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

live up to. Yet when you really get down to what happens in the story, these
kids are absolutely out of their fucking minds. And they just killed themselves
to prove it!
It’s suspected by many scholars that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and
Juliet not to celebrate romance, but rather to satirize it, to show how
absolutely nutty it was. He didn’t mean for the play to be a glorification of
love. In fact, he meant it to be the opposite: a big flashing neon sign blinking
KEEP OUT, with police tape around it saying DO NOT CROSS.
For most of human history, romantic love was not celebrated as it is now.
In fact, up until the mid-nineteenth century or so, love was seen as an
unnecessary and potentially dangerous psychological impediment to the more
important things in life—you know, like farming well and/or marrying a guy
with a lot of sheep. Young people were often forcibly steered clear of their
romantic passions in favor of practical economic marriages that would yield
stability for both them and their families.
But today, we all get brain boners for this kind of batshit crazy love. It
dominates our culture. And the more dramatic, the better. Whether it’s Ben
Affleck working to destroy an asteroid to save the earth for the girl he loves,
or Mel Gibson murdering hundreds of Englishmen and fantasizing about his
raped and murdered wife while being tortured to death, or that Elven chick
giving up her immortality to be with Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, or stupid
romantic comedies where Jimmy Fallon forgoes his Red Sox playoff tickets
because Drew Barrymore has, like, needs or something.
If this sort of romantic love were cocaine, then as a culture we’d all be
like Tony Montana in Scarface: burying our faces in a fucking mountain of it,
screaming, “Say hello to my lee-tle friend!”
The problem is that we’re finding out that romantic love is kind of like
cocaine. Like, frighteningly similar to cocaine. Like, stimulates the exact
same parts of your brain as cocaine. Like, gets you high and makes you feel
good for a while but also creates as many problems as it solves, as does
cocaine.
Most elements of romantic love that we pursue—the dramatic and
dizzyingly emotional displays of affection, the topsy-turvy ups and downs—
aren’t healthy, genuine displays of love. In fact, they’re often just another
form of entitlement playing out through people’s relationships.