Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

or splashing dog piss on your face to look young again. It means not thinking
“mediocre” is a vegetable, and not being afraid to care about things.
Because here’s something that’s weird but true: we don’t actually know
what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and
stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and
motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are
also the most distracting and demotivating. Don’t trust your conception of
positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in
the moment and what doesn’t. And that’s not worth much.
Just as we look back in horror at the lives of people five hundred years
ago, I imagine people five hundred years from now will laugh at us and our
certainties today. They will laugh at how we let our money and our jobs
define our lives. They will laugh at how we were afraid to show
appreciation for those who matter to us most, yet heaped praise on public
figures who didn’t deserve anything. They will laugh at our rituals and
superstitions, our worries and our wars; they will gawk at our cruelty. They
will study our art and argue over our history. They will understand truths
about us of which none of us are yet aware.
And they, too, will be wrong. Just less wrong than we were.
Architects of Our Own Beliefs
Try this. Take a random person and put them in a room with some buttons to
push. Then tell them that if they do something specific—some undefined
something that they have to figure out—a light will flash on indicating that
they’ve won a point. Then tell them to see how many points they can earn
within a thirty-minute period.
When psychologists have done this, what happens is what you might
expect. People sit down and start mashing buttons at random until eventually
the light comes on to tell them they got a point. Logically, they then try
repeating whatever they were doing to get more points. Except now the
light’s not coming on. So they start experimenting with more complicated
sequences—press this button three times, then this button once, then wait five
seconds, and—ding! Another point. But eventually that stops working.
Perhaps it doesn’t have to do with buttons at all, they think. Perhaps it has to
do with how I’m sitting. Or what I’m touching. Maybe it has to do with my