itself a negative experience and paradoxically the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience.
Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or crash 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. How to pick and choose what matters to you and what does not matter to you based on finally honed personal values. This is incredibly difficult. It takes a lifetime of practice and discipline to achieve. And you will regularly fail. But it is perhaps the most worthy struggle one can undertake in one's life. It is perhaps the only struggle in one's life.
You are perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the way you want it to be. This is sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal site, every disagreement as a betrayal. You will be confined to your own petty skull-sized hell, burning with entitlement and bluster, running circles around your very own personal Feedback loop from Hell, in constant motion yet arriving nowhere.
Not giving importance does not mean being indifferent it means being comfortable with being different. Give importance to something more important than adversity. Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what is important.
Turn your pain into a tool, your trauma into Power, and your problems into slightly better problems. That is real progress. Move lightly despite your heavy burdens, resting easier with your greatest fears, laughing at your tears as you cry them. Learn how to lose and let go. Learn to close your eyes and trust that you can fall backwards and still be okay. 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. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. Problems are a constant in life. Problems never stop, they merely get exchanged and or upgraded. Happiness comes from solving problems if you are avoiding your problems or feel like you don't have any problems, then you are going to make yourself miserable. The solutions to today's problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow's problem, and so on.
The truth is that there is no such thing as a personal problem. If you have got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. Likely people you know too. That does not minimize the problem or mean that it should not hurt. It does not mean that you are not legitimately a victim in some circumstances. It just means that you are not special you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain - that is the first and most important step towards solving them.
Most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you are exceptional at one thing, chances are you are average or below average at most other things. That is just the nature of life.
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they will never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won't matter.
This sort of thinking is dangerous.
Emotional health comes from accepting that your actions actually don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things and that the vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy and that's okay the stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.
You will have a growing appreciation for life's basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. These things are ordinary but these are what actually matters.
Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it. The first layer is understanding once emotions. Second layer is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. The third level is our personal values. This is the most important player because our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determine the quality of our lives.
Our values determine the matrix by which we measure ourselves and everyone else. If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and or how you measure failure or success.
People who base their self worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. They lick the ability to take on New Perspectives and empathize with others. They close themselves off to new and important information.
Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emotions and to emotional dysfunction. Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to Life's problems. Problems which, by the way, if you are choosing the right values and metrics, should be invigorating you and motivating you. Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health. To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them.
When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny the existence of our Lives problems. And when we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to solve them and generate happiness. Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life. Thus to duck our problems is to lead a meaningless existence.
The point is to nail down some good values and metrics, and pleasures and successful naturally emerge as a result. These things are side effects of good values. By themselves, they are empty highs.
Good healthy values are achieved internally. You simply have to orient your mind in a certain way to experience it. These values are immediate and control label and engage you with the world as it is rather than how you wish it were. Bad values are generally reliant on external events. These lie outside of your control and often requires socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve.
There are five counterintuitive values that are most beneficial values one can adopt. First is a radical form of responsibility: taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who is at fault. The second is uncertainty: the acknowledgment of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your own beliefs. The next is failure: the willingness to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that they may be improved upon. The 4th is rejection: the ability to both say and hear no, does clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life. The final value is the contemplation of One's Own morality; this one is crucial because paying Vigilant attention to one's own death is perhaps the only thing capable of helping us keep all of our other values in proper perspective.
When we feel that we are choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable. There is a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person's actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things.
Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don't go from wrong to right. Rather we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. And when we learn something additional, we go from slightly less wrong to slightly less wrong than that, and then to even less wrong than that, and so on. We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without actually ever reaching to her Perfection. We should not seek to find the ultimate right answer for ourselves, but rather, we should seek to chip away at the base that we are wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow. When viewed from this perspective, personal growth can actually be quite scientific. Our values are our hypothesis: the resulting emotions and thought patterns are our data. People become so obsessed with being right about their life that they never end up actually living it. Certainty is the enemy of growth. That's why accepting the inevitable imperfections of your values is necessary for any growth to take place. Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt: doubt about our own beliefs, doubt about our own feelings, doubt about weather what the future may hold up for us unless we get out there and create it for ourselves.
Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of Our Lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating.
The more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.
The more you Embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don't know.
Many people are able to ask themselves if they are wrong, but few are able to go the extra step and admit what it would mean if they were wrong. That's because the potential meaning behind our wrongness is often painful. Not only does it call into question our values, but it forces us to consider what a different, contradictory value could potentially look and feel like. Being able to look at end evaluate different values without necessarily adopting them is perhaps the central skill required in changing one's own life in a meaningful way.
Absolute freedom by itself means nothing. Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it. Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one's life is through a rejection of Alternatives, a narrowing of Freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or one person. As with most excesses in life, you have to drown yourself in them to realize that they don't make you happy.
And extension of our positive culture is the belief that we should try to be as inherently accepting an affirmative as possible. But we need to reject something. Otherwise, we stand for nothing. If nothing is better or more desirable than anything else, then we are empty in our life is meaningless. We are without values and therefore live our life without any purpose. To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. The act of choosing a value for yourself requires rejecting alternative values. The rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing we essentially have no identity at all.
Whenever there is a healthy and loving relationship, there will be a clear boundary between the two people and their values and there will be an open Avenue of giving and receiving rejection when necessary.
People with a strong boundaries understand that it's unreasonable to expect two people to accommodate each other 100% And fulfill every need the other has. People with a strong boundaries understand that they may hurt someone's feelings sometimes. But ultimately they can't determine how other people feel. People with a strong boundaries understand that a healthy relationship is not about controlling one and then another's emotions, but rather about each partner supporting the other in their individual growth and in solving their own problems.
Trust is like a China plate. If you break it 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 is impossible to restore. There are too many broken pieces, and too much dust.
There is a freedom and Liberation in commitment. Commitment gives you freedom because you are no longer distracted by the unimportant and frivolous. It hones your attention and focus, directing them towards what is more efficient at making you healthy and happy. Commitment makes decision making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again? Commitment allows you to focus intently on a few highly important goals and achieve a greater degree of success than you otherwise would.
In this way, the rejection of Alternatives liberates us- rejection of what does not align with our most important values, with our chosen Matrix, rejection of the constant pursuit of breadth without depth.
Death scares us. And because it is scares us, we avoid thinking about it, talking about it, sometimes even acknowledging it, even when it's happening to someone close to us yet, in a bizarre, backward way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero. As humans, we are blessed with the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations, to contemplate both the past and the future, to imagine other realities or situations where things might be different. And it's because of this unique mental ability, we all at some point become aware of the inevitability of our own death. Because we are able to conceptualize alternate versions of reality, we are also the only animal capable of imagining a reality without ourselves in it this realization causes 'Death Terror', a deep existential anxiety that underlies everything we think or do.
In order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. So we start immortality projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death. But, whenever immortality projects fail, when the meaning is lost, when the prospect of our of our conceptual self outliving our physical self no longer seems possible or likely, death Terror- that horrible depressing anxiety -creeps back into our mind. Our immortality projects are our values. They are the barometers of meaning and worth in our life. People's immortality projects are actually the problem not the solution. Rather than attempting to implement, often through lethal Force, their conceptual self across the world, people should question their conceptual self and become more comfortable with the reality of Their Own Death. While death is bad, it is inevitable. Therefore, we should not avoid this realization, but rather come to terms with it as best we can. Because once we become comfortable with the fact of our own death -the root Terror the underlying anxiety motivating all of life frivolous ambitions -we can then choose our values more freely, unrestrained by the illogical quest for immortality, and freed from dangerous dogmatic views.
Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life. If death is the only thing that is certain it must be the compass by which we orient all of our other values and decisions. The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself semicolonious that is stretch Beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic word around you. Happiness comes from the same thing caring about something greater than yourself, believing that you are a contributing component in some much larger entity, that your life is but a mere side process of some great unintelly Gible production. The more someone peer into the darkness, the brighter life gets, the quieter the world becomes and the less unconscious resistance someone feel to, well, anything.
Nothing makes you present and mindful like being mere inches away from your own death.