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

out more than anything. Yet she feels stuck. So stuck, in fact, that she ends up
emailing a stranger on the Internet (me) and asking him a silly and obvious
question like, “How do I drop out of med school?”
Or the college guy who has a crush on his tutor. So he agonizes over
every sign, every laugh, every smile, every diversion into small talk, and
emails me a twenty-eight-page novella that concludes with the question,
“How do I ask her out?” Or the single mother whose now-adult kids have
finished school and are loafing around on her couch, eating her food,
spending her money, not respecting her space or her desire for privacy. She
wants them to move on with their lives. She wants to move on with her life.
Yet she’s scared to death of pushing her children away, scared to the point of
asking, “How do I ask them to move out?”
These are VCR questions. From the outside, the answer is simple: just
shut up and do it.
But from the inside, from the perspective of each of these people, these
questions feel impossibly complex and opaque—existential riddles wrapped
in enigmas packed in a KFC bucket full of Rubik’s Cubes.
VCR questions are funny because the answer appears difficult to anyone
who has them and appears easy to anyone who does not.
The problem here is pain. Filling out the appropriate paperwork to drop
out of med school is a straightforward and obvious action; breaking your
parents’ hearts is not. Asking a tutor out on a date is as simple as saying the
words; risking intense embarrassment and rejection feels far more
complicated. Asking someone to move out of your house is a clear decision;
feeling as if you’re abandoning your own children is not.
I struggled with social anxiety throughout much of my adolescence and
young adult life. I spent most of my days distracting myself with video games
and most of my nights either drinking or smoking away my uneasiness. For
many years, the thought of speaking to a stranger—especially if that stranger
happened to be particularly attractive/interesting/popular/smart—felt
impossible to me. I walked around in a daze for years, asking myself dumb
VCR questions:
“How? How do you just walk up and talk to a person? How can
somebody do that?”
I had all sorts of screwed-up beliefs about this, like that you weren’t
allowed to speak to someone unless you had some practical reason to, or that