The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck | Reflection
I was acquainted with this book on a weekend trip to one of the largest independent bookstores - Powell's Books. Although I expected nothing more than your average self-help book I couldn't resist the urge to read it. As jarring as the title may seem, Manson thoroughly articulates the importance of understanding ones values and offers insight on how we can approach complications in our lives. We are reminded that we should "[Not] hope for a life without problems, there's no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems."
I am someone who is guilty of turning myself into my worst enemy. We, as humans, instinctively try to find ways to feel wanted and valued even if it seems like we sacrifice more than we profit.
“Because when you give too many fucks—when you give a fuck about everyone and everything—you will feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. 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 personal Feedback Loop from Hell, in constant motion yet arriving nowhere”
Learning the hard way, this is going to tear you apart. The desperate attempt to be liked by others will emphasize and reflect your insecurities. You will start hate yourself when you cannot fulfill the standards that you believe others expect from you. Whether or not these expectations are actually true, you still deprive yourself the ability to be genuinely happy and satisfied with who you are. Growing up, I maintained this mindset of going about life trying to please anyone and everyone I could. This started with just me trying to make my parents happy, which created a snowball effect to me trying to prove to everyone that I was capable. Why does it matter that your friends think your job sucks? Why does it matter if your parents feel ashamed that you do not make as much as their friend's child? Why does it matter if your boyfriend thinks that that sweater you are wearing looks hideous on you? Why does that matter to you, to me, to him, or to her? It matters because we think we are defined by what and how others perceive us to be. It matters because we are human and we desire to feel accepted. And that's perfectly fine. But the moment that it starts to take over your life and degrades your own self-esteem, it becomes a constant reminder that you are not enough. When you are clouded by so much negativity, you lose sight of opportunities and life itself.
There is always a balance and an awareness of that fact that sometimes it is okay to say "no". This is the moment when you have to reel yourself back to reality and reflect on your situation. When we care too much, we get high off of the idea of wanting more and more in order to prolong the feeling of success and pleasure. When does it stop? We forget the simple pleasures in life - popping bubble wrap, getting an extra hour of sleep, the smell of freshly cut grass, and simply the blessings of our family and friends.
"When we force ourselves to stay positive all the time, we deny the existence of our life's problems. And when we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to solve them and generate happiness."
Problems exist, and it was not until recently that I realized how important it was to face them head on rather than pushing them under the rug, hoping that they would disappear. You know that saying, "sometimes things are better left unsaid"? Well that's definitely not true. Communication is an integral part of solving our problems. We cannot solve them independent of communication. Accept that you'll have problems, because the act of fixing our problems sprouts new perspectives. We cannot be confined by our narrow mindedness and use our past to generate assumptions to avoid our problems. The most selfish trap we can place on ourselves is thinking that we know what we actually do not know. In the end, this leads to putting the blame on others when situations do not bend in our favor.
"There's a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person's actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation, but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric with which you measure your experiences."
Even when we are unhappy with the circumstances, it is important that we do not accuse other's for how we feel. We are responsible for how we feel today and should take responsibility for how we feel tomorrow. Problems are only problems if you allow them to be. In the moment we may feel that a problem's existence only makes life harder, but in reality it actually makes life easier. The more problems we can fix today will teach us how to approach problems tomorrow. It is deciding what we want to experience from going through our problems that define who we are. We experience, we learn, and we apply. That is part of personal growth, self-respect, and finding happiness.
