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

CHAPTER 8
The Importance of Saying No
In 2009, I gathered up all my possessions, sold them or put them into
storage, left my apartment, and set off for Latin America. By this time my
little dating advice blog was getting some traffic and I was actually making a
modest amount of money selling PDFs and courses online. I planned on
spending much of the next few years living abroad, experiencing new
cultures, and taking advantage of the lower cost of living in a number of
developing countries in Asia and Latin America to build my business further.
It was the digital nomad dream and as a twenty-five-year-old adventureseeker,
it was exactly what I wanted out of life.
But as sexy and heroic as my plan sounded, not all of the values driving
me to this nomadic lifestyle were healthy ones. Sure, I had some admirable
values going on—a thirst to see the world, a curiosity for people and culture,
some old-fashioned adventure-seeking. But there also existed a faint outline
of shame underlying everything else. At the time I was hardly aware of it, but
if I was completely honest with myself, I knew there was a screwed-up value
lurking there, somewhere beneath the surface. I couldn’t see it, but in quiet
moments when I was completely honest with myself, I could feel it.
Along with the entitlement of my early twenties, the “real traumatic shit”
of my teenage years had left me with a nice bundle of commitment issues. I
had spent the past few years overcompensating for the inadequacy and social
anxiety of my teenager years, and as a result I felt like I could meet anybody I
wanted, be friends with anybody I wanted, love anybody I wanted, have sex
with anybody I wanted—so why would I ever commit to a single person, or
even a single social group, a single city or country or culture? If I could
experience everything equally, then I should experience them all equally,
right?