Reason for Living Newsletter No. 2 | The Giant Mansion Exercise
Reviewed in this issue: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
Issue No. 2, 04 April 2024
Welcome to the Reason for Living newsletter!
In this issue:
Feature Article: The Giant Mansion Exercise
Book Review: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
From the Archive: Fostering Curiosity to Reach Your Potential
Feature Article: The Giant Mansion Exercise
If you were a multimillionaire, lived in your own private mansion, and never had to work for money again, what would you do with your life?
In Chapter 5 of Reason for Living, I recommend thinking about this question, which I call the Giant Mansion Exercise, as the first step in working out what your deepest values might be—the things that matter so much to you that you’d do them even if you didn’t need to earn money.
While doing the exercise, it’s important to imagine a normal day after you’ve become accustomed to being wealthy. You might be tempted to imagine things you don’t have time for right now, such as sleeping in and watching too much TV, but the novelty of those would soon wear off. Think about what you would choose to do every day to give your life meaning and purpose.
To help you do this, I will now share some of my own thinking on what I might do in that situation:
Writing
I would spend a great deal of my free time writing—whether fiction or nonfiction books, TV/film scripts, or articles. Writing gives me the chance to explore a wide array of interesting subjects and get the satisfaction of producing my own original product at the end of it. I love the process of creating a product and I love the flow state I’m able to achieve when I can dedicate myself to writing without having to worry about other distractions.
Outdoors
Physical exercise is as important for your survival and flourishing as mental exercise. Fortunately for me, exploring places and traveling are some of my favorite pastimes. Weather permitting, I would take walks every day and travel somewhere interesting every week or two. I would also keep a gym in my home for body strength workouts.
Reading/Watching
Good films and TV aren’t just entertainment for me—they fascinate me as an art form. I love stories that explore interesting moral and philosophical themes, and I love visually and technically impressive productions. I would definitely spend some time consuming thought-provoking books, TV, and film most days, but I would only permit myself to do a little in the mornings and make the rest contingent on getting some productive writing done earlier in the day. I would also have a personal library in my house so I could have easy access to a wide range of knowledge in an environment conducive to concentrated learning and reflection.
Hobbies
The main point of the Giant Mansion Exercise is to identify the passion you love so much that you’d do it without needing to be paid. For me, that’s writing, but I have other hobbies too. I love railways and train travel, so I would spend a couple of days each month visiting or volunteering at railway museums. I love astronomy, so I would stargaze when the evenings are clear enough and do a little citizen science on Backyard Worlds on other nights. Beyond that, I would need to think very carefully about how much time I could afford to give up for my various smaller hobbies and passions, considering the opportunity cost compared to using that time to do productive writing.
***
Now you’ve joined me for my Giant Mansion Exercise, what about yours? Don’t feel you have to use the same structure I did. Just consider what would give you meaning and write it down—you can organize it by priority afterwards.
This is one small part of the process of identifying and achieving your values. I will share other stages in upcoming newsletters, courses, and events, and all of this will be covered in much more detail in the Reason for Living book.
Book Review: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
How much of your time do you spend thinking about things that, in the long run, aren’t really that important?
Despite what its provocative title might suggest, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is not a book about letting go of all care and concern for anything. Rather, as author Mark Manson makes clear, it is about identifying the things in life that are really worth caring about. We only have a limited number of “f*cks” to give, he argues, and we need to be careful about how we use them.
The most laudable part of the book is its emphasis on finding and focusing on your core values and primary purpose. Too often, Manson observes, we pour our effort into bad values, such as obtaining popularity and achieving hedonistic “highs,” rather than focusing on good values.
He defines good values as ones that are “reality-based, socially constructive, and immediate and controllable,” whereas bad values are “superstitious, socially destructive, and not immediate or controllable.” In making this distinction, Manson captures the vitally important points that your values should be a) reality-based and b) practically achievable. Unfortunately, his focus on being “socially constructive” means that he encourages readers to define their values based on usefulness to others rather than to themselves. This begs the question of why the needs of others are a reality-based standard when your own needs aren’t. Although he’s right to identify that evaluating yourself in terms of others’ opinions of you is destructive, he misses the point that the proper alternative to this is not switching to your usefulness to others—which still leads you to value yourself only through others’ eyes—but rather defining values according to their importance to your own life, using reason.
This is a symptom of the book’s major problem: It pushes readers away from introspecting about and pursuing their own first-handed goals and principles. Manson argues that you should not want to achieve greatness, pursue happiness, or even spend time working out “who you are” on a deep level. “Greatness is an illusion,” he states, and we should simply accept and learn to enjoy mundane life rather than try to achieve great things. Not only does this discourage readers from achieving amazing things to take pride in, it also presents a false alternative. It’s perfectly possible to accept and enjoy ordinary life while also pursuing greatness. Further, the fact that mundane life is only as comfortable, enjoyable, and long-lasting as it can be today because so many people in the past pursued greatness in such fields as industry, medicine, agriculture, and the arts. More fundamentally, Manson is effectively arguing for the abandonment of the self, which explains his focus on choosing values that are “socially constructive.”
Manson similarly argues against holding any firm convictions, claiming that “beliefs are arbitrary” and that certainty is an illusion. He rightly reminds readers that certainty about unfounded beliefs can motivate people to do horrific things—consider how certain religious terrorists are about their moral convictions—but he makes an error in assuming that this means you should avoid all certainty. The fundamental factor he overlooks is evidence. If there is good evidence for something, that is cause to be certain about it. If there isn’t (or there’s evidence against it), that’s cause to doubt it.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is a good example of a book that starts out with an honorable goal—getting people away from wasting their time on bad values—but fails to provide a good alternative because the author doesn’t bring reason into the equation. There are three fundamental ways you can decide how to act: faith (relying on divine/mystical inspiration), subjectivism (following your whims or those of the group), or reason (following evidence using logic). Sadly, Manson, like many who rightly reject a faith-based approach, overlooks reason and resorts to subjectivism and skepticism as the only alternative.
From the Archive: Fostering Curiosity to Reach Your Potential
The great science popularizer Carl Sagan once made this powerful observation about the state of modern education:
[First-grade] children are natural-born scientists. . . They're curious, intellectually vigorous. Provocative and insightful questions bubble out of them. They exhibit enormous enthusiasm. . . . But when I talk to high school seniors, I find something different. They memorize 'facts'. By and large, though, the joy of discovery, the life behind those facts has gone out of them. . . . Something has happened between first and twelfth grade. Those few who remain interested are vilified as nerds or geeks or grinds.
Childhood curiosity is a wonderful thing, and it’s a crying shame that the vast majority of adults lose that sense of wonder about the world around them. Those of us who retain it treasure it in others—those few people who understand the way we look at the world. One of those people is my wife—we both identify curiosity as one of the values we encourage and treasure in each other—and a few years ago she wrote an excellent article on the importance of cultivating curiosity if we want to live flourishing lives in a technological society. I hope it’ll inspire you to find new opportunities to exercise your curiosity in this amazing world we live in.
This Week’s Reason for Living Quote:
“Just like a job, a relationship is a form of trade—an exchange of values between two people to the benefit of both.”
Reason for Living: A Rational, Fact-Based Approach to Living Your Best Life will be available for preorder in mid-late 2024.
Upcoming Events
June 19-22, 2024: LevelUp 2024, Atlanta, GE. Register here.
Follow Me on Socials:
Find out more about my work at reason-for-living.com.
Prosperity and long life,
Thomas Walker-Werth
You said, "I love railways and train travel, so I would spend a couple of days each month visiting or volunteering at railway museums. "
Tom, even better is to actually take a great train trip. In the United States there are a couple long haul train trips that are worthwhile that I've done a number of times. Amtrak of course is a lousy service, but even Amtrak can't spoil the breathtaking scenery of America. And you deal with the discomfort and the delays for that reason. And it's better than driving because you don't have to constantly watch the road. Plus interstates are dull.
There are currently a number of East West transcontinental routes, depending on whether they take a northern route, a southern route, or go across the middle of the country. There's also several that go (roughly) up the West Coast, North-South along the Mississippi River, and up the East Coast. My favorite transcontinental or semi-transcontinental trip used to be called the San Francisco Zephyr. It still goes from Chicago to San Francisco and his breathtaking. Riding along in a gorge along the Colorado River for hundreds of miles. Crossing the Rocky mountains. Crossing the Sierra Nevada...I'm sure you don't get that in England. The welfare state has not gotten around to erecting some mountains😳.
I haven't yet tried the transcontinental voyage across Canada, but I understand that is spectacular as well.