Rethinking Your F*cks with Mark Manson

Mark Manson is the master of telling us not to sweat the stuff which frankly doesn't need sweating about. As he put it in his best-selling book The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck:

“You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.” 

So, as he faces being locked down in his New York apartment, how is he calibrating what to worry about? What coping mechanisms from his no-nonsense ethos is he deploying - which we can all learn from?

Mark had a deeply candid chat with Tim Samuels - in which they had a ‘depression-off’ to see whose serotonin was more screwed at the moment. Mark also revealed:

• This is actually a great opportunity to break your bad habits

• What’s getting him through all this

• What the world is likely to look like afterwards

Watch their chat here - and read some excerpts below.

I'm Trying To Use This As An Opportunity

As someone who's made a career trying to train us not to over worry and not to give too much of a fuck, how much of a fuck are you giving at the moment?

A lot. It's funny because the interviews I've been doing recently people keep bringing this up. They're like, oh, you're the “not give a fuck” guy. I'm like, well, yeah, but it's really what the book is about, it's about saving your fucks and prioritising them correctly.

And you know, from the beginning I was sending out newsletters to my readers saying, look, you guys know me, I'm not the type of person who freaks out about things. I'm usually the one saying don't believe the media hype, don't buy into all the drama and everything. But this thing scares me and I think a couple of weeks ago I wrote this is a generation-defining event. And it's one of those events that you know, the only other event in my life that I can even compare it to, I think, is probably 9/11, where it's like 20 years from now people are gonna be like, oh, where were you when coronavirus happened? Where did you quarantine? What was that like? And so you start having to ask yourself, how do you want to be able to answer these questions for the rest of your life? What did you do? You want to be able to make the right decisions for yourself. 

So in terms of storing up your fucks, if you've got a kind of fuck bank (not to overplay the metaphor) but you’ve built up your credit now... what are you spending your mental space on, your nervous energy, where’s that going?

I certainly feel a certain amount of responsibility right now because I do have a large audience, I do have a lot of readers and there is a lot of misinformation out there and a lot of conspiracy theories and stuff. I'm getting tonnes of emails every day and I'm writing to people each week. I'm trying to avoid giving expert advice or opinions but I'm also trying to sort through the BS for people and I guess I feel a certain responsibility to do that because of the size of the audience.

On a more personal level, what I’ve found is that I have not had so many phone calls with friends and family. I'm texting with people I haven’t texted in years. I'm talking to my parents more than I have in probably 10 years. And you know, some of that's conscious. Some of that is conscious worrying, but I've noticed too that's the first thing you miss in this whole experience. I would kill to have a beer with a friend right now and we're only like 10 days into this. So the relationship piece is definitely something that's come to the fore pretty quickly.

One minute teaser for the full interview

What have been your coping mechanisms or what are the kind of traits you're trying to instil in your own thinking?

I'm trying to use this as an opportunity. You know, anytime our life gets completely bamboozled like this, it kind of interrupts all of our patterns, it interrupts our morning routine and interrupts our day to day job and interrupts where we go, who we see.

And it also interrupts a lot of our bad patterns, you know? Maybe we go out too much, maybe we're spending a little bit too much money on stupid things. Maybe we're eating too much, maybe we're drinking too much. So I always see situations like this as a sword that cuts both ways. They interrupt a lot of the good patterns in our lives and cause a lot of stress but they can also interrupt a lot of the bad patterns and in that space where they interrupt the bad patterns, there's an opportunity to replace those patterns and replace those habits with something a little bit better.

So for me in particular, especially as somebody who lives In New York, I mean you could just eat at amazing restaurants and drink incredible cocktails 365 nights a year and you would like never go to the same place twice. Probably the last three years or so, it's probably like the least healthy I've been physically and it's been a goal of mine for like the last six or eight months to try to lose some weight and eat healthier or whatever.

But then this happened. And my wife and I were like, alright, this is it, we're gonna stock up on food, it's only going to be healthy food, you know, fruits, veggies and meat. We're going to cook at home, we have to cook at home every day now. So there's really no choice and that's maybe been part of the stress for me, is that I don't get like my weekly whiskey or, you know, my favourite burger anymore. But it's actually been really great in that way. We're just developing better habits and patterns at home in terms of basic day to day choices. So that's kind of what I try to focus on.

“I come from a bit of a Buddhist background and so I one thing I believe very deeply is that, that sort of uncertainty and stress, running away from it always makes it worse”

If you were to try and give people who are perhaps struggling at the moment, you know, three kinds of thoughts to hold on to or tips or something like that what would spring to mind?

This is an opportunity to reevaluate what you're giving a fuck about in your life and whether it deserves it or not. You know, one of the things I wrote about in Subtle Art was that it's incredibly difficult to really know how valuable something is in your life until it's removed. What I find is, you know, with situations like this is that there are many things you realise you took for granted, say, relationships, family members. You're like, wow, I really, really miss that person and I didn't realise it until I couldn't see them anymore. But then there are many things in your life that you thought were important and it turns out they aren’t. 

I guess the biggest thing I'm struggling with myself is there's just so much more fear and uncertainty right now. I think there's a lot of what I call background stress, you know? So it's not like I have a deadline coming up or I have a publisher yelling at me or something, it's just this 24/7 background stress of like, what the hell is going to happen? How bad is this going to get essentially? And for me, I'm trying to practice embracing that uncertainty as much as I can - trying to not avoid it, bury myself in video games or something Netflix.

I mean, obviously, there's a lot of video games and Netflix going on, don't get me wrong, but, you know, I come from a bit of a Buddhist background and so I one thing I believe very deeply is that, that sort of uncertainty and stress, running away from it always makes it worse. You know the best thing you can do is just learn to sit with it and become comfortable with it. And so that's kind of what I'm trying to do. And 90% of the time I fail miserably at that but you know, there are those sweet 10 minutes each day where I feel very equanimous and like, ah, you know, we're gonna make it, humanity's gonna make it. We've been through worse. It's just a few months, we're gonna be fine.

How do you think this is going to change society when all this eventually, please, God, passes?

It's been very trendy in the last five or six years to hate on technology and to hate on Facebook and all these companies. And it's funny because, within 10 days, we're all Facebook and Google and Microsoft's biggest fans. Like thank god for Amazon because I mean, honestly, Amazon might be the only thing preventing mass looting and rioting in a lot of these countries.

So, I think our relationship with technology is going to shift very quickly. And I think maybe this period will teach people you know, one of the things I've kind of been harping on about in the last year is it's not the technology that's bad, it's how we're using it. If you use it very mindlessly, and it just automatically consumes anything that shows up on your newsfeed, then, yeah, it sucks. It's controlling you, not the other way around.

But if you kind of take an active presence in choosing and defining who you interact with, who you follow, who you talk to, it's actually incredible. So I'm hopeful that it will kind of reorient our relationship with technology. That we will become a little bit more connected. And in our relationships, it'll develop a little bit, it'll kind of return to the cultural norms of phone calls and extended text conversations and, you know, zoom happy hours and things like that. I hope things like that kind of persist.

On the business front, I've read in a couple of places that large companies are saying that the zoom meetings are going so well, that they're going to keep them even when everybody goes back to work, that they find them to be more productive and efficient than in-person meetings. I mean, we've all been in those meetings that probably should have been like a five-minute call or even an email. And I think maybe this is showing businesses a lot of inefficiencies and how people spend time. I definitely think the world's gonna look a lot different after this than before it. 

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