- When you stop and really think about it, conventional life advice—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 emphasises them for you. - 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. - Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. - Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity. - Subtlety #3: Whether you realise it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about. - “The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.” - “Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.” - The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences. - the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average. - We all have emotional blind spots. Often they have to do with the emotions that we were taught were inappropriate growing up. It takes years of practice and effort to get good at identifying blind spots in ourselves and then expressing the affected emotions appropriately. - Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable. Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable. - You’ll notice that good, healthy values are achieved internally. Something like creativity or humility can be experienced right now. You simply have to orient your mind in a certain way to experience it. These values are immediate and controllable and engage you with the world as it is rather than how you wish it were. Bad values are generally reliant on external events. - This, in a nutshell, is what “self-improvement” is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about. - Ryan Holiday refers to this as “outrage porn”: rather than report on real stories and real issues, the media find it much easier (and more profitable) to find something mildly offensive, broadcast it to a wide audience, generate outrage, and then broadcast that outrage back across the population in a way that outrages yet another part of the population. This triggers a kind of echo of bullshit pinging back and forth between two imaginary sides, meanwhile distracting everyone from real societal problems. It’s no wonder we’re more politically polarized than ever before. - Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable. That’s why accepting the inevitable imperfections of our values is necessary for any growth to take place. Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt. Instead of looking to be right all the time, we should be looking for how we’re wrong all the time. Because we are. - There’s a lot of conventional wisdom out there telling you to “trust yourself,” to “go with your gut,” and all sorts of other pleasant-sounding clichés. But perhaps the answer is to trust yourself less. After all, if our hearts and minds are so unreliable, maybe we should be questioning our own intentions and motivations more. - For individuals to feel justified in doing horrible things to other people, they must feel an unwavering certainty in their own righteousness, in their own beliefs and deservedness. Racists do racist things because they’re certain about their genetic superiority. Religious fanatics blow themselves up and murder dozens of people because they’re certain of their place in heaven as martyrs. Men rape and abuse women out of their certainty that they’re entitled to women’s bodies. Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil. - 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. - 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 (gulp) one person. - By “boundaries” I mean the delineation between two people’s responsibilities for their own problems. 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. - we all, at some point, become aware of the inevitability of our own death. 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. This realization causes what Becker calls “death terror,” a deep existential anxiety that underlies everything we think or do.