A new book called F*ck Feelings is, well, all the rage.
On its face, the volume cries out for disdain. The title, with its studied coarseness, is nakedly mercenary. The genre—self-help—practically invites ridicule. And the bloated text, which oscillates between tough love and outright fatalism, could be boiled down to Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”
There just isn’t much original material here. Are you wondering if a problem is not what happens, but your reaction to it? Marcus Aurelius got there first: “If you are distressed by anything external,” he observed, “the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”
If the issue is a false perception of reality—and isn’t that so often a plausible diagnosis?—well, this news was delivered in the middle of the last century by Albert Ellis, who emphasized unrealistic thinking when he pioneered cognitive behavioral therapy (never mind your mother or your penis; let’s look at the facts). Ellis in turn got the news from Socrates, who found ignorance (and perhaps worse yet, ignorance of one’s own ignorance) to be at the bottom of various ills. People did bad things out of ignorance about what is good, for instance, or succumbed to cowardice due to ignorance about the nature of death.
Yet lots of people who never got the memo from Socrates or Ellis can still benefit from this message, and that is where a book like F*ck Feelings establishes its usefulness. Why sneer? It should be clear by now that self-help books aren’t necessarily bad; they aren’t even new. Ben Franklin, Samuel Smiles, and Arnold Bennett wrote interesting self-help manuals long before any of us were born. People will always need advice, after all. The real question is whether the advice they receive is sound.
And the advice in F*ck Feelings isn’t half bad. Michael Bennett, a psychiatrist, and his daughter Sarah Bennett, a comedy writer, wrote the book and while it works awfully hard in places to be funny, that will likely help it connect with its hapless audience. This audience will hear things it probably already knows, yet can’t quite acknowledge. The hardheaded authors insist throughout, for example, on the essential unfairness of life. “Profanity is a source of comfort, clarity, and strength,” they write, hastening to add: “On the other hand, we don’t tolerate the reverent use of truly obscene f-words, like ‘fair.’ ”
The Bennetts may or may not be familiar with the work of Herbert Simon, who pointed out that the costliness of search (for the ideal pair of shoes, bookkeeper, or spouse) causes sensible people to accept “good enough” solutions to problems, but it’s highly unlikely that the Nobel laureate and his ideas are known to their readers. So their repeated stress on the high cost (in time, distraction, and psychic pain) of searching for the roots of difficulties, as well as their possibly non-existent solutions, is welcome. In one of many related comments, they write: “If you retrace your steps to uncover the ultimate source of your problems, you won’t usually find it.”
As well, any contemporary work that questions the primacy of feelings is okay in my book. The Bennetts are here to tell you that your emotions don’t mean you can change the many messy problems that beset you and those around you. On the contrary, maturity means that you have to spend a lot of time just sucking it up. The bottom line is that your feelings often don’t serve you particularly well, and they don’t give you any special powers over reality. In a culture that seems ever ready to defer to emotion, this is a message likely to benefit the average American (to say nothing of the average American policymaker).
Now about that title. Yes, F*ck Feelings is coarse, but even in this arena the Bennetts cover well-trod ground. Several years ago the media noticed that books with profanity-laced titles, such as Tucker Max’s Assholes Finish First, were appearing on bestseller lists. The Bennetts aren’t even first to deploy the asterisk, that coy orthographic fig leaf; at the very least, there was Justin Halpern’s Sh*t My Dad Says.
Publishing fads come and go, and this one, which reflects a culture perhaps a little too comfortable with crude language, will probably fade away like all the others (fingers crossed). Meanwhile, let’s not forget that no less than Harry Frankfurt, the estimable philosopher, published a book in 2005 called On Bullshit. He might have called it On Nonsense or On Puffery or even On Doublespeak, but I suspect a lot more people read what he had to say thanks to the title—and these people, unused to reading Frankfurt, were no doubt better off having done so. On Bullshit became a New York Times bestseller.
I don’t know how he felt about that. But as the Bennetts would quickly remind us, who cares?
The post The Latest Self-Help Advice? “F*ck Feelings” appeared first on Acculturated.