By Mark Manson

This book will not teach you how to gain or achieve, but rather how to lose and let go. It will teach you to take inventory of your life and scrub out all but the most important items. It will teach you to close your eyes and trust that you can fall backwards and still be okay. It will teach you to give fewer f*cks. It will teach you to not try.

True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Sometimes those problems are simple […] Other times those problems are abstract and complicated. Whatever your problems are, the concept is the same; solve problems; be happy. Unfortunately, for many people, life doesn’t feel that simple. That’s because they fuck things up in at least one of 2 ways:

1. Denial: Some people deny that their problems exist in the first place
2. Victim Mentality: Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could.

The Self-awareness onion

The second layer of the self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. These why questions are difficult and often take months or even years to answer consistently and accurately. Some questions are important because they illuminate what we consider success or failure. Why do you feel angry? Is it because you failed to achieve some goal? Why do you feel lethargic and uninspired? Is it because you don’t think you’re good enough?

But there’s another, even deeper level of the self-awareness onion. And that one is full of fucking tears. The third level is our personal values; Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?

Honest self-questioning is difficult. It requires asking yourself simple questions that are uncomfortable to answer. In fact, in my experience, the more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true. Take a moment and think of something that’s really bugging you. Now ask yourself why it bugs you. Chances are the answer will involve a failure of some sort. Then take that failure and ask why it seems “true” to you. What if that failure wasn’t really a failure? What if you’ve. been looking at it the wrong way?

When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny the existence of our life’s 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 (even if supposedly pleasant) experience.

We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life.

There is no correct dogma or perfect ideology. There is only what your experiences has shown you to be right for you – and even then, that experience is probably somewhat wrong too. 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.

This is why people are often so afraid of success- for the exact same reason they’re afraid of failure; it threatens who believe themselves to be. You avoid telling your friend that you don’t want to see him anymore because ending the friendship would conflict with your identify as a nice, forgiving person. There are good, important opportunities that we consistently pass up because they threaten to change how we view and feel about ourselves. They threaten the values that we’ve chosen and have learned to live up to.

You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to. This mere fact, this simple optioning for your own values in life, already makes you beautiful, already makes you successful, and already makes you loved. Even if you don’t realise it. Even if you’re sleeping in a gutter and starving.

You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived.

We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t We are terrorised and flattened by life’s trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.

And the primary. lesson was this; there is nothing to be afraid of. Ever. And reminding myself of my own death repeatedly over the years – whether it be through meditation, through reading philosophy, or through doing crazy shit like standing on a cliff in South Africa – is the only that that has helped me hold this realisation front and center in my mind. The acceptance of my death, this understanding of my own fragility, has made everything easier – untangling my addictions, identifying and confronting my own entitlement, accepting responsibility for my own problems – suffering through my fears and uncertainties, accepting my failures and embracing rejections – it has all been made lighter by the thought of my own death. The more I peer into the darkness, the brighter life gets, the quieter the world becomes, and the less unconscious resistance I feel to, well, anything.