A Brief History of Not Giving a Fu*k: The American Art of Existential Shrugging
Wednesday, April 23, 2025,
The Birth of the American Shrug
Once upon a time, in the New World, long before TikTok turned nihilism into a duet, Americans gave a lot of fucks.
About freedom. About God. About lawn care.
And then—somewhere between Nixon’s jowls sweating on live TV and the last unreplied AOL Instant Message—the national emotional thermostat started cooling.
Welcome to the postmodern soulscape: irony is armor, detachment is currency, and emotional economy is measured in fucks not given.
We’re talking about the meme-ification of apathy, the industrialization of DGAF.
We're tracing the weird, winding tributaries that spilled into the cultural Mississippi that now runs through Instagram captions, startup logos, and millennial memoirs.
Foundational Wellsprings: Stoicism, Buddhism, and the Midwestern Deadpan
Before it became a meme, “not giving a fuck” had parents. Like all good American trends, it was stolen from older, wiser civilizations and rebranded with better merch.
Stoicism (Marcus Aurelius, Seneca):
The ancient Romans didn’t “not care,” they practiced apatheia—freedom from disturbing emotions. The goal wasn’t laziness, but dignity. It was the original high-functioning dissociation, delivered in marble busts and angry scrolls.
Zen Buddhism:
Zen said: desire is suffering. So if you could learn to not crave, not grip, not fixate—you could free yourself. This was spiritual DGAF, complete with incense and koans. It wasn’t about flexing emotional indifference; it was about liberation.
Midwestern Reserve:
Let’s not overlook America’s native contribution: the emotionally repressed, Lutheran-adjacent, casserole-fed shrug of the Upper Midwest. If Stoicism was noble, and Zen was transcendent, Midwestern DGAF was weaponized politeness. “No worries” was a threat.
The Slacker Era (1980s–1990s)
Then came the post-Reagan ennui. The economy was deregulating, Blockbuster was booming, and Nirvana taught us that no one cared.
Key artifacts:
Reality Bites (1994): Gen X love triangle, but nobody’s trying.
Office Space (1999): A cinematic ode to minimal effort.
Fight Club (1999): Where the first rule of not giving a fuck was literally not to talk about it.
Thought Leaders:
Kurt Cobain, patron saint of grunge apathy.
Douglas Coupland, who named a generation “X” because he couldn’t be bothered to name it something more ambitious.
David Foster Wallace, whose footnotes apologized for caring too much in a world that punished sincerity.
The Hipster Irony Complex (2000s–Early 2010s)
After Y2K didn’t kill us, irony took over. Brooklyn became a state of mind. Mustaches became metaphysical. The economy was decoupling. And DGAF went artisanal.
Intellectual Wellspring:
Jean Baudrillard and the Simulacra: He warned us that reality was being replaced by signs of reality. So we put a fox on a t-shirt and pretended we didn’t know we were depressed.
Post-irony: A term invented by graduate students to explain why we wore “I ♥ Huckabees” shirts unironically.
Key phrase of the era:
“I’m literally dead.” Which meant: “I have no affective bandwidth left to care, but I’ll die cutely about it.”
The Hustle Culture Rebellion (Mid 2010s–2020)
Enter the backlash to burnout.
Capitalism told millennials to lean in, start side hustles, and optimize their sleep. And millennials... stopped showing up.
Mark Manson, in his 2016 anti-self-help hit The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, gave us permission to choose our cares carefully. It wasn’t apathy, he insisted—it was selective caring, cloaked in profanity.
DGAF had entered its therapeutic era.
Related Memes:
“Let that shit go.”
“No fucks left to give.”
“My give-a-damn’s busted.”
(Not new. Stolen from a country song. But memes are nothing if not kleptocratic.)
Pandemic DGAF (2020–Present)
COVID-19 didn’t just kill social plans—it suffocated performative caring. People ghosted their group chats. Skipped their own Zoom weddings. Some folks, like me, left pretense and desolation and fled to the woods. Suddenly, radical boundaries and emotional minimalism were survival strategies.
Key Subcultures:
Main Character Syndrome: I care only about me.
Doomscrolling: I care so much I’m numb.
Goblin Mode: I don’t care how I look, smell, or behave—and you can’t make me.
Emergent Literature:
The Stoicism revival in men’s podcasts that pretend Marcus Aurelius was a gym bro.
DGAF Becomes a Branding Strategy
Nothing sells like the illusion of freedom. Modern DGAF has been co-opted by:
Brands that say “zero f*cks” while charging $85 for a hoodie.
Coaches who will teach you to “be unbothered”... for six installments of $149.99.
TikTok therapists who say “you owe no one closure” while launching their own journals.
We now sell curated indifference as a lifestyle. We don’t just not care—we invest in it.
The Contradictions: What We Actually Care About
Let’s be clear: we still care. Just secretly, shamefully, and in ways shaped by Limbic Capitalism.
We care about:
Being seen.
Being untouched by obligation.
Being known without vulnerability.
Posting that we DGAF while checking notifications every 45 seconds.
So the question isn’t: “Do you give a fuck?”
A better question is: “Who taught you that caring was weak, and what did they sell you right after?”
The Future of DGAF
As America drifts toward solipsistic cyber-dystopia (available on Threads), perhaps new mutations of DGAF will emerge:
Eco-DGAF: “The planet’s on fire. I’m gonna crochet.”
Dating-DGAF: “I’m not ghosting, I’m healing.”
Therapy-DGAF: “Not my trauma. Not my flying monkeys. Not my circus.”
But here’s the twist: the real nonconformists of the future might be the ones who do give a fuck.
Who grieve openly.
Who write thank-you cards.
Who risk sincerity in a world that rewards snark.
Because in the end, not giving a fuck is only radical until everyone is doing it.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.
Coupland, D. (1991). Generation X: Tales for an accelerated culture. St. Martin’s Press.
Manson, M. (2016). The subtle art of not giving a fck: A counterintuitive approach to living a good life*. HarperOne.
Odell, J. (2019). How to do nothing: Resisting the attention economy. Melville House.
Newport, C. (2019). Digital minimalism: Choosing a focused life in a noisy world. Portfolio.
Seneca. (2004). Letters from a Stoic (R. Campbell, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published ~65 CE)