Mark Manson Can Eat a Dick

Or a whole bag of dicks for all I care. Choke those cocks down with a side of fries, some ketchup and a beer. Or a shot of vodka. Or whatever else works.

OK, truthfully, I have nothing against the guy, as I have never actually met him, and some of what he writes is actually rather insightful, but I did like the title and I'm in a mood, so I decided to go with it. I suppose a better lead-in might have been "Fuck Fuck Yes Or No: A Rebuttal to a Simpleton's Way of Living," but it just doesn't have the same cachet. On with the show.

Backstory: I got dumped yesterday. Or maybe friend-zoned. Not sure if that sounds better in the grand scheme of things. Whatever the fuck you want to call it, there was a girl who I was really into and who was mentioned in my previous post, and we had gone out several times. It seemed like the relationship was slowly progressing - and then it wasn't. The dumping occurred via text message¹ and was prefaced with her asking me whether or not I'd ever read Manson's article Fuck Yes Or No.² I'm sure you can see immediately where this is going and also why I'd like to see Mr. Manson puking from peckishness over a pallet of phalluses. However, the point of this post is not to discuss the dumping or how I feel about it or any of that - maybe that will be the subject of another entry one of these days, or maybe it won't, as that is one introspective rabbit hole that I'm not sure I am ready to go into without a holy hand grenade - no, dear nonexistent reader, the point of this post is to examine the philosophy of "Fuck Yes Or No" (hereafter referred to as FYON) in a bit more detail and eviscerate it as yet another by-product of the self-indulgent instant-gratification bullshit society that we live in today where we are quick to throw people by the wayside if they don't immediately live up to our nigh-impossible standards.

Lest you be confused, note that modulo the first footnote, I'm not bitter towards 3M or even angry at her (again, modulo the first footnote), despite the polemical tone of this post. No, really, I'm not. I don't even know if I'm hurt, but that's rabbit-hole territory for another day. Fact is, I apply something similar to FYON when I do job interviews.³ I'm tired of coworkers that just inspire me to say "meh" when I want to work with people, even if just a handful of them, who are fucking brilliant and who are deserving of my respect because they know all kinds of cool shit that I don't about things that I'm interested in, or any of a whole bunch of other reasons. We've made, IMO, too many hiring compromises and gotten more than our share of average performers because we've got empty seats that need some butts in them rather than holding out for candidates that are going to, in the words of Amazon, raise the bar. Some of my colleagues are great. Call me elitist for wanting more like them. But I digress, as this is not a post about my workplace, either.

To quote Manson, "The Law of 'Fuck Yes or No' states that when you want to get involved with someone new, in whatever capacity, they must inspire you to say 'Fuck Yes' in order for you to proceed with them." There is a converse to this whereby they also have to say "Fuck Yes" in order for things to proceed. The upshot here is that both parties are supposed to be simultaneously excited about something (the same something, mind you) such that the relationship moves forward in some way, whether that be fucking (literally) or along some other dimension, and absent this mutual excitation, it's adios, motherfucker, time to peace out, or at a minimum, give up whatever hope you might have had for whatever aspect of the relationship is lacking in bidirectional affirmative fuckitude.

Like most oversimplified and so-called "rules of life", regardless of how they are packaged and presented, this sounds great, plays well to the unwashed masses, and looks oh-so-cool on a sticker, but it also reflects an obvious lack of understanding of the depths of human experience, which I guess should be unsurprising given that it was cooked up out of the mind of a millennial.⁴ Sorry, not sorry, to my millennial friends, but too many members of your generation who suffer from what I could only wish would be an acutely-terminal rather than chronic case of rectal-cranial inversion give those of you who don't suck a bad reputation.

To his gluttonous Glad-bag knob-gobbling credit, Manson is self-aware enough to recognize that some people (you know, those people...) might call FYON idealistic, but this is immediately brushed off as he offers 5 ways in which following this tripe is supposed to actually make your dating life simpler, damn the torpedoes - because, y'know, lists make for great click-bait. Oddly enough, later in the article - i.e., at the end, which is several paragraphs past the attention-span of your average Internet dweller these days - he tries to do some post-sensationalist token damage control by saying that it's possible to be "Fuck Yes" about things that aren't typically equated with love at first sight or any of that infatuation mumbo-jumbo, like being "Fuck Yes" about giving something more time or trying to work through issues or even just going on a second date. Too late. Any hope for critical thinking has already been nuked by low-orbit ion cannon.

OK, OK, so far all I've done is rant and piss and moan and make a few assorted dick references derived from an old Louis CK routine (I seem to recall that he's on some shit-list somewhere for some kind of sexual misconduct, the details of which I think I knew at one point but have since forgotten, but that doesn't mean his act didn't have some seriously funny bits - this could be yet another post that I will never find the time to write) so let's get to the real question: why should FYON STFU?

If you haven't figured that out by now, you haven't really been paying attention, but here it is one more time. I completely agree with the notion that the best relationships are those where both parties are full-on excited about being with each other. However, where FYON implodes into the black hole of asininity is that it ignores the obvious fact that two people who might very well reach mutual affirmative fuckitude do not necessarily move in that direction at the same velocity. For Manson, this seems to be an immediate cause for being transitioned to the discard pile. Not there yet? Too bad, asshole, yer out! Yet for any thoughtful human, or even a blackbird, ambiguity and uncertainty are unavoidable elements of life, which sometimes asks of us that we have a little more patience than your typical whiny-ass Adderall-addled ferret-like millennial (ooh, shiny!)⁵ is able to muster.

To be clear, I am not advocating that people stay in relationships of any form which have no hope of moving past wherever they are into whatever the parties hope or want them to be. There is no reason to go on date #10 with somebody that you've decided after date #2 is absolutely beyond help, or doesn't like your cat, or whatever. When you want The Fonz but what you have is Steve Urkel (I don't know, maybe you want Christian Grey from 50 Shades of Boring but instead you've got the eponymous subject of a Eurhythmics song⁶, but my point is the same), well, you just can't get there from here. However, if it's not a "Fuck Yes" after date #1 but it is a "Hmm... Maybe" - then that is what date #2 might be for. You aren't always going to know right away if something is a "Fuck Yes" - and to believe otherwise is a demonstration of unbridled hubris which should get your ass fried by a lightning bolt straight out of Mount Olympus. If something isn't an outright "Fuck No" - sometimes the best course of action is to gather more data rather than rush to judgment like some bird-brained seagulls I know that like to hang out on the walls of bars.⁷ You might be surprised. Then again, you might not, and you might go on that second date and wonder why the fuck you ever listened to a blackbird in the first place, because you're never going to get those hours of your life back. That's the risk you take - but consider the reward.

Put another way, expecting simultaneous mutual affirmative fuckitude is just another way to view infatuation, burning bright and burning out and never developing into something sustainable. Here is a brief etymology lesson for those of you who were not scholars of a dead language in high school like yours truly. The word infatuation is derived from the Latin fatuus, which quite literally means stupid. That's right, kids, infatuation is the process of becoming stupid over someone. Personally, I think this world already has a glut of stupid and does not need any more.  Yet that's a core element of FYON.  It's a demand that things happen on your time and to your exacting specification without any acceptance of the other person's reality. It's a lack of respect for where the other person is at, despite Manson's fallacious claim to the contrary. Maybe you're not at "Fuck Yes" right now, but you suspect the other person is, and you're only at "Hmm, Maybe." Manson would have you fold like a tortilla and collapse faster than the French in pretty much every armed conflict in the 20th century. Do you really want to be associated with freedom fries? Do you just throw in the towel like the manager of some outmatched boxer in the ring with Tyson (think early Iron Mike, not I'm-on-the-Zoloft-to-keep-from-killing-y'all Tyson), or do you give it one (or two, or however many you need to make a legitimate determination) more shot to see if that maybe can evolve or if it's just an emotional quagmire (or worse)? As much as I think most people are not worth the carbon that they are printed from, I am also going to say that most people deserve better than the shit they get from others in the dating and relationship department (and just in general, much of the time).

Again, I am not advocating for dragging on a situation that is hopeless. That's not my point at all. My point is that first impressions are often wrong, and sometimes a situation which looks questionable or suspect can end up being the most exquisite success, but getting there requires more effort than just some pathetic reduction of human experience down to a pithy saying that sells more books.

Consider the following hypothetical situation. You're a young dude or dudette, and you're hanging out with a couple of your friends, and you meet someone who is a friend of one of your friends that happens to be of your preferred gender and sexual persuasion. The four of you at some point thereafter go out to a concert from a band that y'all like, and when the band plays a song that you like, you ask this person to dance. You get a rather indignant "no" in reply and the rest of the evening is more than a bit awkward. Sounds a lot like a "fuck no," doesn't it? Now suppose that future you shows up and says "hey, guess what - a few years from now, you and that person who just kicked you in the figurative gonads are going to fall in love, eventually get married, and have a relationship spanning multiple decades." Putting aside the wibbley-wobbley timey-wimey impossibility of this actually happening, what would be your most likely reaction to future you? Probably something like, "Take off, hoser - and stop huffing that paint thinner!" Admit it, there's no way you'd believe some crackpot story like that.

Yet that's exactly what happened (minus the visit from future blackbird, as we have not yet mastered time travel). What has been far and away my longest, best, deepest, and most successful relationship during my time on this rock so far did not reach any mutual affirmative fuckitude status for YEARS. Quite literally. And even though we aren't "together" in any romantic sense of the word anymore, she's one of the few people that I actually believe would be there for me when the zombie apocalypse comes, even if just to crack jokes about bluebird days and make me laugh while my brains are served up for brunch.⁸

And therein lies the other problem with FYON. While Manson doesn't explicitly say that any or all noes are final answers, he certainly hints at it rather loudly. For someone who, in another article, readily admits that he doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about, it is rather disingenuous to offer advice that carries with it the implication of such finality when a no is reached. Life is not always that simple. But hey, I guess a guy has to write a bunch of contradictory shit to be able to have more shit to write about so that he can afford that bag of dicks. Fuck, I bought his book a month or two ago, so maybe I even helped him to have a ball. </rimshot> At least I am doing this shit for free and for an audience of exactly nobody except myself and you unlucky bastards that stumble upon these hallowed pages.

As a species we have figured out that the reductionist worldview alone does not work. Newtonian mechanics cannot describe the universe at a quantum level. Reality is more complicated than 12 Rules of Life, 10 Commandments, or 3 Laws of Robotics, and I am sorry to all of you out there who lack the computational capacity in that ol' noggin or the intestinal fortitude to deal with the messy nature of existence. Yeah, being a human (or a blackbird) is hard shit, and sometimes all we want is an easy map to follow or a simple way to explain things that go wrong when we least expect it. That's not how this game works, despite the billion-dollar self-help industry that tries to tell us otherwise for the low, low price of $19.99 (but wait, there's more!) ... If life didn't suck donkey balls from time to time and defy all attempts at oversimplification and explanation, it would never be filled with ecstatic wonder. I don't like donkey balls any more than the next non-donkey, but that's the price to be paid for crystal castles and wings of elation. Give me a game of Russian roulette in the antechamber of infinity. Take your "Fuck Yes Or No" and fuck it right in the ear. Fuck yes.

Mark Manson, go eat a bag of dicks.

1. Why the fuck do people think this shit is acceptable - especially people in my age range who I keep holding out hope will know better and be better rather than doing this convenient high school cop-out-fear-of-confrontation-weak-ass-pansy shit. Grow a pair and look the person in the eye when you're kicking them in the gonads. I'm 43 fucking years old, and I've been dumped before. I'm a big boy, I can handle it. What I truly despise, though, is a lack of basic courtesy and respect. If I am angry / bitter / whatever about anything with respect to this whole situation, it is this, right here. Didn't you ever learn that how you say something is often more important than what you say? Bad news delivered with a human connection is still better than bad news delivered by AT&T. I broke up with someone earlier this year, and I did it in person - and yeah, it fucking sucked, but I did it in person because I legitimately cared about her (we are still friends, too) and I didn't want some impersonal tiny glowing screen implying inadequacy on her part or any of a million other things that she might have assumed due to the nature of the medium. WTF!? ZOMG?!
2. https://markmanson.net/fuck-yes
3. I also apply it to a certain extent with respect to new people in my life, similarly to what Manson is actually suggesting, which you could say makes me something of a hypocrite. However, having spent the better part of the wee hours of the morning thinking about it and writing this post, I am admitting that this was a mistake (outside of the work environment) on my part. Also, in the past I've never applied his principle to dating with quite the same draconian force when a particular situation has been indeterminate - if something is a no, then it's a no - but if something is a maybe (we are not speaking of issues of consent here, we are speaking of whether or not date #1 will have a successor), that's not actually a no until it becomes a no.
4. https://markmanson.net/about
5. I am demeaning the fuck out of millennials here, because Manson himself is 33 and squarely in that millennial camp based on footnote 4, but the fact is that this kind of zero-attention-span instant-gratification fast food lifestyle is an affectation of virtually every age group in the modern world. Don't feel unfairly singled-out, young'uns. The old farts are shortsighted impatient shitbirds, too, and I'm not immune to it myself.
6. Don't mess with the missionary man....
7. For the record, 3M and I went out 8 times, although the last two are difficult to characterize as "dates." I will say that I wish that a greater number of our encounters would have afforded more opportunities to talk and get to know each other as opposed to being primarily activity-based, but that's irrelevant now. I'm not calling her out for being too quick to reach the conclusion of insufficient affirmative fuckitude - shit happens, despite what Samuel L. Jackson might say about the necessity of time and effort - and as I said, this is not really a post about my naturalization as the newest citizen of Dumpsville.
8. It is interesting how few people I would actually call in a figurative (or literal?) zombie apocalypse, and also how few people I think would actually show up. Now compare that to the number of people who might call me in the event of said Armageddon and for whom I would show up and bring my shotgun. As I said to one of my friends the other night, I am really good as helping other people with their shit. I am usually OK at handling my own shit. I fail miserably at knowing when the pile is too large for me to deal with on my own and asking for help. We can only save the world when we save ourselves first.