The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

challenges and opportunities for honest expression. The
value is an ongoing, lifelong process that defies completion.
If your metric for the value “success by worldly
standards” is “Buy a house and a nice car,” and you spend
twenty years working your ass off to achieve it, once it’s
achieved the metric has nothing left to give you. Then say
hello to your midlife crisis, because the problem that drove
you your entire adult life was just taken away from you.
There are no other opportunities to keep growing and
improving, and yet it’s growth that generates happiness, not
a long list of arbitrary achievements.
In this sense, goals, as they are conventionally defined—
graduate from college, buy a lake house, lose fifteen pounds
—are limited in the amount of happiness they can produce
in our lives. They may be helpful when pursuing quick,
short-term benefits, but as guides for the overall trajectory
of our life, they suck.
Picasso remained prolific his entire life. He lived into his
nineties and continued to produce art up until his final
years. Had his metric been “Become famous” or “Make a
buttload of money in the art world” or “Paint one thousand
pictures,” he would have stagnated at some point along the
way. He would have been overcome by anxiety or selfdoubt.
He likely wouldn’t have improved and innovated his
craft in the ways he did decade after decade.
The reason for Picasso’s success is exactly the same
reason why, as an old man, he was happy to scribble
drawings on a napkin alone in a café. His underlying value
was simple and humble. And it was endless. It was the value
“honest expression.” And this is what made that napkin so
valuable.
Pain Is Part of the Process
In the 1950s, a Polish psychologist named Kazimierz
Dabrowski studied World War II survivors and how they’d