SECRET CHAPTER

The “Secret” Chapter

The Chapter That Got Cut From
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
 Copyright © Mark Manson, 2011-2021.

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 Author’s Note
The original draft of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck was significantly longer and
denser than the book that was eventually published. Instead of nine chapters, the
original draft had 11 chapters. Instead of 210 pages, the original draft had nearly 300
pages. Instead of a few simple concepts (entitlement, values, responsibility, etc.), the
original draft had quite a few complex, interrelated psychological concepts (hero
worship, codependence, “Impossible Metrics,” etc.)

In the process of writing any book, you go through rounds of edits and revisions.
Initially, most of these rounds are done on your own, as the author. But then once you
feel as though you have it right (or you just can’t fucking stand it anymore), you send it
to a professional editor, and they proceed to tear it apart, cut paragraphs and sections,
offer suggestions for revisions, fix your mangled sentences, and ruin your life.

The first two chapters of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck are more or less the same
as the original draft I submitted. So are the final five chapters (covering responsibility,
uncertainty, failure, rejection, and death, respectively).

Most of what was edited and cut was in the middle. In the original draft, the middle
four chapters of the book (chapters 3 through 6) were a convoluted, self-referential
mess. I tried to introduce too many concepts, didn’t define them well enough, and
often lost track of the central thesis of the book. Much of these middle chapters of
the book were spent describing problematic values and the two different forms of
entitlement.

These middle chapters were a mess. They were long-winded and rambly and not
entirely thought through. As a result, my editor and I spent a lot of time trying to
distill the ideas and simplify them enough to reflect the strength of the beginning and
end of the book.
In the process, one of these chapters would be cut, the one you're about to read.
Another chapter would be chopped up and have its body parts buried throughout
other parts of the book. This would leave the book with a streamlined, nine-chapter
structure—an easy and enjoyable read without weighty philosophical concepts that
would lead the reader down an undesirable rabbit hole.

With all that said, it’s always hurt a little bit to have had this chapter axed, especially
given many of the events that have happened in the world since 2016. The concepts
here have always been near and dear to my heart, and fans who have read Everything is
F*cked: A Book About Hope and listened to Love Is Not Enough will recognize how many
of them sprang up in my later work.

I think readers always found it easy to understand how someone like Jimmy in
Chapter 3 was an entitled douche-hat. But the more subtle, innocent version of
entitlement—the codependence and hero worship that is so endemic in our
culture—is far more subtle and difficult to notice in ourselves. That form of
entitlement is what this chapter attempted to cover, and at the time, I think it failed.

Looking back, I think I just wasn’t strong enough as a writer, yet. Earlier this year, I
pulled the chapter back out and gave it a strong revision, cut some of the extraneous
and unnecessary concepts, and streamlined its message a bit. The core points remain
the same and hopefully, you will see how they were intended to mesh with many of
the ideas around entitlement, exceptionalism, and trauma discussed in Chapters 3 and
4 in Subtle Art.

Enjoy.

Mark Manson
May 17, 2021
 Chapter 5
Hero Worship

I once saw an interview with the rapper Lil’ Wayne on TV. Lil’ Wayne had just been
arrested on weapons and drug charges and, in my opinion, was clearly high during the
interview. His answers were flippant. His body language lackadaisical. At one point,
the interviewer, a middle-aged white woman asked him in a condescending tone,
“Aren’t you concerned about the example you’re setting for kids around the world?”

Lil’ Wayne stared at her. “No,” he said. “Why should I be?”

The interviewer said, “Well, you’re a role model.”

Lil’ Wayne, “I ain’t a role model. What makes you think I’m a role model?”

She seemed flummoxed, “Well, kids look up to you. They follow you. They use you as
an example to decide how to act, how to live.”

Lil’ Wayne shook his head. After a beat, he said, “Man, if you need some rapper to tell
you how to live yo’ life, then maybe you don’t deserve to be livin’.”

There’s a human tendency to live vicariously through others—to see the success or
fame of celebrities, business moguls, or politicians and idolize them in some way, and
make them partially responsible for our own happiness. Let’s call this hero worship.

So far, we’ve talked about entitlement—the sense that some people feel that they
deserve happiness without sacrificing for it. Hero worship would appear to be the
inversion of entitlement—the willingness to give up one’s own identity to live

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vicariously through the success and happiness of another. But, as we’ll discover,
entitlement and hero worship have a lot of the same machinery going on underneath
the surface.

Entitlement is when you believe you deserve great things without earning them. Hero
worship is when you believe others deserve great things without earning them.
Entitlement is when you delude yourself into believing you’re embodying all of your
values. Hero worship is when you delude yourself into believing someone else
embodies all of your values.

In both cases, people are simply avoiding problems and tricking themselves in order
to achieve highs. Entitled people are basically saying, “Fuck it, if I have to hurt, I may
as well pretend I’m perfect and can never fail.” Hero worshippers are basically saying,
“Fuck it, if I have to hurt, I'll pretend he/she is perfect and will never fail me.”

Hero worship is the defining trait of pop culture. It’s encouraged and provided
through media, entertainment, and politics. We fail to achieve the happy home life we
always dreamed of, so we watch hours and hours of TV programs where people shop
for and renovate their dream homes. We fail to achieve the popularity and attention
we always desired, so we live vicariously through the douchey reality television stars
who are lavished with attention for all the wrong reasons. We fail to live up to our
dreams of success and luxury, so we spend hours gawking at the lives of celebrities
and billionaires through tabloid media. We fail to see ourselves ever affecting the
world around us in any meaningful way, so we live vicariously through video games
and films where we can—even if for only a couple of hours—pretend that we’re
saving the world over and over again, conquering evil once and for all.

We all do this. We all live vicariously through others to some degree. Some of us just
do it to a greater extent, depending on how fucked up our values are. Generally, the
people with the most trauma and pain in their background are also the people who
possess the greatest sense of entitlement and/or exhibit the greatest amount of hero
worship.

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The real problem with living vicariously through others is when it begins to consume
our lives. Living vicariously by watching sports or following celebrities can be
harmless fun. But letting our hero worship consume us—people ashamed of their
sexuality watching pornography all day; people spending all of their money following a
rock band around the country; people getting plastic surgery to look exactly like a
celebrity—can destroy any possibility of living a happy and healthy life.

The deeper the trauma, the deeper the pain. And the deeper the pain, the more we
must compensate and/or distract ourselves. And not just compensate once. But
compensate repeatedly. Proving to ourselves again and again and again that we are
worthy.

What’s best is to remove as much vicarious living from our lives as possible. Stop
idealizing the people in your life. Stop holding friends or partners or family members
up to some impossible standard. Stop the hero worship and stop putting people on a
pedestal. Stop the excessive gossip, video games, and pornography. Letting go of these
vicarious means of fulfilling one’s needs will be painful at first, and it will generate a
certain amount of fear and insecurity. But it will also force you to build up a newer,
stronger version of yourself, a version that is capable and worthy and adequate.

Hero worship of popular culture, celebrities, sports figures, or even heroes in comic
books or video games is pretty harmless and dull. It gives you highs like anything else,
and when engaged with moderation and a healthy dose of skepticism, it’s fine.

It’s when hero worship enters our personal relationships that things get all sorts of
fucked up. It’s when we decide to give more fucks about somebody else’s happiness
than our own.

Codependence

Decades ago, in some musty basement hall in some barren church meeting room on
some anonymous night, a bunch of alcoholics (sans alcohol) came to a startling

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realization: that the people who most desired to help them were often the ones who
made everything worse.

These were the fathers and mothers, wives and husbands, the children and uncles and
best friends and girlfriends and bar friends and school friends. They all meant well.
They all approached the drunk and diseased with the best of intentions: to be the sling
that sustained the broken limb, to be the salve that eased the seared heart. But these
alcoholics on this anonymous night in this musty basement came to the startling and
uncomfortable conclusion that these well-intentioned helpers were unwittingly paving
the road to each alcoholic’s own personal drunken inferno.

They discovered that while the alcoholics used alcohol to avoid their own pain, these
people in their lives who tried to help used the alcoholics to avoid their pain.

The alcoholics-sans-alcohol named this phenomenon “codependence.” The alcoholic

was addicted to the bottle while the codependent was addicted to being a savior, to
holding somebody else up, to “fixing” somebody who is broken, to being the most
necessary thing in another person’s life.

Codependence is an addiction to other people. The codependent person mortgages

one’s own identity in order to fulfill the identities of others. Codependents are
addicted to the thought that they can fix somebody, that they make everything okay,
that everyone can be happy all the time without any conflict or problems at all.

But the problem is that to build others up, codependents usually marginalize and
destroy themselves.

Codependents empty themselves. They believe in a sort of utopian fantasy where

there’s never a conflict anywhere because we’re all good and equal and the same and
really, you should see him, he’s so much better—yeah, I loaned him the car and he
wrecked it again—no, he was on Quaaludes this time, with a half-empty bottle of
rum—yeah, I’m going to pay for it, he has enough problems, he shouldn’t have to
worry about it—but really, he’s turning the corner. I think he will change this time.

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Codependents are attracted to people with deep pain and psychological flaws because
the codependent sees this pain and these flaws as an opportunity to be needed and to
be loved themselves. The codependent seeks out the damaged and emotionally
disfigured as a form of insurance—if they “fix” this person, glorify them and make
them great, then this person will always be tied to them in some meaningful and
powerful way.

Codependents may appear altruistic but they’re actually quite manipulative. The
difference between someone who is genuinely selfless and someone who is
codependent is that a codependent uses their niceness as a tool to gain approval,
acceptance, and validation; whereas a selfless person gives unconditionally, a
codependent person gives conditionally. It’s a way for them to guarantee affection
and approval in return.

Codependence is a form of hero worship, it’s living vicariously through somebody

else’s achievements or failures rather than one’s own. Entitlement is a strategy where
people delude themselves into believing they’re achieving their values even if they’re
not. Codependence is when people delude themselves into believing they can get
somebody else to achieve their values, even though they can’t. The woman who never
felt important enough finds a lying and cheating man and convinces herself that she
can change him into the amazing person she can never be. The man who never felt
loved finds a drug-addicted girlfriend who constantly needs him to survive. The
mother who never felt beautiful or loved pushes her daughter to be the most beautiful
and likeable of all.

As Marilyn Manson once sang, “We love the abuse because it makes us feel like we are
needed.”

Ultimately, it’s in the codependent’s nature to avoid their own problems by always
trying to solve other people’s problems. It’s in the codependent’s nature to assume that
they deserve whatever punishment is getting dished out to them, because even if they
didn’t do anything wrong, they failed to fix what was wrong with somebody else, and
that, to them, is just as bad. Codependents are also often delusionally optimistic,
especially when it comes to relationships. They continually believe that if they can just

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change That One Thing—maybe it’s moving to a new city, maybe it’s helping him get
a new job, maybe it’s supporting him while he deals with the loss of his
mother—whatever it is, That One Thing will be the last step, the key that will unlock a
golden future of angels and fairies and unicorns pissing honey into everybody’s
mouths.

But sadly, the sun sets again and the home is empty. There’s a desperate silence as the
codependent waits on the couch, calling and calling to no answer, crying and blaming
themselves, wondering what on earth did they do wrong, what on earth did they do to
deserve this? And when he finally comes home at 3 AM—maybe high, maybe drunk,
maybe reeking of pussy and regrets—between the shouts and tears and left hooks to
bruised jaw lines and black eyes and crying toddlers and destroyed furniture, That
One Thing hangs in the air like a cloud, never dissipating, waiting to settle back into
the codependent’s mind once more, allowing them to return to their rightful place:
living for somebody who refuses to live for themselves.

On the surface, codependents are usually the victims. But underneath, they are subtly
just as dysfunctional as the people they are purportedly helping. Because they live so
selflessly, they secretly see themselves as entitled to affection, acceptance, and
deserving of praise never received. They may say to themselves, “I’m nice. I’m
friendly. I pay for stuff. Where’s my love?” Codependence is every cheesy guy who
thinks that because he paid for dinner and a bottle of wine, a woman should like him.
Codependence is every parent who thinks that because they paid for their child’s
school they’re owed X amount of phone calls or Y number of holiday visits.
Codependence is the teacher or employer or minister or even therapist who thinks
they have the right to overstep that invisible line and take responsibility for their
subordinate’s pain and problems.

Ultimately, codependent people buy into a shallow and transactional interpretation of

relationships. “I did X, Y, and Z for you, and you only did A and B in return,
therefore I’m a better friend than you; you should be nicer to me.” There’s a quiet
selfishness lurking beneath the surface.

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We all like to indulge in idealistic fantasies from time to time where we save other
people. And most of us, most of the time, want to help and be a Good Samaritan to
others. Hell, some people’s job is to help others. But the codependent’s problem is not
that they want to help people or that they want happiness. The codependent’s
problem is that they feel as though they need to help or “fix” people, otherwise they
will never be liked or loved or appreciated. And as a result of this incessant need to be
involved in those around them, the codependent willingly walks into the same toxic
relationships that destroy him again and again.

What the codependent doesn’t understand is that sometimes the most loving thing
you can do for someone is to let them deal with their own problems.

Match Made in Hell

Oddly enough, entitled people and codependents tend to attract one another. It makes
sense if you think about it. An entitled person needs constant adulation and attention.
And codependents need to constantly give adulation and attention. An entitled person
wants to be hero-worshipped. A codependent wants to hero-worship.

The two go together like beer and brownies, like whiskey and tango lessons, like
foosball and a Mexican hooker—they sound like an awful combo on the surface, but
in practice, they actually work out perfectly.

The reason is that entitled people and codependents enable each other—by choosing
to constantly praise and hold up the entitled person, the codependent allows their
entitled partner to continue acting selfishly without repercussions. By choosing to
constantly demand attention and support, the entitled person allows the codependent
to continue avoiding their own shitty self-worth by trying to fix someone else’s. The
two bring out the worst in each other in a flurry of fiery passion and broken
romance—the hallmark of a toxic relationship.

But ultimately, they go together for the simple reason that they’re both damaged
goods. They both have this insatiable sense of inadequacy that they’re both able to

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quell in one another temporarily. They both worship the same hero: the entitled.
They’re both, quite literally, giving each other highs to mask the underlying pain
caused by their trauma and failures.

Because of the constant highs being exchanged, toxic relationships like this often feel
the most emotionally profound and powerful to the people in them. The constant
drama creates a rollercoaster of emotions, with higher highs and lower lows. Normal
and healthy relationships are not like this. They are far more stable and efficient. They
are also honest.

You see this same dynamic play out socially with celebrities, gurus, political leaders,
and CEOs—they intentionally foster hero worship in their followers, and their
codependent followers willingly give themselves over to the leader. They promise
salvation and true happiness when all they’re really offering is another avenue to avoid
taking responsibility for one’s own problems.

The Need for Dishonesty

Another thing the entitled and codependent have in common is that they must
constantly lie to themselves. They both must lie because they both must keep the
illusion going, the illusion that they are somehow solving their problems when they
are actually not. It’s Jimmy telling himself that an investor is intimidated by his
business acumen or an abused wife convincing herself that this time her husband will
change.

These lies exist to help them avoid the truths they don’t want to hear. Just as an
alcoholic believes everybody drinks a little too much and a sex addict believes that
everybody wants to fuck as much as he does but they’re just too repressed to enjoy it, an
entitled person views the world through the lens of their own entitlement. The
entitled person believes that everyone wants to either be with them or be like them.
The codependent believes that everyone is capable of greatness and happiness. To the
afflicted, their own lies appear to them as the hard truths that no one else is capable
of seeing.

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But actions don’t lie. Entitlement and codependence can always be spotted, not
through what a person says—because they genuinely believe everything they say—but
rather, through what a person does.

Because they don’t do what they say. Entitled people will talk about their own
greatness… in between bong hits on the couch while watching Jersey Shore reruns.
Codependents will swear that they stand up for themselves and don’t put up with
anybody’s shit… because it’s what they think you want to hear them say.

As a result of these inconsistencies between their perceptions of themselves and the

world around them, you see the same range of behaviors emerge from both entitled
people and codependents:

1. Self-Absorption – The need to conform the world to one’s own perceptions causes
one to become overly preoccupied with one’s own perceptions. Because everything
that occurs in an entitled person’s or a codependent’s life must be filtered through
their sense of superiority/inferiority, the person must interpret everything that happens in
their life to be about them. An entitled person will find ways to take credit for events that
have nothing to do with them or don’t even exist at all. A codependent, because they
feel responsible for someone else’s problems, will interpret anything someone else is
going through as their responsibility to resolve.

2. Lack of Responsibility – Entitled people and codependents both deny

responsibility for their own problems in equal and opposite measures. Entitled people
believe that they aren’t responsible for the repercussions their actions have on others
because what is good for them must be good for those around them, and if other
people can’t see that, then that’s their fucking problem. Codependents, on the other
hand, don’t take responsibility for the repercussions their actions have on themselves.
Instead, they live an ironic existence where they're continually attempting to rescue
those around them, yet they themselves expect to be rescued from any problems they
may have.

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3. Certainty – Addicts maintain an unwavering certainty about their place in the
world. Entitled people do not question their own righteousness because to do so
would ruin their delusions of superiority. Codependents do not question their own
inferiority because to do so would force them to take responsibility for their own
actions and the consequences of their own decisions.

5. A Sense That Nothing Is Ever “Good Enough” – Entitled people and

codependents live in a world of shoulds. The codependent believes everybody should be
happy all the time and becomes upset when they’re not. The entitled believes that
everybody should be as good as they are, as smart as they are, as successful as they are,
and gets upset when the world fails to meet their lofty expectations.

These thought addicts cling to some perception they have of how the world should
be, how people should behave, how things should go. It’s this endless army of shoulds
trampling over their identities, keeping themselves distracted from their gnawing sense
that it’s never enough. But the fact is that the world never seems as though it’s enough
because the thought addict secretly believes that she is never enough.

5. An Unwillingness to Fail or Be Rejected – Because they must always keep up

appearances of their own greatness, entitled people will handle failure and rejection
extremely poorly. In fact, they will usually just deny that they failed at all. Jimmy used
to trash talk former business associates or deals that fell through. He’d call them
losers and claim he was glad he didn’t have to work with them anymore.

Codependents are terrified of failure and rejection as well, but for the opposite reason.
To be rejected by the person or thing that they are so busy worshipping would suggest
that they themselves are worthless failures.

Lack of Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is kind of like sex. Everyone thinks they’re great at it when actually no
one knows what the hell they’re doing.

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Self-awareness is also like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more layers
you peel back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times.

Let’s say the first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple awareness of one’s
emotions. “This is when I feel happy.” “This makes me feel sad.” “This makes me feel
disrespected.” “This gives me hope.”

Unfortunately, there are many people who suck at this most basic level of
self-awareness. I know because I’m one of them. My family is one of them. To this
day, my wife and I have a fun back-and-forth sometimes that goes something like this:

Her: “What’s wrong?”

Me: “Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all.”
Her: “No, something’s wrong. Tell me.”
Me: “I’m fine. Really.”
Her: “Are you sure? You look upset?”
Me: *nervous laughter* “Really? No, I’m OK, seriously.”

[30 minutes later]

Me: “… And that’s why I’m so fucking pissed off! He just acts as if I don’t exist half
the time.”

We all have our emotional blind spots—often the emotions that we were taught were
inappropriate growing up. It takes years of practice and effort to get good at
identifying them in yourself and then expressing them appropriately. But it’s hugely
important.

The second layer of the self-awareness onion is a sense of failure/success. We look at

our emotions, then we ask ourselves why we feel those emotions. Why do you feel
angry? Why do you feel lethargic and uninspired?

These why questions are difficult and often take months or even years to answer
accurately. Most people need to go to some sort of therapy just to hear these

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questions asked for the first time, and then another eight months of sessions to get
close to what the actual answer probably is.

But there’s another, deeper level, of the self-awareness onion, a third layer. And that
one is full of fucking tears. And that deeper level is of metrics—Why do I consider
this to be success/failure?

This level is incredibly difficult to reach and takes years and years of constant
questioning and effort. But it’s also the most important, because as we’ve seen, it’s
metrics that determine the quality of our life, not the successes/failures themselves.

The problem is that most entitled/codependent people never get past the first layer
and definitely not past the second. An entitled person may see that they’re really
lonely. They’ll then look at the why of them being upset and conclude that it’s because
everyone around them isn’t as cool as they are.

In their minds, this is a sufficiently deep level of self-awareness. When in fact, if you
go a level deeper and look at their metrics, it becomes crystal clear that they are living
by some Impossible Metric, refusing to take responsibility for their own actions and
habitually blaming everyone around them for their problems instead.

Even most self-help content ignores this deeper level. They take a person who is
miserable because they want to be rich, and then give them all sorts of advice on how
to make more money, all the while ignoring the important question of why do they
feel such a need to be rich in the first place? How are they choosing to measure
success/failure?

In a sense, most of the self-help industry has become adept at taking whiny miserable
codependents and teaching them how to be entitled. The person’s perceptions and
feelings change, but the underlying metrics causing the misery and pain in the first
place never get addressed. The problems never get solved so it’s just more highs, not
real happiness.

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You can use this “Why?” trick right now, in fact. Take a moment and think of
something that’s really bugging you. Now ask yourself why it bugs you. Then take that
answer and why that answer seems true to you. Then take that answer and ask why
that feels as though it’s a failure. Then start the process all over again. Try it.

A recent example from my own life:

“It bugs me that my brother never returns my texts or emails.”

Why?
“Because it feels like he doesn’t give a shit about me.”
Why does this seem true?
“Because if he wanted to have a relationship with me, he would take the 10 seconds
out of his day that’s necessary to interact with me.”
Why does his lack of relationship with you feel like a failure?
“Because we’re brothers, we’re supposed to have a good relationship!”

Here we arrive at my metric: brothers are supposed to have a good relationship with
one another. By holding on to this metric, I am making myself feel as though I’m a
failure, which sometimes ruins my Saturday morning.

We can even dig deeper by repeating the process.

Why are brothers supposed to have a good relationship?

“Because they’re family and family are supposed to be close!”
Why does that seem true?
“Because your family is supposed to matter to you more than anyone else!”
Why does the lack of relationship with your brother feel like a failure?
“Because being close to your family is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ and I don’t have that.”

Here we arrive at the root cause of my metric: everyone else has good relationships
with their family and I don’t. So obviously there’s something wrong with me.

At this point I can consider changing my metric. Perhaps I don’t need to be close to my
brother to have a good relationship with him. Perhaps there just needs to be some

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mutual respect. Or mutual trust. Or maybe we just need to get along once a year.
There’s no law saying that two brothers have to be close and buddy-buddy all the time.

The latter half of this book will look into these questions further, asking what your
metrics are and how you can choose better ones. These are simple questions with
complicated and often painful answers. But in the end, they are better problems to
have.

But first, I want to take a short detour for one chapter and talk about our current
culture of consumerism and constant media, and discuss how this may be affecting us
and our metrics adversely.

Books by Mark Manson

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck:

A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

Love Is Not Enough – Audiobook

Models: Attract Women Through Honesty

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