Hmm…what an oddity…but in a good way.
Background
Where do I start with this guy? I feel like I’ve been asking that a lot lately. Mark Manson is one of those authors who’s so his own brand that he’s quite hard to place and I think winds up in the wrong part of the book store.
This book, more so than his last one, proves that point. Speaking of his last book, let me tell you a few things about it. The delightfully titled The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck probably set the standards for “Self-help/personal development” books for years to come. It’s sold north of eight million copies in just three years. In today’s fractured media world that’s like…Harry Potter level literary success.
Needless to say, the follow up had a hard act to follow. So it just created it’s own show. Good and Bad.
The Good
Everything Is Fucked (EIF from here on out) does something that pretty much no other book in the self-help genre (it really should be philosophy or social science though) does in that it lists sources, backs up claims and makes an effort to be an academic treatise. Considering how many con-men exist in this genre (my nose catches the whiff of Tony Robbins on the wind), calling this a breath of fresh air undercuts the situation insultingly.
Even better, the point EIF is trying to make is worth backing up academically. Basically, it’s this: everything is materially better than before, but mentally, everybody’s losing their shit. Anxiety and Depression have been soaring and there’s a general malaise going on in the world. Ask most people, and they’ll tell you the Western World is circling the drain. It’s only a matter of time.
But if you ask authors like Hans Rosling and Steven Pinker (who Mark cites; bonus points in my book), even that is disputable. General happiness has either gone up or stayed the same (the famous Easterlin Paradox, but we won’t go into that here) but looking at the media will give you a very different picture of the world.
Clearly, something’s not right here.
And we reach perhaps the strongest part of EIF in that Mark proposes a reason for this which could be given a solid academic research study: the Paradox of Progress. Taking leaves out of philosophy and science, Mark reckons that we, as a society, are becoming less and less tolerant of discomfort of any sort which ultimately makes us more vulnerable to it. Even though everything might be amazing, the wiring of the human mind makes it difficult to appreciate this.
Rather, humans need to have some level of negative emotions in order to be healthy. Not too many, but just the right amount.
Mark also brings up new research which hasn’t been widely released yet, which is always something special. Perhaps my favourite is what he calls “The Blue Dot Effect”. In short, the researchers in this experiment took a group of volunteers and had them look at a screen with two buttons in front of them. If they saw mostly blue dots, they pressed one button and if they saw mostly purple dots, they pressed the other.
What surprised researchers was this: though the researchers shifted from mostly blue dots to mostly purple dots, people’s response rates didn’t change. They tried this with ethical and unethical job proposals and got the same result. In other words: people subconsciously shifted their metric for a blue dot and ultimately saw threatening things that weren’t there.
All of that is amazing, and we haven’t even arrived at the book’s central thesis.
Namely, humans need things to hope for in order for their lives to have meaning. Take away hope and you take away meaning. However, that also means that something has to be broken in order for you to hope for something. Therefore, Mark proposes that humans have to be very careful about what to hope for.
Brilliant, so what’s wrong with this thing? Not much.
The Bad.
If someone wanted me to complain about this book, I’d point to only one thing: the tone. The voice in my head while reading this thing didn’t sit right with me. Kinda like Metallica covering a Simon and Garfunkel song.
The mixture of Mark’s heavy-handed everyman’s voice combined with the academic research creates some odd cognitive dissonance in my mind.
That’s it.
The rest is personal nitpicking. Namely Nietzsche. I just don’t get this guy. As someone who reads things on a literal level (hello autism my old friend), Nietzsche just seems like a sadist to me, a guy with many problems who needed therapy more than anything else. I just don’t get him. The biographical history of his life in the middle of the book didn’t do him any favours.
The last chapter also made me cock an eyebrow or two. It’s about A.I. and Climate Change, two topics I don’t care that much about. The coming A.I. apocalypse feels more like a bad sci-fi story than a reasonable prediction given how many things about we aren’t thinking about. (Michael Lewis calls that stuff The Fifth Risk in his new book of the same name).
Climate Change irritates me on all levels because most people talking about are fatalistic. Mark doesn’t really go there, but it’s still not part of the solution.
Finally, there are two topics I wish Mark would’ve covered but I knew it would have been a long shot. Anyway, here they are: Misinformation and Loneliness.
Most people who don’t have a solid social network in their life are more at risk of just about every form of illness and most illnesses seen today are Loneliness related. Half of the things Mark describes in the book go back to that topic but he doesn’t address it directly. Misinformation is the harder one to pin down, but I was expecting it to be Mark’s answer to the Paradox of Progress. People aren’t ignorant about things, but rather categorically misinformed (usually it’s the media’s fault).
Conclusion
EIF is probably the best thing a person can read about the real (and perceived) problems in their life without getting bogged down in an academic minefield. It’s a book where the emotions conjured by reading it actually match the data and evidence. (Side note: books where this doesn’t happen and could lead to misinformation or worse are usually written by journalists; Johann Hari and Angela Saini come to mind. A special “fuck you” goes to David Wallace Wells’ new book too.)
EIF hits the nail on the head and forces a mental change in you for the better. For that reason alone it’s worth buying.
So go fucking do it.