This book, a lifestyle/mindset/worldview/self-help/whatever book by Sarah Knight, is much less counter-cultural and irreverent than it pretends to be. I bought it literally because I'd had a weird day and the title made me laugh, but then once I started reading it, I realised there was more subtlety to her lifestyle/mindset/worldview/whatever (let's just call this a 'mode') of Not Giving A Fuck* [NGAF] than I'd presumed.
Rather than completely sacking off everything that you don't unquestionably want to do (I call this amoral extreme-end of NGAF the Zero Fucks Given [ZFG] mode), successful NGAF is about 'budgeting' the fucks you give to maximise personal happiness - it's more of a form of mental decluttering.** This budget operates by scrutinising demands, real or perceived, on your time, energy and money, and assessing which of these are actually worthwhile given their impact on your happiness. Things which genuinely do improve your life, or upon which you're dependent in some reasonable way, it's worth giving a fuck about: things which you simply do out of social/cultural/economic obligation, if reasonably avoidable, go ahead and cease giving that fuck. A big part of this is detaching yourself from caring too much what other people think of you and your choices. She is careful to stress that adopting NGAF as a mode shouldn't turn you into an asshole - determining whether it is someone's feelings or someone's opinion 'obligating' you to give a particular fuck is a good way of negotiating situations where you can legitimately give fewer fucks without hurting someone (even if you might upset them a little bit, but that's their fault for thinking something they give a fuck about is of universal value). I'm not entirely convinced that she's solved this Not Being An Asshole problem, as I'll discuss shortly, but she's definitely worked out a fairly reliable model for organising fuck-giving decisions (there's even a fucking flowchart).
Having established this framework, Sarah then walks us through Things, Work, Friends, Acquaintances & Strangers, and Family, to help us determine which fucks to decide if we give or not - these sections are accompanied by listing exercises (which I've not done yet as I gave more of a fuck about finishing the book*** than actually performing NGAF-style decluttering). Once we've decided what we give a fuck about, she then provides some helpful pointers about how we actively stop giving particular fucks (without being a dick about it); these methods revolve around honestly and politely explaining yourself, and actually she gives some really helpful pointers. The whole book is littered with examples as well. Finally, she revisits our NGAF-enlightened life, decluttered of unwanted fucks, and shows us how much better for body, mind and soul it can be. Great.
For all the efficacy of NGAF as a mode, I had two main problems with this book. Firstly, it's a mode very much tailored to highly-autonomous individuals - people without social, cultural, or economic disadvantages holding them back from deciding exactly what they want to give fucks about. The book's target market is almost definitely American middle-class misanthropes (every single example given reeks of this: oh no, an acquaintance's weekend wedding in Europe! oh no, a skiing holiday with the inlaws! oh no, a colleague's poetry recital!), but something as generalistic as a mode should be one that at least works for people with varying degrees of privilege. People who are constrained by social, cultural, economic, or any other kind of disadvantage often simply don't have the freedom to not give fucks about certain things that someone with more autonomy in how they allocate their time, energy and money would readily stop giving a fuck about. That's not to say I expect a mode to completely solve all inequalities of individual capabilities - that's fucking absurd. However, NGAF does clearly work better the more privileged you are, but unfortunately so does life in general in many ways (like, that is the nature of privilege), so maybe this isn't a problem with the book at all and I'm just upset about injustice. Probably. I often am. Who gives a fuck.
Secondly, I had a bigger and more substantive objection to NGAF as a mode. I think it lies at too much risk of turning into ZFG - i.e. a mode where no fucks are given about anything that is not of direct self-determined desirability to an agent. Although Sarah Knight has tried build a consistent safeguard against this into her methods, I'm not convinced they'd stand the test of real people. Let's use Rick as an example. Rick's catchphrase is literally "I don't give a fuck"**** - he's narcissistic, nihilistic, basically just a nobhead. Now, he's also fictional, but he represents the selfish core of all human agency, which is especially strong in highly-individualistic neoliberal societies like modern Britain and America. Empowering neoliberal nihilistic narcissistic nobheads with the sense that their happiness is the top priority of any exercise of their agency isn't spiritually healthy for society - you don't have to think too hard once you start NGAF to realise that the constraints of not hurting other people or their feelings aren't objective boundaries, and you may as well just maximise your own happiness-oriented agency and give zero fucks. If part of NGAF's foundation is detaching yourself from what other people think, where does the requirement to not be a dick come from? If you can live with yourself being a dick, surely other people's opinion doesn't matter, and the only reason you'd need to mitigate your dickishness in any ways to any people is because you've worked out you get more from maintaining a relationship in a particular way than you would by letting your ZFGness taint it. Basically, I believe that people are naturally inclined to be as selfish as they can reasonably get away with unless hooked onto a positive love-oriented mode,***** but NGAF is the opposite of love-oriented - it's self-fulfilment-oriented, and so will naturally tend towards decaying into ZFG - people will become Ricks (apart from not elderly alcoholic genius scientist terrorist inventors: at least not in all cases. Lots of people might just not be very smooth at the ZFG method and become this guy).
So, this book makes some interesting recommendations about how to mentally declutter, but I think given our sociocultural context of rampant individualism, we should be wary in accepting modes of life like NGAF - it will only further fragment communities, widen inequalities, perpetuate injustices, and loads of other things that I give lots of fucks about.
* I was going to censor this post but I decided that since nobody reads this blog anyway it would be a waste of a fuck if I worried about offending someone. I censored the 'fuck' in the post's title because she censors the 'fuck' in the actual title of the book - I guess you can't have the word 'fuck' proudly displayed on public bookshop shelves or something. Also, it's 2016 - how are you not completely desensitised to the word 'fuck' yet? I have been since the age of twelve or so (unless around particularly sheltered company, where conformity instincts kick in and I feign a little flinch if Rude Words are said). If you have a problem with this word, Sarah Knight's book is probably not for you. I didn't count but I'm pretty sure there's over a thousand fucks included in its wordcount - simply because the 'fuck' is the key concept to her system of ideas and practices, so why the fuck wouldn't she fucking mention fucks a lot? (I've used 42 in this post. Just did a search.)
** Sarah Knight does in fact attribute the book's inspiration (and title) to a Japanese bestseller, Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up - this book is basically an extension of those principles into what you give fucks about.
*** I'd planned on breezing through it and then writing a one-sentence blog post about it, simply stating that in the spirit of the book I wasn't giving a fuck about this particular post, but I actually had some pretty interesting thoughts about this book and the NGAF method, so here you fucking go.
**** Okay, so he has several. Wubba-lubba-dub-dub, whatever, I don't give a fuck.
***** Yeh, five is definitely too many asterisks. I've already opened tabs for the links I was going to use to expand on this point though, so I'll type up the fucking footnote anyway. Humans are social animals by nature, highly community-dependent and enmeshed in complex layers of obligations: I believe this is due to our being made in the image of a God who is primarily relational and exists as love. This means social systems of obligation, i.e. things we're made to give a fuck about, can't be reduced to individual decisions - some things are required for communal cohesion, for effective societies, for justice - and responding to these complex structures of obligation in a way that truly reflects our nature as beings made to love and be loved is bigger than simply giving moral fucks, as all fucks which we do or don't give reflect part of our volition to work for collective good or for our own. And that means non-individualism should be fundamental at the individual level. (Didn't know which words to use as the link for this but it's also somewhat relevant.)
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