19 Quotes by Chuck Palahniuk That (If Applied) Will Turn Your View of Reality Upside Down Forever
You may know him as the creator of the "Fight Club" movie
Most of you have never heard of Chuck Palahniuk.
He’s an obscure weirdo. Don’t worry I hadn’t heard of him either. Then I saw some of the best thinkers on the planet quoting him often.
This can’t be an accident.
I later learned he wrote the movie “Fight Club.” This movie about taking risks and escaping the Matrix is one you’ll never forget.
Get ready to have your face ripped off with these Chuck quotes. You’ve been warned.
1. "It's not until we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."
I live my entire life by this quote. It’s why I fell in love with Chuck who gives no f*cks.
Mental illness nearly destroyed me.
Losing a startup I loved erased my entire entrepreneurship future.
Losing a large amount of money a few years ago forced me to start again with nothing.
Loss is what makes you feel free.
Because when you have everything it’s a burden. You don’t know what the hell to do. When you have nothing it forces you to rethink your entire life. What matters shifts. All the bullsh*t problems you think you have seem stupid in comparison.
Loss shows you life is a freaking circus. Loss is the real teacher, not university.
Loss shows you the harsh reality of life before it shows you the most gorgeous beauty you’ve ever seen. I want everyone to experience loss. So they can find themselves.
2. “Our real discoveries come from chaos, from going to the place that looks wrong and stupid and foolish.”
Most people never find what they’re looking for because they look in conventional spots. You’re not going to find miracles at a desk job working for an insurance company.
Following your parent’s plan to go to university and eventually buy a white picket fence house isn’t gonna help you discover a new form of nuclear fusion that can save humanity from climate change. No.
You have to risk looking stupid.
When I told people I would write online for the rest of my life and quit my high-paid job in finance, they thought I was crazy.
“You can never come back to banking. You’ll always be seen as ‘that guy.’”
Good. Sometimes you gotta burn the boats back to the safe island you’ve been living on to find the one thing missing from your life that can change your life.
Bathe in the chaos.
Light the stick of dynamite that blows up your life.
3. “People fall so in love with their pain, they can’t leave it behind. The same as the stories they tell. We trap ourselves.”
You experienced pain. Don’t we all?
Just let it go amigo. It’s not serving you anymore. The BS stories spinning around in your head will make you go insane if you let ‘em.
4. “The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open.”
The good life is full of risks.
~ That’s the way it’s supposed to be little darling. We’ll go riding on the horses yeah yeah (as the song goes).
The biggest failures in life never take a risk. They spend their whole damn time sitting in a safe air-conditioned office unexpectedly waiting to die. Somehow retirement at 65 is gonna change everything. Like it did for your parents, right? No-p-p-p-e-e-e-e-e-e.
They overplan all the way to the grave. They try to predict the future like good lil fortunetellers who play the lottery on Saturday night hoping to win big.
Happiness lies on the other side of risk.
When you take some big fat risks and win, it’s the best feeling in the world. You avoid regrets which is that silent disease that circles your mind every day. The disease you can’t identify but know exists.
5. “If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”
This one’s trippy.
Do we live twice? Do we die, decompose into the soil, have the soil produce new life, and come alive again as a different person? No one knows.
Death feels like going to sleep. Except you never wake up and don’t realize it. It’s not the grand finale many people think. The lights just go out and everyone you’ve ever known is sad for a few days before you become a distant memory.
6. “A girl calls and asks, "Does it hurt very much to die?" "Well, sweetheart," I tell her, "yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.”
Life is full of pain.
Death, in many ways, is easier. It’s why the greats such as Robin Williams and Anthony Bourdain escaped there.
See, the fact you woke up and decided to tackle life is actually a huge deal. You chose the struggle, but you didn’t have to.
It hurts to live but that’s what makes it magical. You get used to the hurt. You pretend to be surprised when the hurt comes knocking at your door in the form of a loss.
Man at the front door: “They’re dead.”
You pretend to act surprised. But you already knew no one around you was getting out alive. You just brainwashed yourself to ignore it because that’s what healthy people do –otherwise, they go crazy.
7. “All the effort in the world won't matter if you're not inspired.”
I see it with writers all the time.
Not inspired. Doing it for the money. Trapped by the algorithm gods.
Waking up inspired is how you become interesting. Quit trying harder. Hard work is for morons. Figure out how the hell to be inspired. I find it’s easiest to chase an obsession. Inspiration strikes every morning when you do.
8. “If you don't know what you want," the doorman said, "you end up with a lot you don't.”
This one rips my soul apart.
People walk around like zombies not knowing what the hell they want. You know what I figured out this year? What I want.
I want to make enough money to buy a house with an extra bedroom for my newborn daughter and a backyard for her to play in. Then I want to do the least amount of work possible so I can spend all day with her. Everything else can get stuffed.
That clarity is enormous.
You gotta work out what you want in life. Otherwise, a dinosaur institution will let its lifeless agenda be the reason you wake up every day.
The best way to figure out what you want is to write a lot. Writing joins the dots of all the ideas floating around in your head.
9. “Find out what you're afraid of and go live there.”
I tripped on this one by accident.
Almost a decade ago, I’d had enough. My life was a disaster. So I wrote a fear list and decided to tackle each item every day. Before then I’d avoid fear at all costs. Now all I did was live with these fears.
What I realized is when I spent a lot of 1-on-1 time with these fears, well, they were False Evidence Appearing Real.
My head built them up to each be a Mt Everest I had to climb that’d probably end in frostbite and then a grave in the snow. Really, they were piss-easy. Stupid stuff like being afraid to fly.
Now I live relatively fearless.
Make a fear list.
10. “I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure. A spinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined.”
Anyone who knows me knows I hate labels.
They’re so limiting. Most of modern medicine is built on labels. A doctor the other day assigned a label to my daughter. “She’s got a tongue tie.”
The doc wanted to laser the underneath of her tongue off. Turned out this was a BS label that became popular in the last 5 years. There’s a 400% increase in medical claims for babies with tongue ties.
And there’s no such thing as a tongue tie … haha.
Anyone can slap a label on you and call it logic. Or truth. Or a fact. It’s not.
Everything in this universe is constructed of a made-up language humans created to try and make sense of the big rock we live on. Meanwhile, there are aliens on other planets with entirely different labels.
Chuck the labels in the bin.
11. “People don't want their lives fixed. Nobody wants their problems solved. Their dramas. Their distractions. Their stories resolved. Their messes cleaned up. Because what would they have left? Just the big scary unknown.”
Now you know why the Twitter babies love swimming in a big lake of their own problems. They’re not trying to escape their problems.
They’re trying to avoid the unknown, like a child afraid to walk in the dark.
12. “Game shows are designed to make us feel better about the random, useless facts that are all we have left of our education.”
Memorization and access to information are the two dumbest things in the modern world. Yet high school and college education is built on it.
Once you realize how utterly pointless university is you can’t unsee it. It’s indoctrination into a life you’ll one day want to escape (aka the Matrix).
13. “Nothing drives people crazier than seeing someone have a good f*cking life.”
This explains unpaid critics and internet trolls. Keep living the good life if you want to make them even angrier. That’s real payback for their bad decision.
14. “You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.”
This idea hits us all the time.
We always wonder “but what if?” What if there was another path? Is this all there is? What if I walked through a different sliding door?
Personally, I find this idea the greatest motivation there is. The idea I could be wasting my life keeps me writing and wanting to find ways to inspire others.
It’s a question that can never be answered though. These are all the paths you can take and you can only take one.
15. “Honest is how I want to look. The truth doesn't glitter and shine.”
That’s how I feel about my Substack publication.
It’s much uglier and rougher than my writing found in other places. It’s pissed a few people off. It’s ruffled a few chicken feathers. Good.
The truth doesn’t come from an Instagram model posing next to a fake Lambo outside a home paid for with debt that destroyed the American dream.
16. “Are these things really better than the things I already have? Or am I just trained to be dissatisfied with what I have now?”
It’s true that gratitude can set you free.
Ads are the enemy of gratitude. It’s why smart people pay for Youtube so they can avoid the ad virus that pollutes their minds.
The role of ads is to make you buy stuff you don’t need.
Because if you lived in a cabin in the woods with food and water and no access to tv or internet, you’d find you don’t need anything else.
“You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug.
Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.” – Chuck Palahniuk
17. “You gain power by pretending to be weak.”
This is why victimhood is so popular. It gives people power.
Pretending to be weak because of a past event or someone who “hurt you” gives you a useless mission in life to pursue.
Victims are insufferable.
Take the tragic events of your life and turn them into a hero’s journey story instead.
18. "We all die. The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will."
What can you create? What can you leave behind?
These are the questions you should let dominate your attention instead of trying to climb status games with material objects of mass destruction.
19. “You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night, then you throw it away.”
Most people treat their fellow humans like a one-night stand.
They interact with them to see what they can get. Capitalism teaches them to create transactions out of relationships. Meet this person to get this thing.
Don’t worry, I did it for most of my career. I sat down with prospects to listen to them and then find out how to exploit them for a sale I could claim the revenue on to keep my miserable job.
Forget about what you can get. Focus on what you can give.
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Tim, it dawned on me when reading this article, how your words have such a massive impact. You are like the Tyson Furey of article writing. You keep hitting us with persistent, painful body blows that keep hitting their mark until such time as I think, hey, I need to change stance here or this is gonna hurt bad. Whether I remember each blow doesn't matter, but I know when I turn away, I can still feel the impact. I will still remember the lesson I just had, and you know what, next time I step in that ring, it might be different. I might win, I might have a better moment, so I go again, waiting eagely for that next punishing lesson that makes me a better person.
I love this newsletter. I can't say enough good about it, It's totally outside of my daily routine, yet it is a routine nonetheless. Keep it up Tim. Happy Christmas.
Scary sh*t for a bold New Year. Thanks and Happy 2023!