The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

something like, “Why do you care that I’m dead when you’re
still so afraid to live?” I woke up crying.
It was sitting on my mom’s couch that summer, staring
into the so-called abyss, seeing the endless and
incomprehensible nothingness where Josh’s friendship used
to be, when I came to the startling realization that if there
really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no
reason to not do anything; that in the face of the
inevitability of death, there is no reason to ever give in to
one’s fear or embarrassment or shame, since it’s all just a
bunch of nothing anyway; and that by spending the majority
of my short life avoiding what was painful and
uncomfortable, I had essentially been avoiding being alive
at all.
That summer, I gave up the weed and the cigarettes and
the video games. I gave up my silly rock star fantasies and
dropped out of music school and signed up for college
courses. I started going to the gym and lost a bunch of
weight. I made new friends. I got my first girlfriend. For the
first time in my life I actually studied for classes, gaining me
the startling realization that I could make good grades if
only I gave a shit. The next summer, I challenged myself to
read fifty nonfiction books in fifty days, and then did it. The
following year, I transferred to an excellent university on the
other side of the country, where I excelled for the first time,
both academically and socially.
Josh’s death marks the clearest before/after point I can
identify in my life. Pre-tragedy, I was inhibited, unambitious,
forever obsessed and confined by what I imagined the world
might be thinking of me. Post-tragedy, I morphed into a new
person: responsible, curious,hardworking. I still had my
insecurities and my baggage—as we always do—but now I
gave a fuck about something more important than my
insecurities and my baggage. And that made all the
difference. Oddly, it was someone else’s death that gave me