Reflection on Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson

               I thought this book would be more of social analysis, but I think it falls more into the self-help category. Manson talks about various dilemmas we find ourselves in but it’s hard to find a unifying theme in the book. Some things I did like, though, were his points about how happiness should not be our goal in life. Happiness is a temporary state and you can’t go through life trying to maximize your joy at all times. What is more important is fulfilling your duties to others. He also points out the difference between variety and freedom. If one person has 2 cereal options and another has 100. The person with 100 does not have more freedom, she has more variety. Freedom isn’t how many choices you have, but rather your ability to make a choice without being forced to do anything by anyone or anything else. Manson has good lessons in the book, but I would have been more interested in what he has to say about broader unhappiness in developed countries. He touches on this on a “micro” level. He discusses how variety doesn’t improve our lives and how we’ll always just look for more problems once our problems are solved, but I didn’t feel like I got any real solutions out of the book.