This guy, Mark Manson, is by a huge distance the pick of the bunch, when it comes to the modern day self help-genre imho.
His excellent book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***" remained at top spot on the New York Times best seller list for a very long and thoroughly deserved time. It spawned dozens of similarly titled books, none of which were anywhere near as good.
From Wikipedia:
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life is a 2016 nonfiction self-help book by American blogger and author Mark Manson. The book covers Manson's belief that life's struggles give it meaning and argues that typical self-help books offer meaningless positivity which is neither practical nor helpful. It was a New York Times and Globe and Mail bestseller. As of July 2024, over 20 million copies of the book had been sold.
Contents
The book is a reaction to the
self-help industry and what Manson saw as a culture of mindless positivity that is not practical or helpful for most people. Manson uses many of his own personal experiences to illustrate how life's struggles often give it more meaning, which, he argues, is a better approach than constantly trying to be happy. Manson's approach and writing style have been described as different from other self-help books, using blunt honesty and
profanity to illustrate his ideas.
The book has nine chapters. The first chapter,
Don't Try, is named after the philosophy of
Charles Bukowski, who served as a major inspiration for the whole book.
The chapters have the following titles:
- Don't Try.
- Happiness is a problem.
- You are not special.
- The value of suffering.
- You are always choosing.
- You are wrong about everything (But so am I).
- Failure is the way forward.
- The importance of saying no.
- And then you die.
The book is not about how to be an asshole and not care, quite the contrary. It's mainly about concerning yourself with the the things in life that really matter. And how to not lose yourself on things that don't matter.
(This book along with Atomic Habits by James Clear have to be the 2 best self help books I've ever read. And I've read a LOT of them. Most of them have just been repetitive, obvious, predictable, and tedious, but these 2 buck the trend.)
Manson has an engaging, amusing, and refreshing way of relaying things. He absolutely goes in for tough love, but only when necessary and all in a way that's appropriate and makes sense. I guess that's his angle, and although many of the things he talks about are familiar, he has an original and modern style, that is so ideal for this day and age. He packs a powerful emotional punch at times.
I watched this last night, and it reminded me just how perceptive and insightful that he is.
I could not recommend him strongly enough tbh.
