A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life
I adored this book1, and it’s one I really needed to read. I’m a people-pleaser by nature, always looking to take the path of least resistance and steer myself away from conflict because I’ve been terrified of people not liking me. This book helped me realise how pointless, absurd and unhelpful that is as a way to go about living life.
I want to be really clear for anyone reading this who thinks it sounds like a big, brash, “don’t give a sh*t about anyone” kind of American self-help book that it’s very much not that. Instead, the big lesson I took from this book was simply that you have to choose what you want to care about in life, and then follow up on that by not attributing disproportionate weight to the things that aren’t important.
“It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law”—the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.”
“Albert Camus said (and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t on LSD at the time): ‘You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.'”
“You must give a fuck about something… The question, then, is, What do we give a fuck about? What are we choosing to give a fuck about?”
“You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.”
“It then follows that finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy. Because if you don’t find that meaningful something, your fucks will be given to meaningless and frivolous causes.”
“Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.”
“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.”
‘Don’t hope for a life without problems,’ the panda said. ‘There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.'”
“To deny one’s negative emotions is to deny many of the feedback mechanisms that help a person solve problems.”
“An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.”
“What determines your success isn’t, ‘What do you want to enjoy?’ The relevant question is, ‘What pain do you want to sustain?'”
“The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.”
“This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. And because we’re all quite average most of the time, the deluge of exceptional information drives us to feel pretty damn insecure and desperate, because clearly we are somehow not good enough.”
“The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame.”
“The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement.”
“People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better.”
“You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? That’s because these things are ordinary. But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.”
“Freud once said, ‘One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.'”
“Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.”
“We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge.”
“Growth is an endlessly iterative process.”
“We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.”
“The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.”
“It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you’re sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your life, and until you’re able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change.”
“We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at.”
“The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me.”
“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”
“Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.”
“Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.”
“Absolute freedom, by itself, means nothing.”
“Ultimately, the only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person.”
“Acts of love are valid only if they’re performed without conditions or expectations.”
“We’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death.”
“Without acknowledging the ever-present gaze of death, the superficial will appear important, and the important will appear superficial.”
“Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing.”
“You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived.”
- The number of highlights/notes in any book (especially non-fiction) is usually (but not always) a good barometer of my feelings about the book as a whole. [↩]