Review: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, by Mark Manson

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Thu Dec 26 21:33:01 PST 2019


The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck
by Mark Manson

Publisher: HarperCollins
Copyright: August 2016
ISBN:      0-06-245773-X
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     211

I've been hearing about this book and Mark Manson's blog posts from
various places for a while. I'd read a few pieces on his blog that
seemed somewhat interesting, but something about the tone left me
uninterested in following his writing closely. But I occasionally like
exploring self-help literature and, after seeing yet another positive
reference to this book, decided to give it a try. (The title helped.
For those not familiar with the idiom, "not giving a fuck" means not
caring, but with the implication that one is intentionally disregarding
the consequences rather than simply indifferent.)

The short summary is that my instincts were right, but now I have more
data to put words to that feeling. There's nothing wrong with this
book, exactly, but it is very much from bro culture. Manson,
intentionally or not, seems to be writing to a specific and limited
audience, one that's relatively privileged, socialized male, and
unfamiliar with the (exhaustive) literature on balancing emotional
demands, expectations, and one's own sense of entitlement.

To be clear, there's nothing wrong with this. There are a lot of people
like that in this world, and the advice Manson gives them seems
reasonable to me. He apparently has a couple million blog readers, so
more power to him. But if you're a regular reader of advice web sites
like Captain Awkward or Ask A Manager, the assumed frame of the reader
is going to feel a bit off.

Put another way, this is a book that contains a lovingly-detailed
description of Manson forcing himself to walk up to a sheer cliff over
the ocean above the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa and sit on the
edge in order to confront his own mortality. If that induces more
eye-rolling than recognition (as it did with me), some of the rest of
the book is likely to provoke a similar reaction.

The thesis of this book is not captured by the title, which is a good
thing since the title in isolation would be awful advice. Manson does
not want you to stop giving any fucks at all. Indeed, he says that you
are incapable of not giving a fuck about things in life. Humans are
designed to give a fuck; that's what we do. Rather, his point is that
if you've not consciously thought about what you give a fuck about,
you're probably giving a fuck about all the wrong things, and thus
making yourself miserable.

  Because when you give too many fucks — when you give a fuck about
  everyone and everything — you will feel that you're perpetually
  entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything
  is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be.
  This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every
  adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every
  inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a
  betrayal. You will be confined to your own petty, skull-sized hell,
  burning with entitlement and bluster, running circles around your
  very own personal Feedback Loop from Hell, in constant motion yet
  arriving nowhere.

The things Manson thinks you should stop giving fucks about are being
happy, exceptional, right all the time, or successful. The things that
Manson thinks you should selectively start giving fucks about are
struggling with something, making mistakes, being uncertain, defining
good personal values, setting boundaries, and making commitments.

If you're not someone who grew up with the belief that you're
exceptional and mostly right and deserve happiness and success, you're
probably not the target audience for this book. If your struggle is
against socialization that taught you to always set aside your needs
and wants in favor of making other people happy, you're definitely not
the target audience for this book. If all of this sounds very familiar
from other reading, you're probably going to find this book rather
basic, although Manson does have an entertainingly direct writing style
(if very bro-tinged and a bit heavy on the sex jokes).

That said, there is one thing in this book that will stick with me. In
the chapter on happiness, Manson challenges the reader to stop asking
what in life will make them happy, and instead ask a different
question: "What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to
struggle for?" In other words, embrace the reality that every set of
life choices will involve unhappiness and suffering, and then make the
choices that invoke the problems that you want to have. The problems
that may be uncomfortable but that bring you joy when you solve them.
The problems that inspire you to beat your head against them instead of
the ones that make you want to give up.

For those in a position to be able to make those sorts of choices, I
think that's a great piece of advice, and one that I read at just the
right time for it to be personally meaningful to me. Any book of this
type is some variety of success if I come away with an idea that I
didn't have before reading it, so full points to Manson there.

Having read this book, my new guess on why Manson's writing shows up so
often in my circles is that I worked in Bay Area tech among a lot of
people with comfortable backgrounds, good schools, high expectations, a
lot of market bargaining power in employment, and a sense that all of
this wasn't translating into happiness in the way that one might assume
it would. If that's you, and you've not already dove into the
introspection and life prioritization deep end, this isn't a bad
introduction, written by someone who seems well-connected to that
world. If you're struggling with feeling like you should be happy but
aren't, and are stuck chasing the next thing on the horizon that's
supposed to make you happy, Manson has quite a lot to say about that
experience.

If you've been making hard prioritization trade-offs your whole life,
know perfectly well why you're not happy (systemic oppression and
late-stage capitalism), and are not in the mood to be lectured about
happiness by some white dude who can afford to fuck off to South Africa
to have a life-altering encounter with his own mortality, you may want
to give this one a pass.

A minor metadata note: The cover design replaces the "u" of "Fuck" with
a blotch, and Amazon and Wikipedia show the title as The Subtle Art of
Not Giving a F*ck with an asterisk. However, the inside cover and the
copyright page clearly render the word in the title as "Fuck," so
that's how I list it here.

Rating: 6 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-12-26

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-245773-X.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


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