People have asked me directly, so I might as well answer directly. How does my book How To Not Give A F*ck compare to Mark Manson's The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck. They share a swear word in the title. They are not the same book. Here is the honest version.
What Manson's book is
The Subtle Art is a philosophy book dressed as self-help. Its core argument is that you have a finite number of things you can care about in life, so you should pick them deliberately, and stop wasting your allocation on things that do not matter. It is well written, it draws on Stoic and Buddhist ideas, and it is aimed at a mostly male, mostly ambitious audience who need permission to stop optimising everything.
If you have never encountered the "choose your battles" idea in a serious form, it is a genuinely good book. It will change how you think about complaining. It is also over 200 pages, and by the end you will have understood the point three chapters in and been given examples for the rest.
What my book is
How To Not Give A F*ck is a shorter, blunter, UK-voiced book aimed at a completely different reader. It is for the person who is not overcaring about the wrong things because they are ambitious, but because they are exhausted from caring about everyone else. The overthinker, the people-pleaser, the woman who runs the emotional admin of an entire household and family.
The problem it addresses is not "you care about the wrong things". It is "you have been trained to care about everyone else's comfort at the cost of your own, and you cannot switch it off, and you feel guilty for even trying".
Those are different problems. The Subtle Art tells you to pick your battles. How To Not Give A F*ck tells you that it is safe to have a battle at all.
Which one you should read
Read Manson if
- You are broadly fine but scattered.
- You care about too many things and cannot prioritise.
- You are open to philosophy in a self-help wrapper.
- You want a longer, more argument-driven book.
Read How To Not Give A F*ck if
- You are quietly exhausted.
- You people-please and then resent people for the thing you agreed to.
- You replay conversations at 2am.
- You want a short, direct, British-voiced book you might actually finish.
- You have already read Manson and it did not quite land.
Read both, honestly
They complement each other. Manson gives you the framework. Mine gives you the permission. Both are cheaper than a therapy session and neither will ask you to buy a course afterwards.
If you want to see if my one is for you, the first chapter is essentially in the reviews, which are on the book's page. Read a few and see if the voice fits. That is the fastest way to tell whether any self-help book is going to work for you: not the description, the reviews.