I just finished reading Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. The cover clearly gives a fuck, because the "u" in fuck is an ink stain. An ink stain sourced from shutter stock, if the back cover of the book is to believed. If he really didn't give a fuck, why not print the full word on the front cover?
I don't know who Mark Manson is outside of the stories in his book. He's a bloged with something like two million followers, but that doesn't matter if they're all robots who can't read. As it turns out, that's sadly not the case, which means I have approximately 0.1% of the following - and that's if my followers are robots and people who can read.
As Manson's book continues to distill, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is all about setting your mental playbook up in a "more right" manner, to enable better outcomes in your brain's internal, ongoing monologue, which bio-chemistry and feedback loops serve to corrupt.
By practicing a form of mindfulness - that is - to give many fucks about one thing, and give no fucks about another, Manson asserts that you can delve into the deepest waters on one thing, and have a rewarding depth of experience as opposed to a breadth of experience.
A fine example of this is the final chapter - you can drink at all the parties you want, but by time you're drinking at your thousandth party - you're going to bored and hate being there because you've danced that dance a thousand times before.
I found myself learning little from Manson's explorative pop-psychology, but I found myself agreeing with a lot of it.
Failure is just a stepping stone to success, and the only reason someone else is better at something than you is because they've failed at it a lot more than you have. While he avoids quoting Nike's slogan of "Just do it", this book is a treatise of going and doing something.
I also enjoyed the part where he provided insights about the directness of Russian culture - where people are honest, and truthful, because they do not have the time or the patience to be misunderstood. If someone smells bad - tell them. They won't know - and if it hurts their feelings that is their problem, not yours.
The single greatest part of Manson's book is the following point - you choose how to feel about the circumstances you're dealt - and you can change your perception. Anything else is bio-chem getting in your way. There's a certain part of human psychology in this - and it was certainly part of the CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) I went through with a psychologist not so long ago.
An immortality totem for all of us
Photograph by me. Taken at West Terrace Cemetary, Adelaide, South Australia.
Towards the end of the book, Manson speaks about the great equaliser - death. What I mean here is that no matter how much HIVE POWER, money, bitcoin, or anything else you accumulate, you will die. Your body will be burnt, or you will be buried, or you will rot out in the open and be set upon by birds, insects, and bacteria, until what made up your physical form is gone.
You can't escape death. Don't try. Embrace the fact that one day, you too, like every other human being - will die.
But what will you achieve?
How will you be remembered?
How will the legacy of your existence be carried forth by those who observed it?
Don't worry about any of those things. Write down what you feel. That way, anyone who is interested, will be able to go along and decant the musings, ramblings, and dynamic opinions that you learn more and more about as you age, and eventually, wither and die.
Your place here on HIVE, or etched into a stone, concrete, paper, tattoo - whatever it might be - is your closest glimpse of immortality.
Say what you will - and mean what you say - whether others read it or not. Be yourself. Don't be a sheep.
In Conclusion
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is not a book that needed writing. None of the material in it is new. None of the ideas are radical or outrageous. What it offers is self indulgence and tutelage to ensure you can sort out the innane bullshit that doesn't matter, and choose to focus on some things that do.
It is a successful book, not because of its message, but because of its digestability, its length, and no doubt the fact that prior to the pandemic, it was on every-single fucking bookshelf at every bookstore, in every airport in the world.
Give more fucks about the things that matter. Give less about those that don't. Find your hill to die on - not someone elses.
Excellent analogy.
Some of the things mentioned in your topic feels like it was taken straight from my mind. I once routinely said the same about death. Your topic got me rethinking what I want my HIVE blog to look like. Do I really want it filled with gaming content or is it better to put some of my thoughts on life in general into my topics which will allow my future relatives and strangers to possibly get a glimps into my life/ general thought process.
There's another component of this lurking beneath the surface of your remark, I think - instead of allowing our legacy to be defined by others who observed it - what can we curate or represent our legacies to be? We've never really that opportunity as a species for such longevity before - but with the more longevity that's out there - what truly remains significant?
The whole notion is - no one is really that special - and we're all just blobs of matter that can somehow think about all this stuff, unlike every other living thing on this particular planet.
I tend to the views of a nihilist in most things.
Very true, the generations before us didn't have the internet. Here we are with endless space and various ways to leave our almost meaningless mark behind which the internet provides us and most of us squander that oportunity. I'm of no delusion of my content being anything other than an afterthought to 99.9% of people. As time passes that 99.9% will grow to 100%.
Eventually, just like most everyone else, we will be forgotten. Its surprisingly hard to get the average person to understand the simple concept of being forgotten. Almost everyone I interacted with seems to think they will live forever and will be remembered forever.
Some view these beliefs as negative but I believe such belief contains positivity. So many people are self absorbed thinking their existance is more important than the next person beside them or more important then the ones before them. They don't even realize they have this veiw point sometimes. This causes them to make bigger deals out of small issues. Pointing out to them that the negative thing that is bothering them is just a moment in time that will be forgotten and is almost meaningless in the grand scheme of things usually goes over their head.