(2018-03-03) Manson How To Grow The Fuck Up A Guide To Humans

Mark Manson: How to Grow the Fuck Up: A Guide to Humans (Grow Up, Self-Help)

there’s still a weakness in this adolescent approach to life. Everything is seen as a trade-off. Older children and adolescents (and a shocking number of adults) approach life as an endless series of bargains

Nothing is done for its own sake. Everything is a calculated trade-off, usually made out of fear of the negative repercussions.

they are essentially saying, “Show me the rules of the game (Game Rule) I have to play; and I’ll play it.” Not realizing that it’s the fact that they think there are rules to happiness that’s actually preventing them from being happy.

Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake

Now, I know what you’re saying, “Geez Mark, by your definition, most of the people walking around in the world are shit-brained adolescents, or worse, a bunch of over-sized children.” Well… yeah. Have you talked to any humans lately? By and large, they kind of suck

It’s probably an overstatement to say that Marilyn Manson saved my life. But he might have saved my maturity.

It was he who first suggested that I get to decide what is cool and not cool

There’s a reason he shocked people with his intelligent interviews as much as he did for his stage antics. That’s because there was always a message beneath his madness: that you don’t have to buy into the transactional game if you don’t want to. You are always free to choose.

You must sit and think critically about yourself and about what you’ve chosen to care about, not through word, but through deed.

Modern democracy was basically invented under the assumption that the average human being is a selfish delusional piece of shit

There’s only one way to threaten a democratic system: by demanding one’s own desires and pleasures are more important than anyone else’s. That is, by being childish. This is what extremists are: childish. They’re a bunch of fucking babies. Because extremists are intractable and impossible to bargain with, extremists are, by definition, childish.

Extremism, on both the right and the left, has undeniably risen in the past few decades. There are likely many complicated and overlapping reasons for this. But I’ll throw out one idea: that the maturity of the voting population is deteriorating. American culture is based on the indulgence of pleasure and avoidance of pain. American consumerism has become so good at indulging these childish impulses that much of the population has come to see them as rights

The problem is that the media (MSM) (again, both on the right and the left) has discovered that reinforcing the childish wishes of extremists on each side is good for business.

How to Grow Up

Step 1 – Fail

Before you can move on and learn from these flawed value systems, you must experience the pain of them failing. That means not denying that they are failing. That means not avoiding the pain of that failure

Step 2 – Skin in the game.

The problem is not you. The problem is what you’re choosing to value, how you’re choosing to see the world and the way in which it operates.

Recognizing this truth is what gently shoves your value-system into a more mature bargaining/transactional level.

You can’t skip stages.

You can’t go from a child to an adult without being an adolescent in between. People stuck at compulsion need to first learn to think of things in transactional terms

Step 3 – Be Willing to Die for Something.

The adolescent is scared to death of rejection or failure. To them, to fail or be rejected is a sort of death because everything they want from the world — all meaning, all purpose — will be deprived of them.

It’s this willingness to die that leads to adulthood.


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