Everything is... Fucked?

"The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation. It's not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up."
- Everything is Fucked by Mark Manson 

Someone once told me they read a book a day. Now that's not impossible, except they're also a full-time workaholic with no apparent appreciation for the arts.

But now I know his secret because today I read Mark Manson's Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope in 45 minutes. The secret involves reading for the sake of bragging to people about reading a book a day. The secret also involves selecting such utterly meaningless swill that actually paying attention to what you're reading would cause your brain to liquify and leak through your ears. 

Pathetic, really. 

It's not that the author makes no sense whatsoever. Over the course of almost 300 pages, he blips in and out of the shadow of his own ego, making vaguely valid points for just long enough for us to absorb them before he slips back into proselytising about the AI overlords and their inevitable victory. 

Again and again, he sets up being a "couch potato" as a negative we must attempt to avoid lest our muscles atrophy and our bones grow brittle, claims that seeing violence in the written word is the result of never having experienced any "real" violence in one's life, and that the (white) people who survived the Holocaust and the Soviets were the real heroes, whereas all we have today are trivial problems that are utterly incomparable to what our great ancestors suffered. 

It's a book, in short, for white people in the Global North, written by a misguided and myopic white dude who, for some reason, believes that his perspective is important and all-encompassing enough to merit publishing. 

Perhaps the problem is that this book, first published in 2019, is deeply outdated 5 years later. Between the pandemic, the economic recessions, and the genocides, 2024 is a completely different time and place. Except, not really. 2024 is when these issues became so large that white people could no longer avoid them, or pretend they don't exist. (Not for lack of trying. They're really making an effort to ignore everything even now.) 

What I'm saying is that the author needs to shut up and follow Black feminist twitter.  

Everything is fucked. It's true. The solution doesn't truly lie in an individualistic framework like changing your perspective. We do have a responsibility to our own survival - individually and as a species - to unfuck things. But a perspective shift may also help in the short term, to help us cope with the overwhelming amount of horror we're seeing on a daily basis, and to hold up against the continuous battering by systems meant to perpetuate chronic inconvenience and poverty. 

As long as we don't stop at the perspective change.