Do I give too many fucks? — Quick Insight into “The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck” by Mark Manson
The contents of this book are as loud and obnoxious as the headline of my commentary. Being the bookworm that I am, people are always asking about any title they see me flipping through and this one has garnered the most inquisitions. I honestly don’t blame them because it also caught my eye years ago and I was curious to peruse it. My father emailed me the ebook back in 2018 but I never quite got around to reading it. I just banked it, typical me. When I started 2020 and was drafting my reading list, I came across it again and decided I’d finally give it a go. Honestly, it both dissatisfied and dazzled me.
Over the last few years, I’ve been on a very intentional journey of finding myself. I’ve learnt many things that have strengthened some of my convictions and others that have shattered them to pieces. With this book, I found that the author started with things I’d already learnt and now knew. This disgruntled me and at some point in the opening chapters, I felt I had made a bad purchase. I continued reading though because I’d already spent my hard-earned coin buying the paperback. It wouldn’t hurt to just read on and see what the dude had to say right? And so, I began Chapter 5 and the concepts started getting profound. The preceding chapters had merely been a setup to the lessons Mark wanted to share. I was spellbound.
Oftentimes, we try too hard to cocoon concepts in confusing terminology and philosophies that just run away from base knowledge. We forget to break things down to their roots and call a spade a spade. This is what Mark Manson does in his book. He alludes to simple thought patterns that we have as human beings that simply arise from our fears and insecurities and make us struggle to get to where we want to be in life. Simply put, we give too many fucks. We fail to do so many things in life because we think way too much about what people may think. What will they say if I make that move? Will she say yes if I ask her out? This job is too lowly for a man of my stature. These examples barely scratch the surface in terms of the many questions we barrage ourselves with before we do anything in life. Safety mechanism or not, fear can be very crippling. It has stopped me from doing way too many things and I honestly regret most of those lost chances. I’m just glad that more keep coming my way and I’m making more deliberate moves to grab them with both hands.
A colleague of mine argues that the problem isn’t that we do not have enough time, rather, we have way too much time on our hands and just don’t have the ’space’ to do it. I translate this as we live in a society that wouldn’t allow you to do some of the things you wish to do because it’d break the status quo. People already have a perception of who you are and what you should be doing and you base your values upon the societal principles that lead all of us. Manson refers to values that are not intrinsic as being poor ones. These have nothing to do with you and everything to do with making others happy. Try out that new thing you’ve been thinking about while counting sheep on your bed every night. The worst that could happen is you’ll fail at it and honestly, who cares? Quickly enough, people will forget about it because there’s always news for the day. Move on and do the next thing. We could be so much more than we are if we could just accept failure in the eyes of others and learn the lessons it teaches us about ourselves.
“The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck” has more bitter truths than I can swallow but as its subtitle says, it is a very counterintuitive approach to living a good life; at times we just need to see the negatives to clearly define the positives. The 204 pages of this manuscript are packed with simple facts we all need to tell ourselves as we travel on the journey of embracing our true potentials.
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