Michael Bennett (12)

Picked up this book because of the irreverent title and iconic cover, and it's a keeper.

The book is ultimately a self-help book, although it's idea of helping is more about getting you to accept that life will never be the perfect thing that you wished for, and more importantly how to _cope_ with life's imperfections and the stuff you'll never really get away from while also giving you practical advice on how to deal with the stuff you could get away from.

I wish this book had been out while I was still a young 20-something, wondering if I was cynical because I couldn't find the right practice to believe in or be devoted enough to to turn my entire life around into something 100% awesome. This book confirms a lot of my feelings about things (which lead to me nodding "yeah, yeah, obviously" while reading it but I'm sure I'll need to pick it off my shelf over and over for reality checks.

I really enjoyed the chapters on depression/anxiety because they were incredibly relevant to me. AFAICT the way they described depression/anxiety seemed reasonable, and the way they handled it as something that will _never really go away_ was incredibly useful as a framework to rotate my life around ... it's something I'll have to deal with and manage, never cure.
The therapy section is incredibly surface-level but it does lay out a great mapping of possibilities, as well as a important reminder of how would should approach looking for therapy that's grounded and will limit the temptation of throwing money after money into an unmeasurable success metric.

I was slightly less impressed with the chapters on love and communication, not because they weren't equally practical but because they tended to mirror the status quo when it came to typical cis heterosexual norms. I think it did a good job being clear that the "men are from mars, women are from venus" is bullshit, but the same pragmatic cynicism that permeates the rest of the book also means that the book accepts language that implies that women and men deal with relationships in a heavily gendered way. It kind of sucks for example that women tend to be pigeonholed into the manic pixie dream girl or "crazy bitch" role, and that men tend to be notoriously bad at dealing with intimacy and emotion, but while I don't think the book demands this is something inherent to gender, it views itself as helping people within that framework instead of challenging it (which was never part of the authors' scope, but it's unfortunate given how much the crappiness of relationships is as much social expectations as it is people's failings.)

Each chapter has a very clear structure, text followed by suggested self-written letters followed by a joke matrix of utopian but completely impractical outcomes and solutions. It got boring after a while and seemed repetitive, but for my favourite chapters I chose to read them and identified with the imagined letter-writers so I will admit that for the areas I'm still working out in my own life, they were poignant even while having a sort of silly humourist column feel about them.


If you don't feel your life is perfect and you don't already know the exact fix, I'd highly recommend reading this book and keeping it around if you're the kind to stress yourself out about life's problems. Even if you feel everything can be solved by the simple use of X, I recommend having a copy anyway since since it's a great reality check. I wish everyone I knew still in their teens and 20s would read it, but I suspect they're not yet old and crotchety and they might as well appreciate reading the book when they're ready to appreciate it and have lost the energy for devoting one's whole life towards that all-encompassing solution which will solve everything :D

I assume must people don't need to read every chapter in this book, but I assume most people will really benefit from at least one chapter.… (más)