BooksJune 5, 2019

Mark Manson’s Everything is F*cked: a first-person review

Guest writer

Mark Manson has followed up his mega-selling The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck with another sweary self-helper. Mark Broatch tries to get into his head.

Hi there. You might remember me from my previous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. In that book, which I wrote when I was 32, I told you that everything you knew about self-improvement was wrong. You know, all that be healthier, be happier, be the best stuff. All wrong.

Don’t try, that was the answer, as the epitaph on Charles Bukowski’s tombstone said.

Don’t try didn’t mean don’t try, of course. Bukowski tried like hell for decades to be a writer, and jumped like a shickered sheep when he got the chance. It’s more that Bukowski knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. Even after he got famous, he still showed up to poetry readings pissed, exposed himself and hit on every woman in sight. He eventually sold about two million copies. As I say, self-improvement and success often occur together, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.

All that conventional life advice is actually fixating on what you lack. We are constantly bombarded with messages to give a fuck about everything, all the time – buy more, own more, make more, fuck more, be more. Buying more stuff may be good for business, but it’s bad for your mental health. We all have flat-screen TVs and our groceries delivered, but we are more depressed, more anxious and unhealthier than ever. The key to a good life is actually giving a fuck about less. Learning how to focus and prioritise what’s important and what’s not is perhaps the most worthy struggle one can undertake in one’s life. That’s the subtle bit.

That book sold six million copies, by the way.

Anyway, I’m baaaack! I’m now 35, and boy, I mean fuck, have I got some news for you. Everything is F*cked has the same artfully told tales about genuine heroes, repeat-for-emphasis arguments, fewer personal anecdotes (though, yes, before I got married I was popular with the ladies), a slightly more serious tone. Like The Subtle Art, there are deftly placed swears every few pages. And now with numbered endnotes, for those of you who wondered if I was just pulling those perfect philosophical epigrams out of my ass.

The subtitle of this book is “A Book About Hope”. By hope, as I write in a longer endnote, I don’t mean optimism or belief in the possibility of positive results like most academics, but purpose or meaning, drawing as I do on motivation and value theory research.

First, though, we have to figure out life’s purpose. To do that, we have to sort out what our Thinking Brain and our Feeling Brain are up to. See that self-control is an illusion. Get to grips with The Uncomfortable Truth and the Classic Assumption. Etc.

We’re the safest and most prosperous humans in the history of the world. Yet we suffer the paradox of progress: you remember, the better things get, the more we seem to despair. The wealthier and safer the place we live, the more likely we are to commit suicide. True.

If there are similarities with Jordan Peterson from time to time, I can’t help that. When you tell people that much of life is pain and striving, to stand up for your own principles and that Nietzsche was a pretty smart cat, perhaps that comparison is bound to be made. But look over here, I also have Kant, Schopenhauer and Plato. And Tom Waits.

The middle section of the book is about how to start your own religion. You know, belief systems, followers, rituals, scapegoats. Don’t worry, it all makes sense at the end. Though the actual end does take a bit of a turn you probably didn’t see coming. Though if you were reading carefully, you might have twigged that it’s all part of a larger argument, about algorithms and stuff.

Even though my books are shot through with interesting ideas about the wrongs in society, and genuine synthesised insights from my having read screeds of psychological research, I don’t offer any political or policy solutions. Politics is a transactional and selfish game, as I say, and democracy is the best system of government thus far for the sole reason that it’s the only one that openly admits it. It acknowledges that power attracts corrupt and childish people, and forces leaders to be transactional. The only way to manage this reality is to enshrine grown-up virtues into the design of the system. Things like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, guarantees of privacy and the right to a fair trial have to be baked into our social institutions. How do we do that?

Let me talk about political extremists. They are intractable and impossible to bargain with, and so, by definition, childish. A right-wing extremist will claim she desires “freedom” above all else, but really means that she wants freedom from having to deal with any values that do not map on to her own. Freedom from having to deal with change or the marginalisation of other people. A left-wing extremist will say he wants “equality” for all, but what he really means is he never wants anyone to feel pain, or harmed, or inferior. And he’s willing to cause pain and adversity to others to achieve that. Equality requires that everybody feel the same pain; freedom demands each person be forced to reckon with lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own.

In the developed world, we’re not suffering a crisis of wealth or material, but a crisis of character, of virtue, of means and ends. We’re childish and impulsive, or sometimes compromising adolescents, with too few real adults who do the right thing because it’s right; the maturity of our culture is deteriorating. Social media has made it so much worse.

So. Don’t pursue happiness. Living well doesn’t mean avoiding suffering: it means suffering for the right reasons. Get better at feeling bad. Don’t hope. Don’t despair either. Just be better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined. Maybe meditate. Though actual Buddhist meditation is hard. You’re supposed to suck at it. Embrace the suckage. Have faith in something. Be an adult. Read the endnotes.

Everything is F*cked: A book about hope, by Mark Manson (Harper, $35) is available at Unity Books.

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BooksJune 4, 2019

How men present, and who they really are: Greg McGee’s new novel, reviewed

Catherine Robertson

Guest writer

Image: Flying Colour Ltd DigitalVision via Getty

Four decades after holding a mirror up to Kiwi masculinity with the sensational play Foreskin’s Lament, Greg McGee is back with Necessary Secrets, a new novel that asks the same question: whaddarya?

At a time when we might feel we’ve reached peak old privileged white bloke, it’s a brave writer who devotes the first 61 pages of their novel to an old privileged white bloke indulging in a pity party. It’s the day of Den Sparks’ 70th birthday, to be held at his large villa in Herne Bay. His mind is failing, his wife is long dead, he’s estranged from two of his three children, his lucrative career was ruined by millennials and technology, and though he’s stashed a snub-nosed Walther PPK in his roll-top desk – his exit strategy – it seems unlikely he’ll have the guts to use it.

Despite his nice line in self-deprecating humour, it’s hard to feel sorry for Den. Good news is we’re not supposed to, because this is a novel written by Greg McGee, who has never gone easy on the dude-bros. By opening with the lament of old Den, Necessary Secrets feels like a bookend to McGee’s 1981 play, which ended with young Foreskin’s famous “Whaddarya?” challenge to New Zealand’s destructive sports-obsessed masculine culture. McGee’s 2015 novel The Antipodeans also explored the damage caused by men unable to connect emotionally, and how Kiwi resourcefulness can mask a callous disregard for other humans. McGee has spent nearly four decades reminding us that how men present may be socially approved of, but it’s a rug under which lasting hurt and harm is swept. Whaddarya? That is the question. And do our men have the courage to look closely enough at themselves to give an honest answer?

The irony of this novel is that Den Sparks is only half-able to take a long, hard look at his life. Dementia is catching up with him, and he’s in that terrible position of being aware of the decline but unable to do anything about it. He relies on his daughter, Ellie, who lives with him as housekeeper, financial controller and old man minder, while working for a domestic violence charity and undergoing the emotional process of fertility treatment. In her mid-thirties, Ellie has no partner, and is reviewing potential sperm donors, trying to judge their worth as decent human beings on the basis of a short written profile. She has no illusions about the gap between how men present and who they are.

Ellie is the moral heart of this novel. She keeps the family connected and ensures her brothers, Stan and Will, come to their father’s birthday. She minds Den and babysits the children of Will, whose wife has kicked him out for his refusal to give up drugs. She provides a safe place for Jackson and Lila, troubled teens fleeing a violent father. She’s a good daughter, sister and friend, and most of her effort is taken for granted, a point that isn’t ignored but could have been given more emphasis. McGee dumps the lot on her shoulders with what reads like a sense of relief. But just because Ellie can carry that weight doesn’t mean she should.

Brother Will is the opposite, the dark Sparks. A meth user, who thinks he has it all under control, Will is fighting to keep solvent the advertising film business he bought from Den. At his father’s birthday, Will announces that he wants to sell the Herne Bay property, and that he doesn’t much care what the rest of the family thinks. Will doesn’t much care for people, full stop – even his children get in his way – but he is under more pressure than his ego will admit. McGee plays it well by not making Will a total monster. Monsters we can hate without question. Those we have flashes of sympathy for are infinitely more dangerous.

Stan is the third and youngest brother. We meet him briefly as a reluctant attendee at Den’s 70th birthday, and don’t see him again until the final part. Gentle Stan has fled to a commune in Golden Bay, where until recently, he’s managed to shut out most evidence that the environment is going to hell in a plastic hand basket. Now, the tentacles of commerce are tightening, forcing Stan back to a family who, apart from his sister, Ellie, he’s never felt he could trust.

Stan is not as well developed a character as the others, and while the short trip to Golden Bay gives the novel some welcome air, it seems like Stan’s main purpose is to be the stooge for a rather good ending that will not be spoiled here. Suffice it to say there’s a rug, and McGee yoinks it out from under you.

The novel is in four parts – four seasons – and each is ostensibly told from the point of view of each of the Sparks. While McGee doesn’t want us to let old Den off the hook for being a shitty father, unfaithful husband and willing exploiter of capitalism, he does seem to want us to like him best. He certainly gives him more page-time than any of the other characters – Ellie’s part in particular feels Den-dominated – and all the humorous lines, right to the end.

Fair enough, given that McGee and Den are of similar age, and McGee has mined some of his own career and business experiences for Den’s back story. If you can’t use your own novel to get stuff off your chest, then what’s the point of the thing?

And Den is likeable enough to carry you through white old-dude narrows and into open sea, where there’s plenty to enjoy. McGee is a fine writer who isn’t afraid to let his anger out on the page, muzzled only by a blackly comedic touch. When it comes to the women, this novel perhaps could have done more, but it gets points for keeping its foot on the neck of destructive masculinity. Four decades on from Foreskin, the question remains, and it’s good to know McGee hasn’t given up trying to answer it.

Necessary Secrets, by Greg McGee (Upstart Press, $35) is available at Unity Books.