Mark Manson, Fight Club and The End of Self-Help
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Over twelve million people have read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck before me. 44 772 people have rated it on Amazon already and 36 840 have reviewed it on Goodreads. Everything about this book has been said already. It’s great and it made a legitimate difference in thousands (if not millions) of people’s lives. That’s why I’m not going to review it.
I wasn’t even supposed to read it either. I’ve seen its bright orange cover for years on prime display in local bookstores and not even once I was even tempted to pick it up. Too in-your-face. Too juvenile. The design was trying too hard to be clever and convince me that Mark Manson knew something I didn’t. Historically, it isn’t the way to sell me books. I knew of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck for YEARS and it never occurred to me once it would be something I’d be interested in.
But two months ago, YouTube’s algorithm threw a monkey wrench in my plans by suggesting I’d watch this video.
Technically, I’ve read more books than Mark Manson in 2020 (his readings were a lot more difficult). But if you read as much as him or me, you know better than to overlook tricks that’ll help you read more. Your mind if open to any performance enhancing tips. So, I clicked on the damned video and not only found Manson’s ideas legit, but I fell into a rabbit hole of unlikely life advice which I am still traveling today. I had originally no fucking idea that he had anything to do with The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. But that guy’s good. He sidestepped conventional marketing and connected through two of my values instead: knowledge and emotional honesty.
Two months later, I’d read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and realize one thing: it’s kind of the logical conclusion of a long journey that started twenty years ago when I first read Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club.
Anger, destruction and (sort of) rejection of society
You might not remember, but the world was a pretty different place in 2001. Our generation hadn’t provided alternative models for living yet and mass culture hadn’t adapted to the insane possibilities of customization the internet could offer. In other words, everyone wanted the same thing: a house, two kids, two cars in the driveway and, if you were lucky, a fulfilling career that provided a sense of purpose to your life. It’s what you were supposed to want. It was the reasonable thing to want for yourself.
But it wasn’t what the image of success was. Professional athletes, rock musicians and movie stars had all that, plus they had everyone paying attention to who they were and what they did. They were given the modern 40 acres and a mule as a tribute for inspiring and uplifting normal folks. They did not have to fight to earn it, so everyone wanted to be professional athletes, rock musicians or movie stars, whether they admitted or not. We all wanted to be exceptional, but none of us were and that desire alone would not do anything to help us get there.
That dynamic didn’t do me any good.
I was unathletic. I couldn’t sing. The best I could hope for was to scrap away at what everyone was scrapping away at. My success and my happiness as a human being would be measured at how close I could get from the default model. It made me angry and depressed all the time. I wanted something that seemed to be on the other side of an imaginary wall and I was hurting myself for wanting it.
My first contact with Fight Club was (like for everyone) though David Fincher’s film adaptation. Unlike everyone else, I bought a VHS copy and a paperback of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel within six months of my first viewing. There was something about it. Something I couldn’t put my finger on, that would require repetition in order to assimilate. Different rules to live by. Nuances that weren’t accessible to everybody. I became obsessed with it. It became so much more than a novel to me. It became a cipher that concealed a hidden truth.
In Fight Club, young men band together in underground boxing clubs that reject the rules of society. They punch each other in the face to feel alive in a world where they merely exist to fill a function. Every night, they betray the most elementary rule of society (don’t hurt other people) and end up feeling better about themselves. Stronger and more inspired. Because they’re actively destroying an image of themselves built by rigid rules that don’t take their desires in consideration. They destroy their old selves to build new selves that aren’t slave to these rules.
Of course that leads to them trying to destroy capitalism in order to build a new, more free and egalitarian world. It is both logical and satirical. But Fight Club was my first exposure to a form of freedom I didn’t know existed: the freedom of not wanting what everyone else wanted. To be different. To choose who I was by rejecting the image of who society thought I should be. Because of Fight Club, I walked into a mixed martial arts gym and destroyed the version of me who dreamed of faraway, mystical lands and replaced it with an existential traveler. I remained in that gym for thirteen years.
I could not explain it, but I could draw a line between what felt right and what didn’t. It was the first and greatest gift popular culture ever gave me. It helped me build a self that I was proud of.
Self-help interlude
My goal with mixed martial arts was to compete professionally. It did not happen for many reasons, but mostly because it wasn’t what I really wanted. I set that goal for myself, but the real reason why I persisted with MMA long after liberated me with its existential magic on me is that I wanted to do something that not everybody could do. I wanted to be that guy who people could look up to. That’s also why I ended up falling out of love for it. The sport grew and grew in popularity and it ended up not being that special. By 2015, I had become a coach and all I did was to manage the feelings every schmuck walking in and wanting to feel special.
My own journey started looking a little silly to me. So, I walked out of the sport and lost my sense of who I was.
One of the last gift my trainer (and later boss) gave me was Stephen R. Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’ve read it in 2013 maybe? It was one of the first non fiction books I’ve read in close to a decade. I loved it because the ideas in this book work. I mean, it’s simple and not exactly life-changing. But it allows you to interact more efficiently with other people and become well-liked. It’s also great to help you minimize your own fuck ups. Simple rules. Clear results. The martial artist in me immediately saw the causality.
It was also the first self-help book I’ve ever read for myself. My mom used to buy me Chicken Broth for the Soul books, but I didn’t take that shit seriously. Who the fuck takes these seriously anyway?
Self-help became somewhat of a hobby to me. Not an obsession or anything, but I became genuinely interested in other people’s ideas on how to live life and maximize what you can get out of reality. I’ve read Robert Greene, John C. Maxwell, Tim Ferriss, Jordan Peterson, Daniel Kahneman and many, many others. The result was always the same: sometimes I added perspective to an already sturdy set of personal values, sometimes I didn’t. It became somewhat of a hollow form of intellectual entertainment to me. Finding bread crumbs of wisdom in an increasingly more complex and fragmented world.
The only real paradigm shift moment I’ve had reading self-help was in Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, a book that has equal amounts of life-changing insight and eyebrow raising oddities. Peterson has a passage about the value of sacrifice. He explains that finding meaning in work means sacrificing the present moment and pleasures that are easy to access for the future satisfaction and pleasures that are meant for people who deserve them. I know Peterson is controversial and I think some of the stuff he said throughout the years is super cringy. But I started writing fiction again (partly) because of him.
Keep that in mind. It’ll be useful later.
Mark Manson and the end of self-help
What makes Mark Manson different from every other self-help author I’ve read is that he’s reverse-engineering the entire field in order to probe its intellectual honesty. Self-help authors want to help you be happy, wealthy, more successful, however they’re putting it the idea is always the same. They have something that you lack. A secret that will change your life.
The entire point of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is that the premise that you’re lacking something is wrong. That not being happy and grateful to be alive all the time is the default wiring of every human being and that you should tune in to your negative emotions because it’s your brain trying to tell you something. They will tell you what it is that you should care about and what it is that makes you miserable.
The alluring title is merely a prop for a series of deeper ideas. The most important being that the life without problems you’re being sold is an illusion. No life is without problems, but a life can be full of interesting problems. By choosing what you’re ready to suffer for, you can at least assure that your life has meaning for you. It's the ultimate form of freedom.
What I love and find extremely profound and honest about Mark Manson’s process is that it doesn’t offer answers, but instead a system of questions you can use to scan your own life. When trying to figure out what you want, it’s easy to come up with boring answers: I want to be happy, to have more money, to have sex with this co-worker, but interrogating the reasons why you want these guys is where the liberation really is: what do I need to be happy? What do I want more money for? Why is that co-worker so important to me?
To my knowledge, The Subtle Art of Giving a Fuck is the most blunt, simple and honest roadmap to emotional fortitude and well-being and Mark Manson did it exactly the same way Chuck Palahniuk did 25 years ago when he wrote Fight Club. By rejecting the idea of what-you-should-want. By deconstructing boring answers and common knowledge and offering a counterintuitive approach to living a good life.
This might be the last self-help book I read. Manson himself kind of veered into philosophy in his own, accessible way in his following book Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope. I don’t think you need to read any self-help book after The Subtle Art of Giving a Fuck really. No one has the answers. You are not special, like Chuck Palahniuk first said in 1996. What is between you and what you want is all sacrifice and suffering, like Jordan Peterson first told me. The rest is just a waste of your fucking time.
I mean, I’ll keep reading non fiction. Philosophy, psychology, cultural history, etc. But I’m through thinking someone else has the answers to my problems. Because we’re all different, we want different things and the important is to understand and verbalize what you want in order to progress and find meaning. This was an unexpectedly enlightening read. Read it and then stop reading self-help altogether. The game is over. Mark Manson won.
For the first time in my life, I feel like I’m where I’m supposed to be and that I’m doing what I’m supposed to do.
