An introspective book! The 'psychological epidemic' talks about how people are hung up over everything, including the little ones that don't really matter. I'm not a perfectionist, but sometimes I, too, struggle to understand what to prioritise, simply because I didn't think about what truly matters. Perhaps, in today's society, we easily see news articles and posts of success stories and so we tend to compare ourselves to others. Manson calls this "The Tyranny of Exceptionalism". Further, we are living in a society where we are perhaps too afraid of hurting others, which paint a false picture of reality, that it's normal to not get hurt. But it is.
Content: Manson split the key takeaways into different chapters to make it easier for readers to follow and digest. Some things he wrote about include constantly having to make decisions in life, and that people need to be less afraid of failing and just go for it, because failure is also part of the process. Otherwise, we'll just be stuck and not moving, which is probably worse than failing.
Estimated reading time needed: 3h
Key takeaways:
1) Conventional life advice fixates on our shortcomings, what we lack, which reinforces our ideas that we're just not good enough. Manson gave the example 'no truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she's happy. She just is'.
2) "The key to a good life is giving a fuck about less, about only what is true and immediate and important". What is it that truly matters? For example, receiving a wrong order at dinner or spending time with the people around you? Choose your worries and problems, not fixate on all of them.
3) "The backwards law" as told by philosopher Alan Watts says that the more we want positives, the worse we will feel, whereas if we accept the negatives, we feel more positive.
4) "To not give a fuck is to stare down at life's most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action". The same can be said for not caring about pissing people off to do what you feel is right.
5) If too many trivial things bother you, you probably don't have more important things going on in your life.
6) Everybody wants good things in life, but many are not willing to suffer for it. Manson then asks an intriguing question: "What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?" The key lies in the process - learn to enjoy it.
7) Choose the right metric to base your life on, by understanding what really matters to you. If you want to change how you see your problems, change your values or metrics.
Recommendation: I really liked the storyline. Manson started off by saying we have to be honest with ourselves, dig deep to understand and find out what we want, and then cater our limited energy and time for them. I would have liked it better if he dove a bit deeper into the 'psychological epidemic' we face today, to expand more about the context of this book. But that's not the point of this book so that's okay. Overall, this book does provide fair, logical points that I think many people would probably need to hear (like being honest with ourselves), even if they don't like it. Manson says to think about this book as a 'guide to suffering and how to do it better, more meaningfully, with more compassion and more humility'. Good book to read in a short few hours!
No comments:
Post a Comment