The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. This is a total mind-fuck. So I’ll give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again: Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience. 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.

Ever notice that sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it?

This is what is so admirable. No, not me, dumbass—the overcoming adversity stuff, the willingness to be different, an outcast, a pariah, all for the sake of one’s own values. The willingness to stare failure in the face and shove your middle finger back at it. The people who don’t give a fuck about adversity or failure or embarrassing themselves or shitting the bed a few times. The people who just laugh and then do what they believe in anyway. Because they know it’s right. They know it’s more important than they are, more important than their own feelings and their own pride and their own ego. They say, “Fuck it,” not to everything in life, but rather to everything unimportant in life.

The problem with people who hand out fucks like ice cream at a goddamn summer camp is that they don’t have anything more fuck-worthy to dedicate their fucks to. Don’t try.

After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.

Problems are a constant in life.

Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress—the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

And so they settle. They settle and wonder, “What if?” for years and years, until the question morphs from “What if?” into “What else?”

I didn’t actually want it. I was in love with the result—the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I was playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all.

I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory.

Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.

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.

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.

This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.

Ultimately, while she was to blame for how I felt, she was never responsible for how I felt. I was.

And it’s true, it’s not their fault. But it’s still their responsibility.

This ability to alleviate responsibility through blame gives people a temporary high and a feeling of moral righteousness.

People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.

You are already choosing, in every moment of every day, what to give a fuck about, so change is as simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else.

As a teenager, I told everybody that I didn’t care about anything, when the truth was I cared about way too much. Other people ruled my world without me even knowing.

It’s easier to sit in a painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for sure.

Beliefs of this sort—that I’m not attractive enough, so why bother; or that my boss is an asshole, so why bother—are designed to give us moderate comfort now by mortgaging greater happiness and success later on. They’re terrible long-term strategies, yet we cling to them because we assume we’re right, because we assume we already know what’s supposed to happen. In other words, we assume we know how the story ends.

Certainty is the enemy of growth.

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.

I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.