The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson is the self-help book for people who think they're too cool for self-help books. It uses profanity, which makes it edgy. It tells you to stop caring about everything, which makes it relatable. It sold 14 million copies, which makes it a self-help book, despite the author's insistence that it isn't one.
Manson argues that you have a limited number of things you can care about, and most people waste their caring on things that don't matter. Instead, choose what to care about carefully. This is genuinely good advice. The problem is that the book is 224 pages long, and the advice can be summarized in one sentence: "Choose what matters to you and ignore the rest." The other 223 pages are anecdotes, profanity, and Buddhist philosophy with the serial numbers filed off.
"Care about fewer things" sounds liberating until you realize that most of the things you care about aren't optional. You can't not care about your job — you need money. You can't not care about your health — you need a body. You can't not care about your relationships — you need people. The things you can stop caring about — celebrity gossip, Twitter arguments, what your neighbor thinks of your lawn — are things you probably already know don't matter. The book confirms what you already suspected and charges you $16 for the confirmation.
It's a decent book with a great title. The profanity makes it feel transgressive, but the advice is fairly conventional when you strip away the swearing. Not caring is not actually the point. Caring selectively is the point. Which is just prioritization, which is something every time management book has been saying since the 1980s, but without the word "f*ck" on the cover.