Book review: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is written by Mark Manson. And you know I am not into self-help books at all. Because they just really, really bore the hell out of me. But this one? Sort of caught my eye so I bought it for my birthday.

The subtle art of not giving a fuck isn’t about Indifference at all. It is about choosing where to give your fucks and not giving all your fucks away on things of little consequence. Like don’t flip out at a cashier or teller about some small insignificant thing. Don’t tailgate someone for 278 blocks because they cut you off. Save your fucks for the important things in your life. That is what the book is about. And really people seem to care so very much about so many insignificant things that it drives me bonkers. You can’t care about Everything. Like people who criticize someone for not donating to some cause when they donate to some other cause… just because that person cares about a cause doesn’t mean they have to put all the energy in the world about every single cause out there.

One thing I liked as a person with chronic illness is that we are responsible for everything in our lives. Now one would think… even the suck of chronic illness? Well, it is Not our Fault for having it. We are not to Blame for it. But we are responsible for our reaction to it. And that is rather true. We sort of train ourselves over time to learn how to change how we react to it. Because it sucks. And no one wants to live in a suckfest. But if we do not think about how we react to it we can be consumed by it.

I also liked how he talks about adversity being a normal human experience. We all have problems. Some problems suck more than other problems but we will always have problems and that is what drives us forward… solving those problems and exchanging them for better problems. And we are not at all unique in our problems.

And how we have to think about the metric on which we measure our lives. And what values we find important. If my metric on which I value my life is compared to being healthy… I will always hate myself and be miserable for failing at that because I do have chronic conditions. And I cannot measure myself by a standard that I cannot ever achieve. But I have. And I was miserable. And it hurt a fuckton.

Anyway, you will get something from this book. Likely not what I got from it. But you will get something and it will make you think about your value system. It will make you think about what is working and isn’t working due to how you think about things.

So I give this book 5 fucks out of 5

Other book reviews

Book review: Graveyard shift
Book Review: Hallucinations
Book review: Smarter

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