Pun Salad

A couple months back I was sufficiently impressed with Mark Manson's rant about intellectuals to add his substack to my reading list and (eventually) to check out his 2016 book on the topic of …

Well, you can read the title as well as I can. Reader, the blotted-out word on the jacket is not asterisked or otherwise obscured anywhere else in the book. And Mark uses it a lot, usually gratuitously. In his defense, that's become kind of common these days, and the word has lost a lot of its power to shock.

Worse, the title does not accurately reflect Mark's main thesis. When he urges the reader to not give a you-know-what about something, he's asking you to not care strongly about that thing. There are broad classes of things like that: basically, things that are outside your control.

But he further observes that there are things you should care strongly about. Specifically, living in tune with your carefully selected values, like honesty, temperance, courage, justice, etc.

So a better title for the book would have been The Subtle Art of Knowing What to Care About, and What Not to Care About.

It didn't take me long to say: Hey, this sounds a lot like stoicism. I don't think Mark says that directly, though. To be fair, I might have missed it. Mark's prose style does not encourage careful reading; it comes across, at times, as a transcription of a slightly-drunken rant.

So an even better title for the book might have been Stoicism, Loosely Described With Dirty Words.

For what it's worth, one of the back-cover blurbs is from Ryan Holiday, who is an explicit Stoic advocate. I read his book Stillness Is the Key a few years back, and thought it was decent. If you're looking for self-help with a Stoic twist, I'd recommend Ryan over Mark.