My thoughts after reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and The Defining Decade (back to back)
So the past year has been crap for 20 and 21 year-olds. It’s been pretty crap for everyone but according to Meg Jay, author of The Defining Decade, the 20s are the roadmap for the rest of your life. While living in pandemic limbo, I have been searching for some advice on how to hit the ground running once the pandemic winds down (fingers crossed it already is). In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson, blogger, Manson outlines how to define what is important for your life at any age through a 2016 lens while Jay, a licensed psychologist, recounts mistakes and regrets from her “twenty-something” clients and advises how to be proactive. While The Defining Decade is nearly a decade old, her advice was still resonating with me. Manson on the other hand felt like a long Twitter thread but a pretty good one. I’m going to go through my takeaways from these books and hopefully after reading this, you might read one yourself.
Manson’s Good Life
Once you get past the casualness of Manson, there are some good tidbits of advice, especially if you find yourself to be a “worrier” or a “crowd-pleaser.” Manson establishes early on that his book is about finding doubt and using that for growth. When you find that you are comfortable in every aspect of your life, that means you no longer are challenging yourself to grow.
Manson also talks a lot about positive versus negative experiences and how relative all of that is. We often look back at the hard experiences in our lives and find that those were the most valuable, even though they felt negative at the time (Manson, 119). Reading this book was a good exercise in self-reflection and helped me redefine what I care about.
Mason’s advice about love was raw and at the same time validating. As someone who has experienced gaslighting in a prior relationship, it was good to hear Mason put it into words that are easy to understand:
It’s not about giving a fuck about everything your partner gives a fuck about; it’s about giving a fuck about your partner regardless of the fucks he or she gives.
It’s a pretty low bar, but it’s true. If your partner is not giving you unconditional love, believing in your dreams because they believe in you, then what’s the point? And if you find that you’re totally checkout out, why are you stringing your partner along?
Ultimately, Manson’s advice felt obvious the moment you finished reading the sentence, but sometimes that’s what we need. Sometimes we need an orange book full of the f-bomb to wake up and realize we are spending way too much energy on people who don’t matter, and instead we need to refocus our priorities.
Not the Roaring ’20s
If you’re still in the mindset that your 20s are a time to be carefree, move to New York on a whim, and just go with the flow of casual hook-up culture, you clearly have not read The Defining Decade. Almost every idea of “the twenties” Jay proved to turn out the opposite of what our culture makes it out to be.
There were some sad stories of clients who got stuck in the routine of finding any job post-undergrad to pay the bills instead of building their “identity capital.” Yeah, the barista job works while you’re applying to grad school or trying to find something else, but it is easy to let those should-be-temporary gigs run for too long. Jay’s advice on early career was to use your connections, strong or weak, to find something that will be meaningful on your résumé. Later in the book, Jay pressed her clients to stick through that difficult internship because it means you are on the way to something better. Work is not as personal as it seems, and employers recognize hard work and dedication.
Reading this book coming out of a breakup, Jay validated everything I was feeling about the men in my generation, dating app culture, and the frustrations of trying to find stability in such an uncertain time of your life. Jay’s clients struggled through not clearly defining expectations upfront or not dating to what should be their standard. My philosophy on dating is that I’m trying to find my person, and anyone who is not on that same journey is wasting my time. Furthermore, if you go into dating with the intention of the relationship transitioning to marriage (if it’s the right one), then you won’t be so stressed when all of your peers are getting married in their late 20s and early 30s. Plan ahead and there won’t be an uncomfortable game of musical chairs where the last person standing ends up single.
Jay backed up her claims with evidence talking about cohabitation is not key to a future marriage or if you want kids while you can have them in your 40s, do you want to be 60 at their high school graduation? Really regardless of what science says, we only have a limited time here on earth. Jay’s most important advice was to define your timeline because a good-paying job doesn’t magically materialize in your 30s, it’s started in your 20s. Starting a family takes finding the right partner early and ensuring you both want the same things. Even when it feels like everything is out of your control, you can still choose to keep trying rather than sit back and wait for your 20s to pass you by.
Reading the Future
Obviously, no book can tell you how to live your life, and there are beautiful life stories that are the exact opposite of what is described in these books. However, if these books were to be described in one sentence, both Manson and Jay came to the same conclusion: define what you care about. If you’re feeling lost, write down your dreams and aspirations, what is making you happy and what is not, and do something about it. I hope you read one or both of these for yourself, and I’ll see you in the next post!