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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

We can clearly see that I have reached the stage of not giving a fuck about what my hair looks like in this humidity. 

This book is so effective that I don’t even give enough of a fuck to finish it. (Just kidding, it just wasn’t that interesting.)

In other words, I’m not impressed. I mean I picked this book up because I was genuinely looking for a way to care less about shit in my endless pursuit of zennishness. Work shit. Political shit. Work shit. Self righteous virtue signally shit. Work shi- yeah, you know, just a lot of work shit. I thought, “Maybe this is like when Peter is hypnotized in Office Space and he just doesn’t give a fuck any more and somehow becomes wildly successful at work. Cos I need to be Peter.” But yeah, it’s not.

Manson fills all these pages up with gems like “Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another,” and “Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow,” or “In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference,” like some drunken frat boy philosophizing at a kegger in the hopes of getting laid.

Kudos to you, Mark Manson, for saying a bunch of crap everyone already knows and has said a million times and capitalizing on it. Credit where it’s due. But I’m gonna have to hop off your bandwagon on this one.

“The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience. This is a total mind-fuck. So I’ll give you a minute to unpretzel your brain and maybe read that again …”

Here’s how I’ma “unpretzel” my mind: by throwing this book in the burn pile. I’m not even going to donate this bitch. I’d hate to have any part in perpetuating its circulation.

I’m not even normally the self help type. It’s all so much touchy feely lie back and tell me all about it while we get in touch with our inner child and soothe it to sleep with milk and cookies foolishness, in my view. I don’t really do FEEEEELINGS. So I think it’s safe to say I was at a pretty low point in the course of events that led me to picking this book up. Plus, let’s face it, I’m a sucker for a book that so blatantly flaunts the fuck word. (Though it would have been more daring to drop the ink splat in the title. So much for not giving a fuck.)

Or is this book supposed to be tongue in cheek? Humor? A self help mockery? I honestly don’t know. But I don’t think it is. I think it’s dead fucking serious.

Of course, what do I know? I’m not a best selling author, I just trash their books on my blog. (Which I would feel kind of bad about, but I’ve remembered how to not give a fuck. And a lot of these books really do suck. Also that wasn’t even the point of this series in the first place. I need to get back to books that are actually good, but that I just keep putting down.)

I’ll tell you this though: This book reminded me precisely why I don’t read self help. So, I guess there’s that.

You wanna know how to not give a fuck? Just don’t give a fuck. Also a little Xanax never hurt either.

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1 Comment

  1. Amanda Mendoza

    Thank you for at least attempting to read this drivel so that the rest of us don’t have to. Way to take one for the team.

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