I read the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k and it really hit home as to how one should approach life and the trails and tribulations of it.

It is not the least likely that any life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment of th person who lived it

Mark Twain

All the adversity I’ve had in my life , all the troubles and obstacles, have strengthened me… You may not realize it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.

Walt Disney

The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.

Thomas Paine

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.

Napoleon

We must accept finite disappointment, but we never lose infinite hope.

Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.

Martin Luther King

(Mark Mason. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. 2016.)

         Mark Mason’s book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, is a not so subtle irreverent comment on today’s “we must all be happy and engaged” society. He says, “Now here’s the problem: Our society today, through the wonders of consumer culture and hey-look-my-life-is -cooler-than yours social media, has bred a whole generation of people who believe that having these negative experiences – anxiety, fear, guilt, etc. – is totally not okay. I mean, if you look at your Facebook feed, everybody there is having a fucking grand old-time.” (Mason, 7) He goes on the say that while the world is on this incredible high note, you are “stuck at home flossing your cat,” or petting your dog. He asserts that this only confirms in your mind that one’s life sucks even more than they thought. He says this has led to The Feedback Loop from Hell that has made many “overly stressed, overly neurotic, and overly self – loathing.” (Ibid.)

In former times many would feel low or down, it was called the blues, but people then just figured that was life and moved on. Today, we are told the opposite, as modern culture is obsessively focused on positive expectations, one must be happier, healthier, and better than anyone else. One cannot fail, or feel bad, that is met with counselors and many hours of exhortations for one to move on and connect. One must connect 24/7, and must have a opinion of all things. It has made many so focused on the positive and happy feelings that any thing negative is seen as an evil, or and illness. Thus, we cannot hear an opposite point of view, because it makes us uncomfortable, which is a bad thing. One must never be bored, or feeling down, that is seen as the modern heresy, one which could get one burned at the social media stake. Mason proclaims that the fallacy of this modern mindset is:

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”

Ibid. 9

It is the idea that philosopher Alan Watts refered to as the “backwards law – which is that the more you work to feel better all the time the less satisfied you become. The pursuit of something usually only emphasizes that one does not have it in the first place. Or as Albert Camus said,” You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consist of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.” or as Mason simply puts it, “Don’t try.” (Ibid. 10)

Mason explains this by asserting, “Ever notice that sometimes when you care less about something, you do better at it? Notice how it’s often the person who is least invested in the success of something that actually ends up achieving it? Notice how sometimes when you stop giving a fuck, everything seems to fall into place?” (Ibid. 11) Or as it is written in Ecclesiastes, “The race is not to the swift, or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all.” (9:11) In other words, to pursue the positive is a negative and the negative is a positive. It means that pain is an integral part of life and failure is the best teacher. Mason argues that opening yourself up to the insecurities of life is necessary for success and makes one more confident and charismatic around people. Honest confrontation of what is painful is the source of the greatest trust and respect in a relationship. Only through going through one’s pains and anxieties can one built courage and perseverance.  He concludes:

Seriously, I could keep going, but you get the point. Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.

Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unravels everything else with it. To try to avoid pain is to give too many fucks about pain. In contrast, if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.

Ibid. 11-12

          It is not a matter of not caring about anything, but knowing what to care or give a fuck about. In the modern world, many crisis are no longer material, but existential and spiritual.  The modern world has so much stuff, so much information, that humans are in overload, with too many examples of not measuring up or not being a s good as one could be. This was not how humans were when they strode across the Serengeti and moved from the small groups of early modern humans to the modern-day society. Yuval Noah Harari says of them, “The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies, or jellyfish.” (Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. 2015. 4) Then between 30,000 or 70,000 years ago something happened to these insignificant creatures. They began thinking and communicating in a totally new ways. They created myths and legends about themselves and their surroundings, Harari calles this the Cognitive Revolution and it caused humans to become the dominate species on Earth. (Ibid. 21) The psychologist Julian Jaynes theorized in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published in 1976, argued that humans were basically instinctual until around 3,000 when both halves of the brain began working together. (Ron Powers. No One Cares About Crazy People. New York: Hachette Books. 2017. 23-25) Until the modern era, many felt things were not all what they wanted, but that was life and they labored on making do with what they had.  Such sayings as playing with the hand they were dealt or sleeping the bed they made was the mantra of many, and one just accepted troubles as part of life nad labored through them. Today, however, that has changed, now to be unhappy, bored, in pain, or have a failure is a thing to be denied changed, or completely avoided.

         Mason argues that today we, “give too many fucks about the rude gas station attendant who gave us out change in nickles. We give too many fucks whan a show we liked was canceled on TV. We give too many fucks when our coworkers don’t bother asking about our awesome weekend. Meanwhile, our credit cards are maxed out, our dog hates us, Junior is snorting meth in the bathroom, yet we are getting pissed off about nickles and Everybody Loves Raymond.” (Mason. 12-13)  He issues a warning:

Look this is how it works. You’re going to die one day. I know that’s kind of obvious, but I wanted to remind you in case you’d forgotten. You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in a short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice – well, then you’re going to get fucked.

Ibid. 13

         Mason advocates that one learn, and he states this not easy or quick, to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively. based on what one picks and chooses to deem what matters and not matters, based on the finely honed personal values.  He argues this will take time ands one will fail in many attempts, but he states that this is the most worthy struggle of one’s life. To not do this creates in a person a feeling that they are entitled to be eternally happy and comfortable, and one should get their way in all cases. Mason concludes:

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 Feedback Loop from Hell, in constant motion yet arriving nowhere.

Ibid 14

One ends up like Alice and the Red Queen, having to run faster and faster to just stay in the same place. Or as Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band said, “Running against the wind.”

What may be at the root of the modern human problem, may be it is the ability to adapt to almost all situations. Rene Dubbos argued in his book, So Human an Animal (1969), that humans had not had any significant changes since the Stone Age and the key component of humans is their adaptability. Humans he argue could easily return to a primitive state and thrive, as they can adapt to almost anything thrown at the m. He asserts the biggest problem of this ability is:

Most of man’s problems in the modern world arise from constant… exposure to the stimuli of urban and industrial civilization… the physiological disturbances associated with sudden changes in life, the estrangement from… the natural cycles under which human evolution took place, the emotional trauma and the paradoxical solitude in congested cities, the monotony, boredom… in brief all the environmental conditions that undisciplined technology creates.

Powers. 59

         Harari put it this was, “One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tends to become necessities and spawn new obligations.” (Harari. 87) Thus as teen baby boomers would wait to get home and get permission to use the phone to call friends, present day high schoolers cannot be without their phones and must be inconstant communication with their friends. Our modern society now demands that we are in constant touch with each other and live without any feelings of pain or unhappiness. Mason counters,

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biological useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s going to do the most work to innovate and survive. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant desertification has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. So no – our own pain and misery aren’t a bug of human evolution; they’re a feature.

Mason. 27-28

         Mason argues that pain is what teaches us what is good and bad for us, it pushes forward and makes us better. Whether physical or psychological is not just healthy, but necessary as well, without it, humans become disconnected from the reality of the world around us. Thus Mason explains there are three “subtleies ” of not giving a fuck, it is the difference between a healthy life and that of an uncaring psychopath. They are:

1.Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

2. To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.

3. Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.

Ibid. 14-20

         Through these Mason argues that we can find a better way, the problem is that the society is in the grips of a psychological epidemic, one in which the society tells us that it is not okay for things to suck sometimes.  If one believes it not okay for things to suck, then one starts blaming him or herself. This leads to overcompensation that is, “like buying forty pairs of shoes or downing Xanax with a vodka chaser on a Tuesday night or shooting up a school bus full of kids.” (Ibid. 20-21) It feeds the society’s Feedback Loop from Hell that has come to dominate the culture of the present time.  Mason concludes that by freeing oneself from this loop one can reorient one’s expectations for life and achieve a kind of “practical enlightenment.” One then can turn one’s pain into a tool and tram into power and make problems slightly better.  He finishes with:

No, not that airy – fairy, eternal bliss, end – of – suffering, bullshitty kind of enlightenment. On the contrary, I see practical enlightenment as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable – that no matter what you do, life is composed of failures, loss, regrets, and even death. Because once you become comfortable with all the shit that life throws at you (and it will throw a lot of shit, trust me), you become invincible in a sort of low – level spiritual way. After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.

Ibid. 21

         The modern society has banned all suffering and pain in the search for the perfect life. One in which one is never challenged, hurt, disappointed, or have to confront any kind of failure what so ever. A life in which one is never wrong and all agree with whatever one thinks. No disagreements to upset one or problems in one’s way to nirvana. My grandfather once said that if one really wanted something, there were challenges to overcome, and would be overcame. If you really did not what something, then there were problems that were insurmountable. The search for perfection was condemned by historian Isaiah Berlin, as “a recipe for bloodshed, no better even if it is demanded by the sincerest of idealist, the purist of heart.” (Bernard Bailyn. Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2015. 236) Mason goes on to explain that his is a problem and tells how the highs of happiness are elusive and temporary and in many was like a opiod addiction. He explains that we are not special and things will go wrong and we must find a way to endure such times as these many times are the greatest periods of one’s life. He urges to have good values and discard those that are destructive, and one must be aware that suffering does have a value and many times makes one stronger. He list bad values as:

1. Pleasure

2. Material Success

3. Always being Right

4. Staying Positive

         He says that many of life’s greatest moments are, “not pleasant, not successful, not known, and not positive.”  He defines good values as those that are reality based, socially constructive, and immediate and controllable, while bad values are superstitious, socially destructive, and not immediate and controllable. He explains how the good are positive and the bad are negative through examples of the lives of several people.  He further explains that one must take responsibly for all happenings in life, even if it was not your fault, and that one must deal with the situation one is given, genetic or socially and take responsiblity for and move on. He moves forward saying that one must recognize that they do not know everything and can be wrong about a lot. That failure is many times the best way forward and it is important that one say no sometimes and rejection is many times a pathway to success. An old sports saying is that sometimes the best trade one made is the one they did not make.

         One of the results of this excessive drive to always be happy is loneliness, which in the modern society has reached epidemic proportions.  Psychology Today,  states, “Loneliness poses a serious physical risk – it can be quite literally deadly. As a predictor of premature death, insufficient social connection is a bigger risk than obesity and the equivalent of smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, according to Julianne Holt – Lunstad, a psychology professor at Brigham Young University and one of the leading figures in loneliness research. And, she says, the epidemic is only getting worse.” (Jennifer Latson. “The Cure for Disconnection.” Psychology Today.  March/April 2018. Volume 51. No.2. 45) The article goes on to argue that loneliness, “causes serious hurt, acting on the same parts of the brain as physical pain.” (Ibid.) It goes on to conclude that “what makes loneliness so insidious: It hides in plain sight and , unlike smoking or obesity, isn’t typically see nas a threat, even though it takes a greater toll on our well – being.” (Ibid) John Cacioppo, the director for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience and the author of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, states that, Loneliness is not simply being alone.”  While many crave solitude and do benefit from it at times, it can be a misery for some, and at times even for those who crave it. (Ibid) Loneliness and depression can be twin afflictions, but researchers distinguish the effects as while depression elevates the risk of Alzheimer’s slightly, Loneliness does so in a much greater fashion. Cacioppo argues that loneliness doesn’t necessarily predict depression, it does lead to it and increases stress, anxiety, and even anger, giving the sufferer a sense of personal threat and thus is physically toxic. “These data suggest that a perceived sense of social connectedness serves as a scaffold for the self. Damage the scaffold, and the rest of the self begins to crumble.” (Ibid. 46) The article concludes, “Our drive for social connectedness is so deeply wired that being rejected or socially excluded hurts like an actual wound.” (Ibid) What is at the root of modern society’s loneliness epidemic, is detailed in the following:

Overall, roughly 40 percent of Americans reported regularly feeling lonely in 2010, up from 20 percent in the 1980s. According to a sociological report called the General Social Survey, the number of Americans who say they have no one they can confide in nearly tripled between 1985 and 2004: At the survey’s end, the average person reported having just two confidants.

Why? There are many reasons, but Sherry Turkle, the author of Alone Together: Why We Ask More From Technology and Less From Each Other,  places blame squarely on the rise of digital culture. Connecting meaningfully with others in person requires us to be ourselves, openly and genuinely.  Conversations by text or Facebook messenger may be filled with smile emojis, but they leave us feeling empty because they lack depth.

“Without the demands and rewards of intimacy and empathy, we end up feeling alone while together online.” Turkle says, “And when we get together, we are quite frankly less prepared than before to listen. We have lost empathy skills. And of course, this, too, makes us more alone.”

Ibid. 49

Mason asserts that, “Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.” (Mason. 11) Yet when one is isolated in a like-minded online community, where one can avoid any thing painful or negative, one misses the experience of overcoming a painful episode or engaging in a real conversation where one might have to admit to being wrong and changing one’s mind or stance. Like Dorothy in the tornado, one is sucked up into a land where nothing is ever sad, boring, or challenging.  It may look like paradise, just like Oz did, but the Wicked Witch is just hiding in the flowers. Mason is urging people to step out of the unreal fantasy world and rejoin reality.

Mason concludes his book by looking at death. A famous statement either by Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer or the thrush metal band Cerebral Fix summed up life and death in the following, “Life Sucks, then you die.” Jim Morrison said of the subject, “Death makes angles of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as Ravens claws.” Lady Jane Grey, while awaiting execution wrote to her fourteen year old sister, (she was almost seventeen herself, the age that Janis Ian said we learn the truth), “Live still to die, that you (by death) may purchase eternal life. And trust not that the tenderness of your age shall lengthen your life. For as soon (if God calls) goeth the young, as the old: and labour always to learn to die…” Mason, in revisiting the death of a friend, puts it like this, “Oddly it was someone else’s death that gave me permission to finally live. And the worst moment of my life was also the most transformational.” (Ibid. 195)  Mason says of death:

Death scares us. And because it scars us, we avoid thinking about it, sometimes even acknowledge it, even when it’s happening to someone close to us.

Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of life’s meanings is measured.  Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.

Ibid.

          He cites Ernest Becker, author of The Denial of Death,  to make his point that we must learn to accept the final fate of men, as described in the ninth chapter of Ecclesiastes, who argues that humans are the only animal that can conceptualize and see themselves in the abstract. Dogs so not worry about their careers, or cats review their lives to see what could have been different. This forces humans to the realization that death is inevitable to all, which causes “death terror,” and which causes “deep existential anxiety that underlies everything we do.” (Ibid. 197) According to Becker this is the origin of the two sides of humans, the physical, the one that performs the physical acts of life, and the conceptual, the one of our identity or how we see ourselves. (Ibid)  Becker argues to compensate for this terror humans create what he calls immortality projects, in an attempt to allow our conceptual self to live on in the future as the physical did in the past.  Thus one is remembered, revered, and idolized after the physical self has come to an end. Becker further states that all civilization is the result of these projects of all who came before us, “remnants of conceptual selves that ceased to die.” (Ibid. 198) Mason contends that, “Whether it be through mastering an art form, conquering a new land, gaining great riches, or simply having a large loving family that will live for generations, all the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never die.” (Ibid)  He further argues that failure of such projects and the realization that the conceptual self-will not survive the physical causes the death terror to overtake one’s mind. A horrible and deep, depressing anxiety that can destroy a mind. Mason says that trauma, shame and social ridicule can also cause this as well as mental illness. 

         Harari explains that death was not avoided by earlier people, he states:

Of all mankind’s ostensibly insoluble problems, one has remained the most vexing, interesting and important: the problem of death itself. Before the modern era, most religions and ideologies too for granted that death was our inevitable fate. Moreover, most faiths turned death into the main source of meaning in life. Try to imagine Islam, Christianity or to the ancient Egyptian religion in a world without death. These creeds taught people that they must come to terms with death and pin their hopes on the afterlife, rather than to seek to overcome death and live forever here on earth. The best minds were busy giving meaning to death, not trying to escape it.

Harari. 266-267

Mason argues that confronting the reality of human mortality because by doing so eliminates all the “crappy, fragile, superficial values in life.” Confronting the end forces one to wonder what legacy one is leaving behind. Becker said that this was the most important question in life, but it is avoided because it is scary, hard and humans have no idea what they are doing. When this question is avoided the trivial and hateful vales take over the brain and desires and leads one down the corridor to our modern problems. Mason states, “Death is the only thing we can know with any certainly. And such, it must be the compass by which we orient all of our values and decisions. It is the correct answer to all of the questions we should ask but never do. The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. This is the basic root of all happiness.” (Mason. 206)

In his final argument, Mason says that entitlement strips this feeling of being more away from one, and turns one inward making one the center of the universe and the center of all problems, suffering and injustice, and that the individual is the only one deserving of greatness.  Mason goes on:

As alluring as it is, entitlement isolates us. Our curiosity and excitement for the world turns in upon itself and reflects our own biases and projections onto every person we meet and every event we experience. This feels sexy and enticing and may feel good for a while and sell a lot of tickets, but its spiritual poison.

It’s these dynamics that plague us now. We are so materially well off, yet so psychologically tormented in so many low – level and shallow ways. People relinquish all responsibility, demanding that society cater to their  feelings and sensibilities. People hold on to arbitrary certainties and try to enforce them on others, often violently, in the name of some made – up righteous cause. People, high on a sense of false superiority, fall into inaction and lethargy for fear of trying something worthwhile and failing at it.

The pampering of the modern mind has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something, a population that feels they have a right to something without sacrificing for it. People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real – life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary.

Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not.

You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody realizes it or not. And it’s not because you launch an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet – ass boat. These things do not define greatness.

You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to. This mere fact, this simple optioning for your own values in life, already makes you loved. Even if you don’t realize it. Even if you’re sleeping in a gutter and starving.

You too are going to die, and that’s because you too were fortunate enough to have lived. You may not feel this. But go stand on a cliff sometimes, and maybe you will.

Ibid. 207-208

Or another way to put it:

Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing.? Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? Which of you by worry can add one cubit to his stature? So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not worry saying, “What shall we eat? or “What shall we wear?” For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

Matthew 6:25-34