The art of not giving a fuck, as I understood from the book, takes some self-realisation and acceptance, which it would seem isn’t a piece of cake. His second book runs along the same lines but with a totally different aim – it’s there to help people figure themselves and their lives out without too much hardcore counselling or therapy. His first book, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, is everything Paddy McGuinness is not: it uses emotional reasoning rather than a daft game show to help people understand how to attract a good partner.
The author, Mark Manson, has made his name doing entrepreneurial self-help writing bits and bobs, and probably doing quite a bit of thinking. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is a funny mix of “I mean, no-one really knows what is the right thing but I’m going to help you figure it out” and “fuck it, let’s just be miserable when we want to be”. I would argue that it isn’t until someone points it out that we realise how intruding and exposing social media can be the game of liking posts and photos can be bitchy, deliberately isolating and a breeding ground for misunderstandings. It talks about the discourses surrounding social media and our peers’ enduring presence in our lives, in the form of Facebook profiles and Snapchat stories. It tackles the growing twenty-first century problem of rich people not feeling rich because of how rich everyone else is, of beautiful people not feeling beautiful because of how beautiful everyone else is, and so on. I opened this book expecting a sarcastic, kind of satirical commentary on emotions, and how to come across as cool and collected in front of others, but The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is actually very clever, and very well thought out.
It makes more sense in the book, I promise. I think we all have that crisis-that’s-not-a-midlife-crisis-but-is-still-a-crisis at some point, and The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is a well-worded reminder that life is shit and we have to find the shit things that aren’t as totally shit as the other shit things so that the shitty parts of life aren’t as shitty as they could be. But for adults, this book is pretty damn good. Probably not the ideal bedtime story for your kids, unless you want them effing and blinding at nursery school.
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