The-Subtle-Art-of-Not-Giving-a-F-ck-EnglishPDF-Mark-Manson

met some wonderful women, my life was more or less a wreck the whole
time. I was often unemployed, living on friends’ couches or with my mom,
drinking way more than I should have been, alienating a number of friends—
and when I did meet a woman I really liked, my self-absorption quickly
torpedoed everything.
The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and
the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for those problems. This
entitlement plays out in one of two ways:
1. I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
Opposite mindset on the outside, but the same selfish creamy core in the
middle. In fact, you will often see entitled people flip back and forth between
the two. Either they’re on top of the world or the world is on top of them,
depending on the day of the week, or how well they’re doing with their
particular addiction at that moment.
Most people correctly identify a person like Jimmy as a raging
narcissistic ass-hat. That’s because he’s pretty blatant in his delusionally high
self-regard. What most people don’t correctly identify as entitlement are
those people who perpetually feel as though they’re inferior and unworthy of
the world.
Because construing everything in life so as to make yourself out to be
constantly victimized requires just as much selfishness as the opposite. It
takes just as much energy and delusional self-aggrandizement to maintain the
belief that one has insurmountable problems as that one has no problems at
all.
The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got
a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it
now, and are going to have it in the future. Likely people you know too. That
doesn’t minimize the problem or mean that it shouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean
you aren’t legitimately a victim in some circumstances.
It just means that you’re not special.
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.