Mark Manson

One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing.

the more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true

Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problems

“With great responsibility comes great power.”

The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.

We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.
Because there’s an infinite amount of things we can now see or know, there are also an infinite number of ways we can discover that we don’t measure up, that we’re not good enough, that things aren’t as great as they could be. And this rips us apart inside.

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.

You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others. You just can’t.

Some people deny that their problems exist in the first place.

Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances.

Remember, nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.