Mark Manson’s analysis of how to be happy asserts that “the desire for more positive experiences is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.” (p9) To support this paradox, he cites the philosopher Alan Watts -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts - , famous for popularising Western Buddhist psychotherapy in the 1960s. Watts explained happiness in terms of personal satisfaction, recognising that we can't get satisfaction.
This leads to the sage advice from Yoda, “Don’t Try”, recognising the psychology of flow, that conscious thought about an objective harms our ability to achieve it, that instead we must get into the zone of being rather than reflection on being.
All this looks to be squarely aimed at Kim Kardashian and her acolytes, as false prophets who preach a delusional path to happiness based entirely on the assumption that appearance is reality. Popular culture seeks to cultivate instinctive responses of envy and pleasure while excluding contemplative virtues of equanimity and understanding. The Buddha taught that such popular instincts are the primary cause of suffering, and that enlightenment can rise above the suffering of the world into a perspective of bliss and love and joy through a meditative detachment from sensory pleasure and desire.
To my mind this raises tensions between personal coping, social responsibility and transforming the world. If we believe that worrying about what other people think does not matter, we do risk veering off into an unaccountable and delusional personal space where we ignore the need to listen to and respect the perspectives of others. Saying you could not care less about what other people think is a recipe for isolation and depression and failure. Fretting about appearance and reputation is often central to worldly success, but such fretting can easily take over from an ability to understand reality.
This all leads to some central messages from Christianity. According to the Bible, Jesus spent forty days in the desert, on a total fast in order to focus his attention on problems of temptation and vision. The church commemorates that fast each year in Lent, the forty days before Easter. At the end of this long fast, Jesus tells the devil that he does not give a fuck about political power, personal reputation or performing miracles to impress people. Instead, his focus is entirely on the long game of planetary transformation, understanding what the real problems of the world are and how they can be fixed.
The theoretical distinction that Jesus is raising here is between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of the World. Jesus says we should care totally about the Kingdom of God, understood as a transformed future vision of what our world could become if we focused properly on moral values. By contrast, the Kingdom of the World is in a fallen and corrupted state of depravity, preaching seductive Satanic lies. It is essential to detach from the false and delusional values of society in order to concentrate on articulating a sense of the possibility of change, how humanity can evolve into a state of grace, with the goals of universal love and flourishing. The subtle art of not giving a fuck requires the ability to distinguish what is durable from what is fleeting, to care about what is lasting while ignoring what does not really matter.
These issues were hinted at in the famous Buddhist song "
I Can't Get No Satisfaction", where the delusions of advertising are critiqued.