Should You Give That Fuck?
A flowchart to help you balance your Fuck Budget.
Happy Monday, my gentle fucklings! Each of my No F*cks Given® Guides contains its own custom flowchart, a simple tool to walk you through the strategic highlights of not giving a fuck, getting your shit together, calming the fuck down, etc. There are six in total, and today I’m sharing the one that started it all.
Feel free to print it out, carry it around in your wallet, tape it to your desk, commission a mural for your living room, or get it tattooed on your chest. (Just make sure Ryan down at The Sweet Needle inks it backwards, so you can read it in the mirror.)
For anyone who hasn’t read The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck (or seen my TEDx Talk) and may be unfamiliar with my sweary shorthand, here are brief explainers on the three most important boxes in terms of kickstarting your NFG practice:
“Do I give a fuck about what other people think?”
Let me stop you right here, because YOU HAVE NO CONTROL OVER WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK, which means wasting your fucks on that pursuit is a recipe for failure on a grand fucking scale. All you can control in any given scenario are YOUR actions and behavior. In other words, stop worrying about looking like an asshole and just focus on not being an asshole.
“Make it about a difference of opinion.”
In the book, I recommend learning to communicate in the Language of Opinion—as in speaking in “opinions” vs “feelings.” You have every right to honestly and politely disagree with or simply not share someone else’s opinion; it’s how you choose to express that disagreement that can veer into rude or feelings-hurting territory, which can result in you being AND looking like an asshole and/or getting stuck in a much longer conversation than you want or need to have about this fuck you theoretically do not wish to give.
For example: say your football fanatic friend invites you to their Superbowl party, and you don’t want to go because watching a bunch of guys give each other traumatic brain injuries in between overhyped commercials and a halftime show that will never be as good as Prince isn’t really your idea of a Sunday Funday.
While this may be an accurate assessment of your feelings, expressing them quite so honestly is likely to come across as a referendum on your friend’s love of the game, potentially (and unnecessarily) hurting their feelings when all they did was invite you to a party. Instead, you could just say “Thanks, but football isn’t really my thing. Have fun!” It’s an honest, polite, and non-assholic response wherein you’ve communicated a difference of opinion and left everybody’s feelings out of it.
(And BTW, I’m not saying that differences of opinion and strong feelings aren’t worth the occasional vigorous debate among friends; only that in a case like this, such debate is going to eat up a lot of additional time and energy that you already didn’t want to spend at a Superbowl party, which would seem to run counter to your goal.)
“Does this fit into my Fuck Budget?”
In the parlance of the NFGGs, I refer to time, energy, and money as your “fuck bucks”—and allocating them wisely is “making a Fuck Budget.”
In an ideal world, you’d be spending them (i.e., “giving your fucks”) as much as possible on things you care (i.e., “give a fuck”) about—and NOT spending them on things you don’t, such as Superbowl parties and/or prolonged arguments about the myriad evils of the NFL, bloated corporate ad budgets that could have gone toward eliminating homelessness instead of selling Doritos, why Prince is and always will be the GOAT, etc. etc.
If you’re still having trouble deciding whether you should give that fuck, remember this:
Every bit of time, energy, and/or money that you spend on shit you don’t even care about is time, energy, and/or money you no longer have left to spend on the stuff you do care about.
Budget wisely, friends. And when in doubt, consult your flowchart. That’s what it’s here for.
A bit about me: I spent 15 years as a book editor in NYC before quitting that career to pursue a freelance life (a decision that involved a lot of red wine and a lot of tears). In 2015 I had the idea for my first book, The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck. And people loved it, so I kept writing! Today my sweary self-help series includes Get Your Shit Together, Calm the Fuck Down, Grow the Fuck Up, and more, with 3 million copies in print all over the world. You can also find me on Instagram, where my content skews tropical (in addition to quitting my job, I quit New York entirely and moved to a small fishing village in the Dominican Republic), plus food, cocktails, travel, and cats. So many cats.
A friend once wrote that she had a field of fucks, and the harvest was limited. As a result, she was careful to distribute them in a meaningful way, which is precisely what you're advocating here. Someone- I think it was Adam Grant - wrote about empathy distress, which is a polite way of saying that we give WAY too many fucks about things we can do nothing about. The way I think about it, Sarah, is that giving far too many fucks about shit that is ultimately meaningless isn't just draining, it's indicative of how little we're attending to what's going on inside us. That's basic psychology, but who on earth stops in the middle of rant and says "Gee. I'm projecting." Most of us don't. Social issues are one way where folks who are in emotional distress throw their fucks at stuff where they simply bounce off, useless. We aren't particularly good at asking hard questions like, where the fuck is all that energy coming from and why? And if I'm going to hand out all those fucks, might it make sense to invest a few in myself? I haven't read your book, but I'll bet my last fuck you address most of this. Now I gotta go seed my fuck field and grow a new crop. :-)
Love this post, and the analogy, Julia. I give way too many fucks, and it’s hard to remember my fields are a wasteland. I’m like that dystopian world you can’t see unless you put on the visor and there it is, smoking in the distance.