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

myself to read fifty nonfiction books in fifty days, and then did it. The
following year, I transferred to an excellent university on the other side of the
country, where I excelled for the first time, both academically and socially.
Josh’s death marks the clearest before/after point I can identify in my life.
Pre-tragedy, I was inhibited, unambitious, forever obsessed and confined by
what I imagined the world might be thinking of me. Post-tragedy, I morphed
into a new person: responsible, curious,hardworking. I still had my
insecurities and my baggage—as we always do—but now I gave a fuck about
something more important than my insecurities and my baggage. And that
made all the difference. Oddly, it was someone else’s death that gave me
permission to finally live. And perhaps the worst moment of my life was also
the most transformational.
Death scares us. And because it scares us, we avoid thinking about it,
talking about it, sometimes even acknowledging it, even when it’s happening
to someone close to us.
Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow
of all of life’s meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel
inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly
zero.
Something Beyond Our Selves
Ernest Becker was an academic outcast. In 1960, he got his Ph.D. in
anthropology; his doctoral research compared the unlikely and
unconventional practices of Zen Buddhism and psychoanalysis. At the time,
Zen was seen as something for hippies and drug addicts, and Freudian
psychoanalysis was considered a quack form of psychology left over from
the Stone Age.
In his first job as an assistant professor, Becker quickly fell into a crowd
that denounced the practice of psychiatry as a form of fascism. They saw the
practice as an unscientific form of oppression against the weak and helpless.
The problem was that Becker’s boss was a psychiatrist. So it was kind of
like walking into your first job and proudly comparing your boss to Hitler.
As you can imagine, he was fired.
So Becker took his radical ideas somewhere that they might be accepted:
Berkeley, California. But this, too, didn’t last long.