The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck

Bad values are generally reliant on external events—flying in a private
jet, being told you’re right all the time, owning a house in the Bahamas,
eating a cannoli while getting blown by three strippers. Bad values, while
sometimes fun or pleasurable, lie outside of your control and often require
socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve.
Values are about prioritization. Everybody would love a good cannoli or a
house in the Bahamas. The question is your priorities. What are the values
that you prioritize above everything else, and that therefore influence your
decision-making more than anything else?
Hiroo Onoda’s highest value was complete loyalty and service to the
Japanese empire. This value, in case you couldn’t tell from reading about
him, stank worse than a rotten sushi roll. It created really shitty problems for
Hiroo—namely, he got stuck on a remote island where he lived off bugs and
worms for thirty years. Oh, and he felt compelled to murder innocent
civilians too. So despite the fact that Hiroo saw himself as a success, and
despite the fact he lived up to his metrics, I think we can all agree that his life
really sucked—none of us would trade shoes with him given the opportunity,
nor would we commend his actions.
Dave Mustaine achieved great fame and glory and felt like a failure
anyway. This is because he’d adopted a crappy value based on some arbitrary
comparison to the success of others. This value gave him awful problems
such as, “I need to sell 150 million more records; then everything will be
great,” and “My next tour needs to be nothing but stadiums”—problems he
thought he needed to solve in order to be happy. It’s no surprise that he
wasn’t.
On the contrary, Pete Best pulled a switcheroo. Despite being depressed
and distraught by getting kicked out of the Beatles, as he grew older he
learned to reprioritize what he cared about and was able to measure his life in
a new light. Because of this, Best grew into a happy and healthy old man,
with an easy life and great family—things that, ironically, the four Beatles
would spend decades struggling to achieve or maintain.
When we have poor values—that is, poor standards we set for ourselves
and others—we are essentially giving fucks about the things that don’t
matter, things that in fact make our life worse. But when we choose better
values, we are able to divert our fucks to something better—toward things
that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate