Bestselling author Mark Manson reveals how to not sweat the small stuff

If you ever feel overwhelmed by the amount of hatred and anger on the internet, you may want to look to bestselling author Mark Manson — the man who has perfected the art of what he calls “pessimistic self-help.”

The author of “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a ****: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life,” appeared Wednesday night at 8 p.m. at Seattle’s Neptune Theatre. He has just released a third book that could serve as an elixir for everyone weary of social media squabbles — “Everything is ****ed: A Book about Hope.”

“It’s a book about values, about what are you choosing to make important in your life, and how are you of what you’re making important,” he told KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson. “But that’s not a fun sexy topic — so if you put the f-word on the title, you trick millions of people into thinking about it.”

In an era where we are “constantly bombarded with information” online, Manson said, it’s hard to focus on what matters most to us and shut out the rest. We should identify the things we care about and pursue them, without running ourselves emotionally, mentally, and physically ragged by caring too much about too many things.

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“Our brains have a certain amount of bandwidth, and if you exceed that bandwidth, they freak out, they get anxious … but if you don’t use that bandwidth, you’re not living,” he said. “So the goal is to kind of max out your own personal bandwidth — pick a handful of things that you can dedicate your life to, that you can fill up your days, doing something [in which] you feel like your time is being spent valuably.”

This is a lifelong effort, he said, since our values may change as we get older.

Frustrations of social media

Knowing what to invest energy in caring about and what to ignore has only gotten harder in a time when viral social media posts, click-bait, fake headlines, doxxing, and vicious political partisanship dominate every screen that we look at.

At the beginning of the internet age, Manson said, “there was so much optimism,” as everyone looked to the World Wide Web as a way to reach across cultural and geographical boundaries to unite vastly different people.

“I think what’s happened the last five years is, we did connect the world — and everybody is awful,” he said.

Before he was an author, Manson was a blogger, caught up in the excitement of those optimistic internet days of the 2000s.

“Initially, social media was a really amazing tool for people to connect with one another,” he said. “I think what’s happened is it’s scaled to such a degree, it has all these negative side effects that we didn’t really think about when we built these platforms.”

It was one day when he used blogging as a kind of therapy to deal with his anger at other people’s behavior that the idea for his first book was born.

“I was in kind of a cranky mood, and when I get cranky, I get kind of sarcastic and satirical,” he said. “So I was like, ‘You know what, I’m going to write a satirical article, and it’s going to be the most vulgar, disgusting thing anybody has ever read, but it’s also going to have amazing life advice.'”

He emptied his thoughts into a blog post that was shared over a million times. Manson turned the post into an entire self-help book, accompanied with plenty of psychology and wry humor.

“I’ve spent a lot of time with psychological research, and if you dig into the research, you just realize that — people suck, man,” he laughed. “Like, we’re all pretty awful … let’s just talk about being less awful.”

He formulates his ideas from philosophies from every era of history and religions from around the world.

“What happens each generation is that [ideas] get repackaged in new forms and communicated in new ways,” he said. “And so I very much see myself as a packager — I didn’t invent this stuff.”

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