Original subtitles

What's up everybody, Mark Manson here, number one New York Times bestselling

author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. It's funny, I was actually

looking around YouTube and Google and I found that dozens of people have posted

summaries of my book. Well, fuck you, if there's gonna be a summary of the book,

it should come from the master non -fuckiver himself, moi. So gather round,

children. prepare yourselves as I take you chapter by chapter through this

modern self -help masterpiece.

So before I actually get into the book and kind of summarize each chapter in a

few minutes, I want to zoom out a little bit and just tell you briefly what my

goal is by writing this book.

First of all, contrary to most people's perceptions, the book is not about not

caring about things.

In fact, it's about the opposite of that. It essentially makes the argument

you have to give a fuck about something.

Therefore, the most important question is, what are you giving a fuck about and

why? Now, that's a pretty cute little concept on the surface, and I think it's

why a lot of people bought the book or enjoyed the book initially.

But my goal with this book is that it's essentially a book about values.

I very intentionally wanted to be contrarian to the self -help industry.

Most self -help takes for granted what your values are. It takes for granted

what your definition of success is. It assumes you want a big mansion and a

fancy car and a perfect marriage with three and a half kids and a guitar

swimming pool. Most self -help books just assume that we all want the same

thing. Whereas in my book, I wanted to point out that a lot of these cultural

definitions of success a lot of these cultural values may not be the right fit

for us. And so the real important question of getting ahead in life or

our lives is not necessarily figuring out how to accomplish every single goal

have. It's more in asking what sorts of goals should we have in the first place?

What sorts of things should we give a fuck about? So you'll see as we go

it that there are a lot of points in the book where I'm very intentionally

contradicting most typical self -help advice.

Part of this I'm doing for effect. It's to grab people's attention and to make

them think a little bit more critically about some of their assumptions.

But some of it is legitimate. Some of it I do strongly believe is more

correct than the general self -help advice out there. So without further

let's get into it. Chapter one, don't try.

I start the book off with a story about Charles Bukowski. He was a very famous

fiction and poetry writer, but he was a total drunk. He was a lowlife.

He was in and out of prison.

He had drug problems. He had prostitute problems.

I mean, he was just, he was a total mess.

I actually wanted to open the book with him because

He is kind of a counter -argument to most of the examples that you see in

like this. You're used to opening a book about how to improve your life and

seeing a story about Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or something like that. And I

wanted to start with Bukowski because it shows that you can actually become

conventionally successful in life.

despite yourself. You can become successful while seemingly doing all the

things and committing all the biggest errors.

So even beginning on the first page, I'm starting to undermine the reader's

assumed definition of what success is or what is a good life or a desirable life

for themselves.

Now, the big idea to take away from chapter one, and this is the most

thing in the book and one of the most underlying things on Amazon Kindle ever,

is something called the backwards law. And the backwards law originally comes

from Alan Watts, but I rephrase it in my own way. And I say that the pursuit of

positive experience is itself a negative experience.

And the acceptance of a negative experience is itself a positive

So I go on and give a number of examples of the backwards law. I say that the

idea is that the more that you pursue feeling better all the time, the less

satisfied you become.

That pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first

place. The more desperately you want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you

will feel regardless of how much money you have.

The more desperately you want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you will come

to see yourself regardless of your actual physical appearance.

The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more

afraid you will become regardless of those who surround you. The more you

to be spiritually enlightened, the more self -centered and shallow you become in

trying to get there.

I didn't follow that up with. It's like that one time I tripped on acid and it

felt like the more I walked towards the house, the farther away the house got

from me.

It's a good time, good time. So the backwards law introduces the central

of the book, which is that negativity is actually the path to positivity.

Most people's assumption is they just want the positive experiences from life,

but it's actually the...

tolerance and acceptance of the negative experience that leads to the positive

experience. And I will end up spending pretty much the entire book expanding

upon this. So I go on to finish chapter one by introducing the give a fuck

framework. And I have three subtleties of not giving a fuck. So subtlety number

one is not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent. It means being

comfortable with being different.

One point that I make throughout the book and I dispel very early on is that

indifference is impossible.

If you give a fuck about nothing, then you are giving a fuck about giving a

about nothing. It is impossible to not give a fuck about something.

Therefore, the question is, what do you give a fuck about?

And kind of the conclusion that arises is that if you give a fuck about a few

very important things, then the small things cease to bother you so much.

Subtlety number two is to not give a fuck about adversity, you must first

fuck about something more important than adversity.

So if you're always worrying about what people think about you, the problem is

not what people think about you. The problem is you don't have anything

to worry about. If you're always worried about how much money you have, the

problem is not how much money you have. The problem is that you don't have

anything better to worry about.

Subtlety number three, whether you realize it or not, you are always

what to give a fuck about.

This concept of choosing will come back in force in Chapter 5. Pretty much the

entire chapter is about it.

All right, so that's Chapter 1. Kind of lays the groundwork, starts off very

contrarian, drops a lot of F -bombs. A lot of people like that. Some people

don't. Chapter 2 is called Happiness is a Problem.

So Chapter 2 opens up with the story of the Buddha and focuses on the central

Buddhist doctrine of dukkha, or the fact that life is suffering.

that no matter what you do, where you go, who you hang out with, what you

pursue, there is some facet of suffering associated with it, simply because our

mind becomes attached to things and attachment leads to suffering. But

of kind of going down the Buddhist rabbit hole with it, I take it off in

direction. And I explain, I say, you know, it's not like we're doomed to

It's that suffering has a certain evolutionary usefulness to it. Like if

think about evolution over the course of...

hundreds of thousands of years, a creature that is happy all the time,

creature is not going to survive. It's actually the creature that is a little

bit dissatisfied all the time, a little bit anxious all the time, a little bit

paranoid, a little bit pissed off at the people around them. Like that's the

creature that's going to do the most work to actually survive and replicate.

I think that this modern idea that we shouldn't have to feel bad ever is

completely misguided. Not only is it misguided, but it goes against.

our evolutionary nature our genetic nature negative emotions have an

purpose to them and they help us and so a lot of this chapter is describing how

a lot of the anxiety that we wish to escape from or the anger we wish to

overcome these emotions are actually signals within our body to do something

they are important signals and if we ignore them or if we train ourselves to

ignore them then we are actually limiting ourselves in a lot of ways I

about a psychology concept called the hedonic treadmill, this idea that

happiness is like a treadmill.

It's like you think, if I get a boat, I'll be happy, and then you get the

and it's like you've got to pay docking fees. You're like, man, if I could just

find a better dock, I'd be happy, and then you find a better dock.

Then you realize that none of your friends want to drive out to that new

You're like, man, if I could just have some friends to hang out on my boat,

I'd be happy, and then you get friends on your boat, but then they get too

drunk, and they fall overboard, and you have to like...

throw in life preservers and save them and call the Coast Guard. And you're

like, man, if I didn't have to call the Coast Guard, then I'd be happy. And it's

like happiness, it's like this carrot always dangling in front of you, no

what you do.

So the point of chapter one is to kind of undermine our expectations about

positive and negative experience. Chapter two's point is to undermine our

expectations about positive and negative emotion.

Negative emotions have a lot of utility.

They have a lot of purpose.

They help us. They grant us meaning in a lot of situations.

And they signal to us that we have challenges or problems that must be

Happiness, happiness is great. We all want to be happy. It's not the only

in life. There are bad forms of happiness.

Doing cocaine all day, it'll make you happy for a while. It doesn't mean you

should go do it.

Serial killers seem to be very pleased with themselves while they're killing

people over and over again.

Doesn't mean they should do it. The emotions themselves are not necessarily

or bad. It's the context around them. It's the meaning around them. And so I

up kind of creating this framework where I say that happiness comes from solving

problems. If you either pretend you have no problems in your life to solve, then

you won't be happy.

But if you also have problems in your life that you feel you can't solve, then

you won't be happy. So kind of the secret sauce is finding problems.

that you kind of want to have or kind of enjoy having. And that's how I wrap up

the chapter with a section called Choose Your Struggle. Now, I'll actually read

the first couple paragraphs of that section because it's one of the most

important sections of the book and it's resonated with a lot of people. So if I

ask you, what do you want out of your life? And you say something like, I want

to be happy and have a great family and a job I like, your response is so common

and expected that it doesn't mean anything.

Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everybody wants to live a carefree,

easy life. To fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships.

To look perfect and make lots of money and be popular and well -respected and

admired. Everybody wants that. It's easy to want that. A more interesting

question, a question that most people never consider is, what pain do I want

my life? What am I willing to struggle for?

Because that actually seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives

out. Fucking sweet. All right, chapter three, one of my favorite chapters.

You are not special.

You're not.

Nobody is.

So You Are Not Special, it opens up with a story of a guy I knew named Jimmy.

Jimmy is actually, he's kind of a composite of two different people I

Jimmy is basically, he's a con man, essentially.

Like, pathological liar, schemer.

bullshit artist, 24 -7 salesman. I knew him for about a year in my mid -20s,

back when I was starting my first business, and he was starting a number

businesses too. And the dude, he was just a grifter. Total low life, wasted

money left, right, and center.

And so I tell this story about Jimmy, and I use him as an example for a

I introduced of entitlement. I define entitlement in the book as Feeling as

though you deserve to be happy without sacrificing for it. It's basically that

idea of believing you deserve to have positive experiences without traversing

the negative experiences to get there.

I said much of this chapter pointing out, both from stories about Jimmy, but

also stories of me being a dickhead in my own life, that it's this belief that

we shouldn't have to go through the negative and only have the positive,

causes us to adopt many destructive and selfish behaviors.

So the middle of the chapter is the story about how I got arrested for

drugs. If you want to hear about that, you should buy the book.

So here you go. There are two forms of entitlement.

Form number one is, I'm awesome and the rest of you all suck, therefore I

deserve to have special treatment.

Form number two is, I suck and the rest of you are awesome, so I deserve special

treatment. So in the psychological research, this is known as grandiose

narcissism versus victim narcissism. And it's basically, they seem to be

opposites on the surface. Like one person thinks he's better than

then the other person thinks he's worse than everybody.

But the behavior ends up being the same because both people have delusional

beliefs about their place in the status hierarchy. One person thinks he's at the

top. One person thinks he's at the bottom.

But the behavior ends up being the same. They end up being completely self

-absorbed. They think everything in the world should be altered and catered to

them. And yeah, they just become unbearable to be around.

And so I spend much of this chapter, probably the second half of this

describing how the growing culture of exceptionalism, particularly with social

media, consumer culture, things like that, they're always pushing us

individually.

Facebook algorithms are designed.

Everything is designed to make you feel like you're the most special fucking

person on the planet.

And my argument is that that is actually mentally and socially unhealthy because

that drives an attitude and a feeling of entitlement. It creates delusional

beliefs that you are somehow the exception, that the world...

owes you something, that everything should be rearranged to cater to your

desires and your happiness, that you should be able to have positive

without accepting the negative.

I closed out the chapter by using a metaphor that I really like. I'll just

a couple paragraphs.

All of this, quote, every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness

stuff is basically just jerking off your ego.

It's a message that tastes good going down, but in reality is nothing more

empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated.

the proverbial Big Mac for your heart and your brain.

The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from

your veggies, that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life. Truths

such as your actions actually don't matter that much in the grand scheme of

things, and the vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy,

and that's okay.

This vegetable course will taste bad at first, very bad, but once ingested, your

body will wake up feeling more potent and alive.

That's chapter three. Chapter four, the value of suffering.

So in my mind, the book is actually kind of in two parts, even though I didn't

divide it into two parts. The first three chapters are very much about this

desire for positive experience and unwillingness to sacrifice or go through

negative experience to get through the positive experience. Starting with

chapter four, the book becomes a lot more about values and it becomes more

what are we willing to sacrifice for? So like assuming you, by the arguments of

the first three chapters that we should sacrifice for something, that we should

struggle for something, that that's actually what makes life more meaningful

generates a more consistent sense of happiness. The next question is, what is

worth struggling for? What is worth valuing? What is worth sacrificing for?

And so I opened up the book with a World War II story about a Japanese soldier

who, it's super interesting, there was a number of Japanese Soldiers in World

War II, like, they got stranded on random islands in the Pacific, and

told them the war was over. So they continued to fight the war into the

60s, and even 70s. And so the last soldier who was still fighting World War

I think he finally surrendered in, like, 1973 or something like that. I'd have

to look here. Anyway, his name was Hiro Nara.

And I wrote his story here and I used him as an example of how like it doesn't

matter how disciplined you are. It doesn't matter how motivated you are. It

doesn't matter how strong you are, how intelligent you are, how much support

have. If you have the wrong goal, you're fucked.

If you have the wrong value, then all of that other stuff, it's just going to

hurt you. And I use Onoda as an example of that. He spent 27 years.

fighting a war that didn't exist.

Literally killing people. He was on an obscure island in the Philippines. He

still shooting at people, killing people, hiding in the jungle for 27

And obviously he was doing an amazing job, but he was like Don Quixote. He was

like... chasing windmills, right? So the chapter opens up with that and it uses

that to kind of introduce this topic of values. So if we agree that we should

sacrifice, what is worth sacrificing for? I talk about Dave Mustaine from

Megadeth and Metallica as an example of good and bad values. And then I kind of

finish the chapter up with my attempt at defining what are good and bad values.

And I just lay out a few principles.

So good values tend to be one reality base.

two, socially constructive, and three, immediate and controllable. Bad values

tend to be one, superstitious, two, socially destructive, and three, not

immediate or controllable. I go on to say honesty is a good value because it's

something you can have complete control over, it reflects reality, and it

benefits others, even if it's sometimes unpleasant.

There's a whole section kind of diving into what makes a value good or bad, and

then I finish this section by saying the rest of this book, the last five

chapters of this book, so chapters five through nine, I'm going to propose five

kind of classes of values or things to give a fuck about that are a little bit

counterintuitive, but I have found to be very important.

And that's where chapter five picks up. All right, chapter five, you are always

choosing. In my opinion, this is maybe the most important chapter.

I would say two, five, and nine are the most important chapters.

Two is the one kind of challenging notions of happiness.

Five is about responsibility, and then nine will be about death.

So you are always choosing. I open up the chapter with a story about William

James. And then I kind of offer the reader a thought experiment. And I say,

imagine like a mafia guy kidnaps your family and then puts a gun to their head

and says, if you don't run a marathon tomorrow, I'm going to kill your family.

And you're out of shape. You haven't gotten off the couch in a week. This

be horrible.

It would be absolutely traumatic. It'd be terrifying.

Arguably the worst experience of your life. Now imagine.

training for nine months, hiring a coach, buying a bunch of gear,

getting ready for a marathon, running the marathon, having your family attend,

cheer you on, crossing the finish line, and then going and celebrating with

everybody you care about and love in your life. That would be one of the best

experiences of your life.

Now, what's interesting is that the actual pain of running the marathon

any different.

The only thing that's changed is the context.

And what I argue in this chapter is that what has actually changed is the

perception that you chose to run the marathon or not.

For whatever reason, when we feel as though we are choosing our struggles or

are choosing what problems we have in our life, they seem much more acceptable

and easier for us to deal with. When we feel as though our problems and our

struggles are thrust upon us without our control, that's when we suffer.

That's when we feel completely powerless.

always choosing whether you realize it or not. There's no such thing as a

situation where you are not choosing your struggle or not choosing your

The only thing that changes is whether you admit it to yourself or not. People

don't like hearing this point. They don't like hearing the idea that every

problem in their life, they chose it. And the second section of this chapter,

the reason why is I point out that we tend to conflate responsibility and

We assume that if you are responsible for something, it means that it's your

fault. But these are two completely different things.

You know, it's like if I get cancer, it's not my fault that I got cancer, but

is absolutely my responsibility to deal with the cancer.

You know, if somebody leaves a newborn baby on my doorstep, that's not my fault

that somebody left it there, but it is absolutely my responsibility. I have to

do something about it. And every moment of life, is this way. Even if the mob

boss kidnaps your family, makes you run a marathon, you are choosing to run the

marathon. You are choosing for the lives of the people you care about to be more

important than the pain of the marathon.

The thing you are choosing from moment to moment is how to value each

experience. So even if I like, let's say I go to a baseball game and I'm bored

to tears, I'm choosing to be bored.

Why? Because I'm choosing not to be interested in the baseball game.

Sure, I could sit there and blame the baseball game like, oh, you're so

boring. Why don't you entertain me more? Well, why don't I change my definition

of entertainment?

Why don't I change what I find interesting?

Why don't I develop the ability to pay more attention or appreciate the

subtleties of throwing a curveball or something? In each experience in life,

there is a component of choice embedded in it. And we tend not to be aware of

that choice, but as soon as we become aware of it, two things happen.

One, we become way more comfortable with pain.

And two, we actually get off our ass and fucking do something.

Because now we don't care whose fault it is anymore.

We don't care if it's boring or tedious or unfair.

You fucking do something.

You realize in every moment you have a choice to do something or not do

something. To blame somebody else or take responsibility yourself.

And once you develop that habit or that value of constant responsibility,

everything fucking changes.

So this whole chapter, I kind of lay that argument out in the first couple

pages, and literally the entire chapter is just knocking down objections to it.

So I knock down the responsibility. I call it the responsibility fault

I talk about genetics.

I talk about life situation.

I talk about surviving trauma.

I talk about cultural pressures.

There's no fucking excuse.

I mean, if there's anything that I'm like an extremist about, it's

responsibility. All right.

Well, before I start sounding too self -important, chapter six, why you are

wrong about everything, but so am I.

This chapter starts out with another fun little thought experiment.

And I actually can't take full credit for this. This thought experiment was

of brought to my attention by a friend of mine named Lydia. She wrote some cool

stuff about it. But basically, it says, think back 500 years ago. What seemed

cutting edge and scientifically true five years ago? And I point out that

thought the Earth was flat. They didn't even know the Western Hemisphere

existed. They thought fire was made of a thing called phlogiston.

And then I kind of...

pull that out to a personal level. I say, you know, think about what you

was true 10, 20 years ago. And then I mentioned a few stupid things I thought

was true when I was a kid.

And then from there, I say, now imagine everything you think is true today. And

imagine how ridiculous that's going to look 20 years from now or 500 years from

now. Like everything we think is so true and important today is going to be

absolutely ridiculous to us at some point. And that's actually a good thing.

Like we should hope.

that our present day beliefs look ridiculous to us because that means that

grown and become smarter.

Like I experienced this all the time with my own writing. I go back and look

stuff I wrote 10 years ago and I cringe. I'm like, this is awful.

Like, I can't believe I published this. But then I remember, I'm like.

That's great. It means I've become a better writer. So this thought

is kind of setting us up to think a little bit more about beliefs and

uncertainty and being, I guess, a little bit open -minded, for lack of a better

term. From there, I go into a little bit on the research of belief formation and

how arbitrary it is. And then I talk about the dangers of certainty.

And this is one of the more fun.

sections of the book, I actually had a cyber stalker for a number of years. She

was nonviolent. Thank God. What was remarkable about her was that she had

unbelievable certainty, like absolutely unshakable certainty and completely

batshit crazy beliefs.

I mean, she literally told me to my faith that angel told her that we were

supposed to be together, that God said that our relationship was going to cure

death. These were things that she said to me. And whenever I tried to kind of

poke holes in them or point out that maybe that didn't make a lot of sense.

had absolutely no effect. She met my wife. No effect. Didn't change her mind

all. To me, it was fascinating in that maybe one of the most troubled people

I've ever known in my life was also probably the most certain and unshakable

person I've ever met in my life.

And so I use her as an example of the binds that certainty can get us into.

And then I use a number of examples from my own life.

from other people's lives, and then I kind of trot out the benefits of

uncertainty. It opens up space for you to learn and improve.

It helps guard you against like extremist ideology or just becoming like

zealot for some cause.

It opens room for dialogue with people, to learn from other people, to make

other people feel more heard, which improves relationships.

I've got a section in here that I call Manson's Law of Avoidance.

which I decided to be cheeky and name a law after myself. But Manson's Law of

Avoidance says that the more something threatens your identity, the more you

will avoid it. And I bring this up in terms of what are the pieces of

information that we protect ourselves from? Because ultimately, like grasping

onto some sense of certainty, it's a means of protecting our ego from

threats. And so...

Manson's Law basically says that the more threatening something is, the more

will become certain in things that will help us avoid dealing with that truth.

An extension of Manson's Law of Avoidance is that we should define

loosely and ambiguously as possible.

Because the less defined our self is, the less we need to cling to defense

mechanisms or faulty ideas to protect ourselves.

This is fundamentally a Buddhist idea, the idea of no self.

You know, if there is no such thing as self, then there's nothing to protect.

And there's nothing that you need to be certain about in the first place.

Finally, I finish up the chapter with a few questions to help you become more

uncertain in your life.

Question number one is, what if I'm wrong?

Question number two is, what would it mean if I were wrong?

Question number three is, would being wrong create a better or worse problem

than my current problem, both for myself and others?

And that's chapter six.

Chapter seven.

Failure is the way forward. This is actually probably the most kind of like

of the mill self -help chapters.

If you've made it this far in the book, it's not going to surprise you that a

book that just spent 150 pages arguing that negative experience is the path to

positive experience, that a willingness to sacrifice prevents entitlement, a

willingness to be uncertain prevents crazy beliefs, that we're now going to

argue that failure is actually a huge component of success.

So this chapter is just a series of stories.

about all the ways Picasso failed.

Talk about, you know, a little -known psychologist named Kazimir Dabrowski,

who's from Poland.

He has some great theories from studying Holocaust survivors.

And then the real big gem of this chapter, or the thing that everybody

love, is something that I call the do -something principle.

And I actually made a humorous little video about it.

a few weeks back, if you want to check it out on the channel. But the Do

Something principle is very simple, and it comes from one of the great gurus of

all time, my high school math teacher.

And my high school math teacher's name is Mr. Packwood. Shout out to Mr.

Packwood. What's up?

Whenever we were taking a test, he'd always tell us, he'd say, if you don't

what to do, rewrite the problem.

Because when you rewrite the problem, it will help your mind find the next step.

It was crazy because it worked.

Like you'd look at a question, you'd be like, oh, I'm so fucked. I have no idea

what to do. But then you'd start copying out the problem and you'd be like,

well, I can do this one little thing here.

And then you do the second step.

And then something about it, it just made you see the next thing. And when I

went off to university, I noticed that this worked for all sorts of things. You

know, like if I was stuck on a term paper, I'd be like, okay, let's just

the next paragraph.

And I'd write a paragraph and sure enough, the rest of the paper would

Or if I was needed to study for an exam, you know, it's like, all right, well,

let's just study this chapter tonight.

And I'd study that chapter. And next thing I know, I've studied three

And so I kind of just adopted this little mini personal philosophy of like,

something. Just fucking do it. Like, take the smallest thing and do it.

I remember when I was when I suffered from a lot of social anxiety, I used to

tell myself, just walk towards the person you want to talk to.

That was it. That was all I had to do. Just walk towards them. And then what

would end up happening is I would walk towards them and I would keep walking

keep walking. And next thing I know, I'm standing in front of this person and

it's like super awkward because I'm standing there and not saying anything.

And so to prevent the awkwardness, I would say something. And next thing I

I'm like talking to somebody and I'm like, I make a new friend. This

just kind of applies universally. It applies all over the place. It's one of

those like just real special.

simple pieces of advice that you can take and use anywhere. One of the things

point out in the book too is that most people assume that you need motivation

have action, but I point out that it's the other way around. Action actually

leads to motivation, and that's the do something principle.

Chapter eight is the importance of saying no.

This is kind of the relationship chapter of the book. Again, it logically

follows that if you're willing to traverse the negative to get to the

if you're willing to take responsibility for your struggles, if you're willing

to accept failure on the way to success, then being able to say no to people,

being able to manage conflict, that's probably a good thing to have for your

relationships. And sure enough, that's pretty much how I would define a healthy

relationship. It's two people, actually I do define it in here as two people who

are comfortable saying and hearing no from each other.

I have a section in here called rejection makes your life better, which

more philosophical note, if you think about the project of choosing what you

value in order to value one thing, you have to reject the other things. You

know, it's like if I want to value my career over all else, I need to be able

sacrifice other things. That means I need to be able to reject other things.

That means I need to reject my.

dream of becoming a pro gamer or reject the idea that I'm going to become a

software engineer or reject the idea that I'm going to go live on a beach

somewhere. If I choose one value to prioritize over everything else, that

by definition, I must be willing to reject other things. If I'm not willing

reject those things, then I'm not able to actually prioritize what's important

in my life. And so this is why.

People who struggle to say no, they often feel very lost and they don't know

what they want from themselves.

I talk about this, you know, saying no is kind of like the fundamental basis of

boundaries in relationships. How if you want to have a healthy marriage or a

healthy romantic partnership, you need to be able to say no to each other, tell

people what you don't like, tell people what your values are, be willing to

disappoint the other person and trust that they're going to stick with you.

Because if you are never willing to disappoint your partner, then you never

actually develop trust for them. You never actually know if they're going to

stick with you when shit hits the fan.

So this is why couples that never fight eventually end up in a very toxic place.

Finally, I finished the chapter by talking about commitment and how there's

of a hidden freedom of commitment, of finding that one thing or one or two

things in your life that are more important than anything else and

full -heartedly to them.

On the surface, it sounds limiting, and I think a lot of people, particularly in

my generation, we avoid those sorts of commitments.

It's like, I want to go everywhere.

I want to do all the things. I want to date all the people. It's like this

constant effort to always keep your options open.

But as soon as you limit yourself to a few things in your life that you truly

care about, there's a new form of freedom that happens on a very subtle

which is that...

I don't have to give a fuck about this stuff. I don't have to give a fuck about

who I'm going to date. I don't have to give a fuck about what my gaming friends

think about me. These are the things I care about. These are the ways I'm going

to measure my life. That's what I'm going to pursue.

And there's just this abundance of inner mental freedom to pursue it. All right.

So finally, chapter nine.

And then you die.

This chapter is maybe my favorite thing I've ever written.

It's about death, obviously.

And I open up talking about a friend of mine who died at a party when I was 19.

And it was incredibly shocking and traumatic, upsetting.

I spent pretty much that entire summer dealing with depression.

As the months went on, it actually ended up being a very transformative

experience for me. Maybe one of the most important experiences of my life. So

this chapter is about how death is actually the thing that most

what matters in life.

It's only when you confront death or come close to death that it's most clear

you what you should be giving a fuck about.

And therefore, it makes sense, and this kind of goes back to the Stoics, that we

should regularly question our own mortality. We should regularly think

own death.

And this is just something I've kind of instinctually done for a lot of my life

is I've wondered, you know, if I died a year from now, What would I do with my

last year if I died tomorrow or if I got diagnosed with cancer tomorrow? Would I

have any regrets?

Would I feel like I wasted time?

If so, what was the time I wasted?

This is a very important project for us or exercise for us to do.

And throughout the chapter, I talk about one of my favorite philosophers and

scholars. His name was Ernest Becker. And then I use a little vignette of...

I have this weird fetish, I guess you could call it, when I visit high places.

I kind of have like the opposite of a fear of heights. I have like an

to height.

I tell a story about when I was at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa.

It's just, it's this massive cliff over the ocean that you can literally just

walk up to the edge and, you know, the wind blows the wrong way, you just fall

off. And I have this weird fetish for like walking to the edge of these

It drives everybody in my life crazy. People wonder if I'm okay.

It wasn't until I started writing this chapter that I kind of realized why.

For one, it forces me to confront a lot of fear in doing it. But two, when you

are walking up to the edge of a cliff with no intention of jumping, it forces

you to reckon with the question of, what if I do trip and fall?

This could be it right now. This could be it. There's something a little bit

intoxicating. for me, about that thought. Not in that I want to trip and

but in that it forces me to think about my life in a way that feels very

profound to me. So that's what I try to communicate to the reader in that last

chapter. And, you know, I just, I tie up all the major concepts of the book. You

know, I come back to tolerating negative experience, taking responsibility,

being uncertain, tolerating failure, the willingness to say and hear no, and

kind of just like wrap it all up in this nice little, bow about death.

And now death elucidates everything that is meaningful in life. So that's the

book.

That's what all the hype's about.

If you like this summary, please check out the book. I have a particular style.

I use a lot of humor.

I use a lot of profanity.

Some people love that. Some people don't, which is fine.

But if you like that and you like these ideas, I encourage you to check out the

book. If you've read the book and this was kind of a refresher, I appreciate

that. And please send this to somebody who you think would enjoy the book or

find it meaningful. And please subscribe to the channel. I do weekly videos with

life advice and I talk about all sorts of different concepts, philosophers,

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Subscribe below.

Like this video. If you love the book, definitely like this video. If you have

any thoughts about the book, leave it in the comments.

So until next time, everybody, this is Mark Manson. I'll catch you later.