The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck

life, I’ve been flat-out wrong about myself, others, society, culture, the world,
the universe—everything.
And I hope that will continue to be the case for the rest of my life.
Just as Present Mark can look back on Past Mark’s every flaw and
mistake, one day Future Mark will look back on Present Mark’s assumptions
(including the contents of this book) and notice similar flaws. And that will
be a good thing. Because that will mean I have grown.
There’s a famous Michael Jordan quote about him failing over and over
and over again, and that’s why he succeeded. Well, I’m always wrong about
everything, over and over and over again, and that’s why my life improves.
Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new,
we don’t go from “wrong” to “right.” Rather, we go from wrong to slightly
less wrong. And when we learn something additional, we go from slightly
less wrong to slightly less wrong than that, and then to even less wrong than
that, and so on. We are always in the process of approaching truth and
perfection without actually ever reaching truth or perfection.
We shouldn’t seek to find the ultimate “right” answer for ourselves, but
rather, we should seek to chip away at the ways that we’re wrong today so
that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow.
When viewed from this perspective, personal growth can actually be quite
scientific. Our values are our hypotheses: this behavior is good and
important; that other behavior is not. Our actions are the experiments; the
resulting emotions and thought patterns are our data.
There is no correct dogma or perfect ideology. There is only what your
experience has shown you to be right for you—and even then, that experience
is probably somewhat wrong too. And because you and I and everybody else
all have differing needs and personal histories and life circumstances, we will
all inevitably come to differing “correct” answers about what our lives mean
and how they should be lived. My correct answer involves traveling alone for
years on end, living in obscure places, and laughing at my own farts. Or at
least that was the correct answer up until recently. That answer will change
and evolve, because I change and evolve; and as I grow older and more
experienced, I chip away at how wrong I am, becoming less and less wrong
every day.
Many people become so obsessed with being “right” about their life that
they never end up actually living it.