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

that’s when it all came out: the waterworks. The wails and the screams and
the snot. I pulled the car over to the side of the road and clutched the phone
and cried the way a little boy cries to his father.
I went into a deep depression that summer. I thought I’d been depressed
before, but this was a whole new level of meaninglessness—sadness so deep
that it physically hurt. People would come by and try to cheer me up, and I
would sit there and hear them say all the right things and do all the right
things; and I would tell them thank you and how nice it was of them to come
over, and I would fake a smile and lie and say that it was getting better, but
underneath I just felt nothing.
I dreamed about Josh for a few months after that. Dreams where he and I
would have full-blown conversations about life and death, as well as about
random, pointless things. Up until that point in my life, I had been a pretty
typical middle-class stoner kid: lazy, irresponsible, socially anxious, and
deeply insecure. Josh, in many ways, had been a person I looked up to. He
was older, more confident, more experienced, and more accepting of and
open to the world around him. In one of my last dreams of Josh, I was sitting
in a Jacuzzi with him (yeah, I know, weird), and I said something like, “I’m
really sorry you died.” He laughed. I don’t remember exactly what his words
were, but he said something like, “Why do you care that I’m dead when
you’re still so afraid to live?” I woke up crying.
It was sitting on my mom’s couch that summer, staring into the so-called
abyss, seeing the endless and incomprehensible nothingness where Josh’s
friendship used to be, when I came to the startling realization that if there
really is no reason to do anything, then there is also no reason to not do
anything; that in the face of the inevitability of death, there is no reason to
ever give in to one’s fear or embarrassment or shame, since it’s all just a
bunch of nothing anyway; and that by spending the majority of my short life
avoiding what was painful and uncomfortable, I had essentially been
avoiding being alive at all.
That summer, I gave up the weed and the cigarettes and the video games.
I gave up my silly rock star fantasies and dropped out of music school and
signed up for college courses. I started going to the gym and lost a bunch of
weight. I made new friends. I got my first girlfriend. For the first time in my
life I actually studied for classes, gaining me the startling realization that I
could make good grades if only I gave a shit. The next summer, I challenged