Chapter 1: DON'T TRY
"..the problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. 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 vår moderne verden: Feedback Loop from Hell: "We feel bad
about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty. We get angry about
getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious."
..Vi blir opplært til å mene at det å ha negative
opplevelser, er noe vi absolutt ikke skal ha. Isåfall er det noe galt med deg.
«Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s
spiritual. We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we
don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.»
«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.»
Alan Watts(filosof) – 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.»
UENIG: ..i «don’t try» å finne meningen med livet. - Det
fører sjelden til noe godt! Men det er også utgangspunktet for all ‘ekte’
filosofi, . – å mentalt snevre inn sin viten om de viktige spørsmålene.
«Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting
the associated negative experience.»
«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
exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness. And it will eat
you alive. (..) ..running circles around your very own personal Feedback Loop
from Hell, in constant motion yet arriving nowhere.»
«Indifferent people are afraid of the world and the
repercussions of their own choices. That’s why they don’t make any meaningful
choices. They hide in a gray, emotionless pit of their own making,
self-absorbed and self-pitying, perpetually distracting themselves from this
unfortunate thing demanding their time and energy, called life.»
«.., ‘fuck it’, not to everything in life, but rather to
everything unimportant in life.»
«..another sneaky little truth
about life. 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.»
«The point isn’t to get away from
the shit. The point is to find the shit you enjoy dealing with.»
«..once you become comfortable
with all the shit that life throws at you (..) , you become invincible in a
sort of low-level spiritual way.»
Chapter 2: HAPPINESS IS A PROBLEM
"..pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them."
"Pain is what teaches us what to pay attention to when we're young or careless."
"..it's not always beneficial to avoid pain and seek pleasure, since pain can, at times, be life-or-death important to our well-being.
"Life is essentially an endless series of problems, .. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one."
"True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving."
"Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change."
Den hedoniske tredmøllen: "A fixation on happiness inevitably amounts to a never-ending pursuit of "something".."
"What pain do you want in your life?"
"People want to start their own business. But you don't end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to appreciate the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, the insane hours devoted to something that may earn absolutely nothing."
"Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for."
"This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly upgraded problems.
See: it's a never-ending upward spiral. And if you think at any point you're allowed to stop climbing, I'm afraid you're missing the point"
Chapter 3: YOU ARE NOT SPECIAL
«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.»
«It takes just as much energy and
delusional self-aggrandizement to maintain the belief that one has
insurmounatable problems as that one has no problems at all.»
«Often, it’s this realization
- that you and your problems are
actually not privileged in their severity or pain – that is the first and most
important step toward solving them. But for some reason, it appears that more
and more people, particulary young people, are forgetting this.»
«It’s strange that in an age when
we are more connected than ever, entitlement seems to be at an all-time high.
Something about recent technology seems to allow our insecurities to run amok
like never before.»
«To become truly great at
something, you have to dedicate shit-tons of time and energy to it. And because
we all have limited time and energy, few of us ever become truly exeptional at
more than one thing, if anything at all.»
«The problem is that the
pervasiveness of technology and mass marketing is screwing up a lot of people’s
expectations for themselves. The inundation of the exceptional makes people
feel worse about themselves, makes them feel that they need to be more extreme,
more radical, and more selfassured to get noticed or even matter.»
«..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.»
Chapter 4: THE VALUE OF SUFFERING
"If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not "How do I stop suffering?" but "Why am I suffering - for what purpose?"
"..our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives."
"Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not. 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."
"The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?"
"Our values determine the metrics 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/success."
"Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life's problems - problems which, by the way, if you're choosing the right values and metrics, should be invigorating you and motivating you."
Freud: "One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."
"Some of the greatest moments of one's life are not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive."
"This, in a nutshell, is what 'self-improvement' is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life."
Chapter 5: YOU ARE ALWAYS CHOOSING
Verdi/value: å ta ansvar «taking
responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who’s at
fault.
«Often the only difference between
a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we choose it, and that
we are responsible for it.»
«When we feel that our problems
are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.»
William James: «In his diary, he wrote that he would spend
one year believing that he was 100 percent responsible for everything that
occurred in his life, no matter what. During this period, he would do
everything in his power to change his circumstances, no matter the likelihood
of failure.»
«James would later refer to his
little experiment as his «rebirth», and would credit it with everything that he
later accomplished in his life.»
«We don’t always control what
happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as
well as how we respond.» (..en av stoismens grunnprinsipper)
«To not give a fuck about anything
is still to give a fuck about something. The real question is, What are we
choosing to give a fuck about?»
«With great responsibility comes
great power.»
«The more we choose to accept
responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives.
Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving
them.»
«..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. You always get to choose
the metric by which to measure your experiences.»
Øvelse, sett inn det som passer:
«I still resented my (..) for what she/he/they had done. But at least now I was
taking responsibility for my own emotions. And by doing so, I was choosing
better values – values aimed at taking care of myself, learning to feel better about
myself, rather than aimed at getting (..) to fix what she/he/they ‘d broken.»
Pokeranalogi:
«I see life in the same terms. We
all get dealt cards. Some of us get better cards than others. And while it’s
easy to get hung up on our cards, and feel we got screwed over, the real game
lies in the choices we make with those cards, the risks we decide to take, and
the consequences we choose to live with. People who consistently make the best
choices in the situations they’re given are the ones who eventually come out
ahead in poker, just as in life. And it’s not necessarily the people with the
best cards.»
«The responsibility/fault fallacy
.. This ability to alleviate responsibility through blame gives people a
temporary high and a feeling of moral righteousness.» Outrage porn/victimhood
chic.
«The biggest problem with
victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims.»
Chapter 6: YOU’RE WRONG ABOUT
EVERYTHING (BUT SO AM I)
Verdi/value: usikkerhet:
«..acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt
in your own beliefs.»
«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.»
«We are always in the process of
approaching truth and perfection without actually ever reaching truth or
perfection. We shouldn’t seek to find the ultimate ‘right’ answer for
ourselves, but rather, we should seek to chip away at the ways that we’re wrong
today so that we can be little less wrong tomorrow.»
«And because you and I and
everybody else all have differing needs and personal histories and life
circumstances, we will all inevitably come to differing ‘correct’ answers about
what our lives mean and how they should be lived.»
«Instead of looking to be right
all the time, we should be looking for how we’re wrong all the time. Because we
are. Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change.»
«If we’re all wrong, all the time,
then isn’t self-skepticism and the rigorous challenging of our own beliefs and
assumptions the only logical route to progress?»
«Parkinson’s law: Work expands so
as to fill up the time available for its completion.»
«Murphy’s law: Whatever can go
wrong will go wrong.»
«This is why people are often so afraid of success
– for the exact same reason they’re afraid of failure: it threatens who they
believe themselves to be.»
«My recommendation: don’t be
special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways.
Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius.
Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure.
Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a
friend, a creator.»
It’s worth remembering that for
any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day,
then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your life, and
until you’re able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change.»
«Aristotle wrote, ‘It is the mark of
an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.’ Being
able to look at and evaluate different values without necessarily adopting them
is perhaps the central skill required in changing one’s own life in a
meaningful way.»
«if it’s down to me being screwed
up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that
I’m the one who’s screwed up.»
Chapter 7: FAILURE IS THE WAY
FORWARD
Verdi/value: ..å være
innenforstått med at; å feile er en del av det å komme seg videre.
«With this value, to not pursue my
own projects became the failure - not a
lack of money, not sleeping on friends’ and family’s couches (which I continued
to do for most of the next two years), and not an empty résumé.»
«Improvement at anything is based
on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on
how many times you’ve failed at something. If someone is better than you at
something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If
someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of
the painful learning experiences you have.»
«At some point, most of us reach a
place where we’re afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and
stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we’re already good at.
This confines us and stifles us. We can be truly successful only at something
we’re willing to fail at. If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to
succeed.»
«For many of us, our proudest
achievements come in the face of the greatest adversity. Our pain often makes
us stronger, more resilient, more grounded.»
«We need some sort of existential
crisis to take an objective look at how we’ve been deriving meaning in our
life, and then consider changing course.»
«It’s easy to look back at my
parents’ generation and chuckle at their technophobia. But the further I get
into adulthood, the more I realize that we all have areas of our lives where we
are like my parents with the new VCR: we sit and stare and shake our heads and
say, ‘But how?’ When really, it’s as simply as just doing it.»
«VCR questions are funny because
the answer appears difficult to anyone who has them and appears easy to anyone
who does not.
The problem here is pain.
Filling out the appropriate
paperwork to drop out of med school is a straightforward and obvious action;
breaking your parents’ hearts is not.
Asking a tutor out on a date is as
simple as saying the words; risking intense embarrassment and rejection feels
far more complicated.
Asking someone to move out of your
house is a clear decision; feeling as if you’re abandoning your own children is
not.»
«Learn to sustain the pain you’ve
chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a new form
of pain into your life. Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then
act despite it.»
«Life is about not knowing and
then doing something anyway. All of life is like this.»
The ‘Do Something’ principle:
«When I was in high school, my
math teacher Mr. Packwood used to say, ‘If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit
there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what
you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right
ideas to show up in your head.»
«Action isn’t just the effect of
motivation; it’s also the cause of it.»
«The thing about motivation is
that it’s not only a threepart chain, but an endless loop:
Inspiration->Motivation->Action->Inspiration->Motivation->Action->etc.»
«If you lack the motivation to
make an important change in your life, do something – anything, really – and
then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating
yourself.»
«..with simply doing something as
your only metric for success – well, then even failure pushes you forward.»
Chapter 8: THE IMPORTANCE OF
SAYING NO
Verdi/value: evnen til å si nei
«Freedom grants the opportunity
for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessary 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 (gulp) one person.»
«There is such pressure in the
West to be likable that people often reconfigure their entire personality
depending on the person they’re dealing with.»
«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 and 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. There’s a certain level of joy and meaning
that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single
relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those
decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.»
«To value X, we must reject
non-X.»
«..part of having honesty in our
lives is becoming comfortable with saying and hearing the word ‘no’. In this
way, rejection actually makes our relationships better and our emotional lives
healthier.»
«People in a healthy relationship
with strong boundaries will take responsibility for their own values and
problems and not take responsibility for their partner’s values and problems.»
«When you have murky areas of responsibility
for your emotions and actions – areas where it’s unclear who is resonsible for
what, whose fault is what, why you’re doing what you’re doing – you never develop
strong values for yourself. Your only value becomes making your partner happy.
Or your only value becomes your partner making you happy.»
«Entitled people who blame others
for their own emotions and actions do so because they believe that if they constantly
paint themselves as victims, eventually someone will come along and save them,
and they will recieve the love they’ve always wanted.»
«Without conflict, there can be
no trust.»
«For a relationship to be
healthy, both people must be willing and able to both say no and hear no.
Without that negation, without that occasional rejection, boundaries break down
and one person’s problems and values come to dominate the other’s.»
«If people cheat, it’s because
something other than the relationship is more important to them.»
«Consumer culture is very good at
making us want more, more, more. Underneath all the hype and marketing is the
implication that more is always better.»
«But more is not always better. In
fact, the opposite is true. We are actually often happier with less.»
[the paradox of choice]
«And what I’ve discovered is
something entirely counterintuitive: that there is a freedom and liberation in
commitment. I’ve found increased opportunity and upside in rejecting
alternatives and distractions in favor of what I’ve chosen to let truly matter
to me.»
«Yes, breadth of experience is
likely necessary and desirable when you’re young – after all, you have to go out
there and discover what seems worth investing yourself in. But depth is where
the gold is buried. And you have to stay commited to something and go deep to
dig it up. That’s true in relationships, in a career, in building a great
lifestyle – in everything.»
Chapter 9: ..AND THEN YOU DIE
Verdi/value: daglig stirre døden
i hvitøyet, for å sette livet i perspektiv.
«..in the face of the inevitability
of death, there is no reason to ever give in to one’s fear or embarrassment or
shame, since it’s all just a bunch of nothing anyway; and that by spending the
majority of my short life avoiding what was painful and uncomfortable, I had
essentially been avoiding being alive at all.»
«Without death, everything would
feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly
zero.»
«Because we’re able to
conceptualize alternate versions of reality, we are also the only animal
capable of imagining a reality without ourselves in it.»
«’death terror’, a deep
existential anxiety that underlies everything we think or do.»
«..in order to compensate for our
fear of the enevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual
self that will live forever.»
«’immortality projects’, projects
that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death.»
«What Becker is saying, in
essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about
something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that
distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death.»
«The Stoics of ancient Greece and
Rome implored people to keep death in mind at all times, in order to appreciate
life more and remain humble in the face of its adversities.»
Mark Twain: «The fear of death
follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any
time.»
«..death confronts all of us with
a far more painful and important question: What is your legacy?»
«Without acknowledging the ever-present
gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will
appear superficial.»
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