The subtle art of choosing what to care about.

because your chips are limited.

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We have a limited amount of fucks to give.

Not giving a f*ck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different. - Mark Manson.

We live like we have an infinite supply of time, energy, and attention. As if there’s some bottomless reservoir of mental bandwidth we can tap into for every breaking news headline, every social media drama, every random thing someone says about us. The truth is far less generous: you have a finite number of fucks to give in your lifetime. Every single one you spend on something meaningless is one you’ll never get back, one you won’t be able to invest into something that actually matters. Think of them like poker chips. You don’t get to buy more. Every chip you push into the pot for something trivial is one less chip you’ll have when the stakes are real. The reason so many people feel exhausted isn’t because life is impossibly busy, it’s because they’re constantly burning their chips on garbage hands.

Picture it. You wake up tomorrow, grab your phone, and scroll through Instagram. The first thing you see is someone’s vacation in Bali. Without thinking, you’ve just handed over one of your chips and suddenly you’re comparing your own life to theirs. Then you switch to Twitter. Someone you’ve never met is furious about a political decision. Another chip gone. You check your email, three spam promotions, two “urgent” client requests, and one dramatic update from that colleague who thrives on chaos. There goes three more chips. By 9:30 a.m. you’ve burned through most of your emotional budget for the day and you haven’t even touched the things that actually matter: your health, your relationships, your goals, your own peace of mind.

When you care about everything equally, you flatten the playing field. A stranger’s opinion on social media becomes as urgent as the wellbeing of your own family. A minor inconvenience gets the same reaction as an actual crisis. No wonder people live in a constant state of anxiety, they’ve given away all their chips before lunch. We’re living in an economy where your attention is the product. Every app, every platform, every news channel is engineered to pull you into caring about one more thing you didn’t plan to care about. The designers don’t care whether that thing is useful to you. They just care that it keeps you engaged. It’s like walking through a carnival where every booth is screaming: “Hey! This is important! You should be upset about it!” “No, over here! This is way more important!” “Wait, before you go, here’s something else you need to obsess over!” And because our brains are wired to respond to novelty, outrage, and social validation, we take the bait. Every time.

I once read about a guy who kept a jar of 100 poker chips on his desk. Every morning, he’d put them in a little cup labeled “Today’s Energy.” Every time he made a decision, dealt with a problem, or let something get under his skin, he’d move a chip to another cup labeled “Gone Forever.” His rule was brutal: once the chips were gone, so was his willingness to spend energy on anything else that day. Sounds extreme, but it made one thing painfully obvious, most of the things he spent chips on didn’t matter in the slightest. A rude email. A celebrity breakup. A driver cutting him off in traffic. He started asking himself: “Do I really want to burn one of my limited chips on this?” And over time, the answer was almost always no.

The easiest way to waste your life is to treat everything as equally important. The easiest way to reclaim it is to accept that most things aren’t worth your energy. That’s where it gets uncomfortable because deciding what not to care about feels selfish at first. You’ll feel guilty ignoring certain texts, declining invitations, or letting small things slide. People might even accuse you of being cold or detached. But boundaries are a filter. They force you to choose where your care actually goes. And if you don’t choose, the world will choose for you, usually in the most exhausting way possible.

When something tugs at your attention, try asking yourself: Will I care about this a year from now? Does it align with the kind of life I want to live? Is it connected to the values I actually want to live by? If the answer is no, that’s your cue to drop it. That’s your permission to save that chip for something that matters.

Here’s the thing, when you stop caring about everything, you don’t become apathetic. You become free. Free to invest deeply in the few things that make your life rich. Free to notice what brings you joy instead of reacting to everything that irritates you. Free to protect your mental space so you’re not running on fumes by midday. It’s like clearing out a cluttered house, at first it’s hard to let go of stuff, but once it’s gone you see how much space you were wasting on junk you never needed in the first place.

You have a finite number of fucks to give. Stop handing them out like free samples at Costco. Guard them. Spend them intentionally. Because once they’re gone, they’re gone. And when the big moments of life arrive, you’ll wish you’d saved them for that.

The Myth of more.

The problem isn’t just that we care about too many things. It’s that we often care about the wrong things entirely. We convince ourselves that the path to a meaningful life is lined with “more”. More money, more followers, more achievements, more validation. If one win feels good, then surely stacking win after win after win will make us feel unstoppable. And yet, people hit every milestone they thought would make them happy… and still feel like something’s missing. That’s because what you value determines the quality of your life, and most of us never consciously choose our values. We just absorb them from the noise around us.

It’s easy to inherit bad values without realizing it. You grow up in a culture obsessed with wealth, so you chase money without questioning why. You’re surrounded by people who treat status like oxygen, so you learn to seek approval before you seek truth. You’re bombarded by influencers preaching about “living your best life,” so you think buying the right things or visiting the right places will somehow fill that gnawing emptiness inside. The trouble is, these values don’t hold up when life inevitably punches you in the face. They’re fragile. They’re based on things you can’t fully control. Markets crash, people move on, trends die, followers disappear. If your happiness is tethered to something that unstable, you’re setting yourself up for a lifetime of emotional whiplash.

I once knew a guy who made it his mission to be liked by everyone. On the surface, he was killing it, always surrounded by people, always getting invited to things, always posting photos of his “amazing” social life. But behind closed doors, he was exhausted. Every “yes” to someone else was a “no” to himself. His identity was built on being what other people wanted him to be, which meant he had to constantly shape shift to match whatever would win him the most approval in that moment. He wasn’t living his life, he was performing it, like a circus clown. And when a few key relationships fell apart, he realized he didn’t even know who he was without an audience.

This is what happens when you let bad values run your life, they’re addictive, they look impressive from a distance, but they hollow you out over time. The solution isn’t to stop caring altogether. It’s to ruthlessly decide what’s worth caring about, even if that means ignoring what everyone else says you should want. Good values are reality based and within your control: things like honesty, kindness, discipline, curiosity. Bad values are dependent on external circumstances you can’t control: popularity, image, wealth, constant comfort. The irony is that chasing the bad values is what keeps most people stuck in that cycle of caring about everything, burning out, and wondering why they’re still miserable.

The moment you switch your focus to better values, “more” stops being the goal. Suddenly, it’s not about getting more things to care about, it’s about caring more deeply about fewer things. You stop measuring your life by the number of people who approve of you and start measuring it by whether you’re living in a way you’d respect if nobody was watching. You stop hoarding experiences to post online and start investing in experiences that actually change you. You stop chasing the next shiny thing because you realize that all the best things in life need time, effort, and struggle to grow.

Once you get that, you see the trap for what it is: the pursuit of more is endless, because “more” is never enough. It’s not a finish line, it’s a treadmill. And the faster you run on it, the more exhausted and empty you feel. But when your values shift, the game changes. You’re no longer running to impress the crowd. You’re walking your own path, at your own pace, toward something you actually believe in. And that’s the kind of caring worth spending your chips on.

Choosing your battles.

A life without problems is a life without meaning.

Once you’ve got your values straight, life stops being about avoiding discomfort and starts being about choosing the right kind of discomfort. We spend our whole lives running from problems, trying to design a path that’s smooth, painless, and effortless. But here’s the punchline: a life without problems is a life without meaning. The trick isn’t to avoid struggle but to pick the struggles that are worth enduring.

Happiness doesn’t come from comfort. Comfort gives you a brief sigh of relief, maybe even a little dopamine rush, but it fades almost immediately. What actually gives life texture and depth is solving problems that matter to you. Think about it: every story worth telling is about someone facing a challenge, not someone lounging on a beach doing nothing for twenty years. If your favorite movie was just two hours of the main character sipping cocktails and posting selfies, you wouldn’t make it past the first scene. We know this when it comes to fiction, but somehow we forget it when it comes to our own lives.

The difference between a fulfilling life and a miserable one isn’t the absence of struggle, it’s the quality of your struggle. A good struggle changes you. It forces you to adapt, to grow, to stretch beyond what you thought you could handle. A bad struggle just drains you without giving anything back. Chasing someone else’s approval is a bad struggle. Building something meaningful even when nobody notices is a good struggle. Complaining about things you can’t control is a bad struggle. Taking action on things you can control is a good one.

I remember talking to a friend who hated his job but wouldn’t quit because “finding another one would be too stressful.” He wasn’t wrong, job hunting is stressful. But what he failed to see was that he was already in a constant, low grade state of stress by staying in a place that killed his motivation every day. He was choosing a bad struggle over a better one simply because it was familiar. We get stuck because we confuse comfort with safety, and end up trapped in problems we’ve simply gotten used to.

The thing about problems is they never disappear. You solve one, another takes its place. The only real choice you have is which ones you’re willing to deal with. That’s why people who seem “lucky” aren’t actually lucky, they’ve just gotten better at picking problems that are worth the pain. The marathon runner chooses the pain of sore muscles over the pain of feeling weak. The artist chooses the pain of creative blocks over the pain of a life without expression. The entrepreneur chooses the stress of uncertainty over the pain of working on someone else’s dream.

The sooner you accept that there’s no life without pain, the freer you become. Because then you stop wasting energy avoiding it, and start using that energy to move through it. You start seeing problems not as signs that something’s gone wrong, but as proof that you’re engaging with life. Every worthwhile relationship comes with problems. Every meaningful project comes with problems. Every major life change comes with problems. If you try to dodge them all, you end up dodging the very things that could make your life worth living.

Choosing your battles is really about accepting trade-offs. You can’t have growth without discomfort. You can’t have commitment without sacrifice. You can’t have freedom without responsibility. Once you see that clearly, you stop chasing an easy life and start chasing a worthwhile one. And that’s when you realize that the pain was never the problem. The problem was spending it on things that didn’t matter.

The power of NO.

Learning to say no. Most people never get this right. They think saying yes to everything is the path to opportunity, approval, and success. But the truth is the opposite: every time you say yes to something that doesn’t align with your values, you’re silently saying no to something that does ( the guy with the desire to be liked by everyone ). Time, energy, attention, these are your finite resources. Saying yes too freely is the fastest way to scatter them across the wrong things, leaving nothing for the things that actually matter.

The power of no isn’t about being rude or selfish. It’s about protecting the space where your meaningful struggles can live and grow. A garden doesn’t flourish if weeds are allowed to take over. Every “yes” to a distraction, a trivial obligation, or someone else’s agenda is a weed in your life. If you don’t pull it, it spreads, choking out the things you really care about. Learning to say no is the act of pulling those weeds before they take root.

Saying no is uncomfortable at first. People might be disappointed. People might judge you. That’s part of the process. The discomfort is temporary; the freedom you gain is permanent. Boundaries are like the guardrails on a winding mountain road. Without them, you could still drive, but the risk of veering off into chaos is far higher. With them, you can navigate confidently, even when the path is steep and difficult.

Something we have to realize is that saying no doesn’t close doors, it opens them. When you free up your attention and energy, you create the space to pursue the people, projects, and experiences that actually deserve your care. You start saying yes to the things that align with your values, yes to challenges that help you grow, and yes to moments that bring meaning to your life. Every no to the trivial is a yes to the extraordinary.

Learning to say no is a skill, not a personality trait. It requires practice, reflection, and sometimes brutal honesty with yourself. You have to constantly ask: Is this struggle worth my attention? Does this decision move me closer to my values or further away from them? If the answer is no, you say no. And in doing so, you reclaim control over your life. You stop being a passive participant in a world that constantly demands your energy and start being the author of your own story.

Mortality as a compass.

Everything we’ve talked about so far, caring less about the trivial, choosing the right values, picking meaningful struggles, and saying no to distractions, they all come back to one unshakable truth: your time is finite. You will not live forever. Every day that passes is one less day to spend on the things that actually matter. Most people go through life acting like tomorrow is guaranteed, like the energy, attention, and opportunities they have now are endless. But the clock is always ticking, whether you notice it or not. And once you truly grasp that, it changes everything.

Mortality is the ultimate filter. When you remember that you are not here indefinitely, suddenly the petty frustrations, the endless comparisons, the social media outrage, and the trivial obligations shrink in significance. They no longer have the power to steal your attention or steal your peace of mind. You begin to recognize what deserves your care, what struggles are worth embracing, and what obligations are safe to let go. That awareness is both frightening and liberating, because it forces you to confront the way you’ve been spending your life and to decide if it’s how you want to continue spending it.

I think about people I’ve known who have ignored this truth. They kept chasing every opportunity, agreeing to every request, trying to live up to every expectation. And at the end, when the real milestones came, the moments that truly mattered, the relationships, the projects, the chances to leave a mark, they were too drained, too distracted, too late. They had spent their lives on a thousand small things that didn’t matter, leaving almost nothing for the few things that did. It’s a cruel irony, but it’s also preventable.

When you embrace your mortality, you start to make intentional choices. You say yes to struggles that grow you, yes to values that shape you, and yes to people and projects that align with your purpose. And you say no - firmly, unapologetically to everything else. You begin to live as though each day is a limited resource, which it is. You stop letting life happen to you and start living life deliberately. You start stacking your fucks where they truly belong.

It’s not morbid to think about death, it’s clarifying. It’s a compass pointing you toward the things worth your attention, your effort, and your care. Every decision, every struggle, every yes and no becomes sharper and more meaningful when you know your time is not infinite. The more you remember it, the less you waste your energy on distractions, trivial arguments, and meaningless comparisons. The more you invest it in living a life that, when you look back, feels like it was fully yours.

So take stock of your fucks. Identify what truly deserves them. Align yourself with values that are meaningful and within your control. Embrace problems that will grow you, not drain you. Learn to say no to the trivial so you can say yes to the extraordinary. And never forget, you are on a clock that cannot be reset. Use it wisely. Spend your care intentionally. Live deliberately. Because when you finally realize your time is limited, everything that isn’t important suddenly becomes obvious and everything that is important becomes urgent.

Talk soon,

Pathsofstoicism

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