The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F_ck

of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of
trying something worthwhile and failing at it.
The pampering of the modern mind has resulted in a
population that feels deserving of something without
earning that something, a population that feels they have a
right to something without sacrificing for it. People declare
themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators,
mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience.
And they do this not because they actually think they are
greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel
that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that
broadcasts only the extraordinary.
Our culture today confuses great attention and great
success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are
not.
You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not.
Whether anybody else realizes it or not. And it’s not
because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a
year early, or bought yourself a sweet-ass boat. These
things do not define greatness.
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 realize 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. You may not feel this. But
go stand on a cliff sometime, and maybe you will.
Bukowski once wrote, “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 terrorized and flattened by life’s
trivialities; we are eaten up by nothing.”
Looking back on that night, out by that lake, when I
watched my friend Josh’s body getting fished out of the lake