Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of
our worst moments. It’s only when we feel intense pain that we’re willing to
look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us. We need
some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how we’ve been
deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course.
You could call it “hitting bottom” or “having an existential crisis.” I
prefer to call it “weathering the shitstorm.” Choose what suits you.
And perhaps you’re in that kind of place right now. Perhaps you’re
coming out of the most significant challenge of your life and are bewildered
because everything you previously thought to be true and normal and good
has turned out to be the opposite.
That’s good—that’s the beginning. I can’t stress this enough, but pain is
part of the process. It’s important to feel it. Because if you just chase after
highs to cover up the pain, if you continue to indulge in entitlement and
delusional positive thinking, if you continue to overindulge in various
substances or activities, then you’ll never generate the requisite motivation to
actually change.
When I was young, any time my family got a new VCR or stereo, I would
press every button, plug and unplug every cord and cable, just to see what
everything did. With time, I learned how the whole system worked. And
because I knew how it all worked, I was often the only person in the house
who used the stuff.
As is the case for many millennial children, my parents looked on as if I
were some sort of prodigy. To them, the fact that I could program the VCR
without looking at the instruction manual made me the Second Coming of
Tesla.
It’s easy to look back at my parents’ generation and chuckle at their
technophobia. But the further I get into adulthood, the more I realize that we
all have areas of our lives where we’re like my parents with the new VCR:
we sit and stare and shake our heads and say, “But how?” When really, it’s as
simple as just doing it.
I get emails from people asking questions like this all the time. And for
many years, I never knew what to say to them.
There’s the girl whose parents are immigrants and saved for their whole
lives to put her through med school. But now she’s in med school and she
hates it; she doesn’t want to spend her life as a doctor, so she wants to drop