I know it’s not what cool kids like to do, but I like to read non-fiction. lots of nonfiction. and my favorite moments when reading nonfiction are when a book slams into my brain and reshapes my entire understanding of reality and my place within it.
I love that. it’s like a mental orgasm.
You are reading: Mark manson best books
I get a lot of emails asking for book recommendations. I never know what the hell to say because a lot of the books that have influenced me haven’t done it because they’re so good or brilliant, but mainly because they addressed issues I was going through at the time I was reading them.
so instead of divulging which are my favorite books, i’ll leave you with something better: seven of the most inspiring keanu reeves “whoa” books i’ve ever read.
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in no particular order…
stumbling on happiness
by daniel gilbert
What it’s about: Stumbling on happiness is like the red-haired stepson in the happiness books. it doesn’t fit in with the rest because it’s basically trying to convince you that you don’t even know what the hell makes you happy in the first place, so why stress about it?
Gilbert is a famous Harvard psychologist who has a knack for devising outlandish experiments that show just how flawed and biased the human mind really is. in the book, he shows you over and over again that as humans we misjudge, among other things, what made us happy in the past, what will make us happy in the future, and even what makes us happy right now.
In fact, decades of Gilbert’s research on happiness point to the same disturbing fact: happiness has little to do with what happens to us in our lives, and more to do with how we end up choosing to see things.
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Gilbert’s theory is that each of us has a “psychological immune system,” basically a bullshit generator where our minds explain our past experiences, our future projections, and our current situations in such a way that we always maintain a basic level of mild happiness.1 and it is when this “immune system” fails that we fall into prolonged depression and/or existential crises.
notable quotes:
“We treat our future selves as if they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days building tomorrows that we hope will make them happy… but our temporary progeny are often ungrateful. we toil and sweat to give them exactly what we think they’ll like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair long, move to or from san francisco, and wonder how we could have been stupid enough to think they’d like that . We don’t get the accolades and rewards we feel are crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God things didn’t work out according to our short-sighted and misguided plan.”
“economies thrive when people work hard, but because people only work for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are pathways to personal well-being.”
bonus points for: being perhaps the wittiest and best written psychology book I’ve ever read.
If this book could be summed up in one image, that image would be: a dog called “mankind” endlessly chasing its own tail with a big slobbery grin on its face.
read this book if… …you like harvard professors who reference the beatles in every chapter and make jokes about quadriplegics. …is interested in behavioral economics and irrational decision making. …you’ve always had a feeling that you’re completely full of shit, but you’d like 400 pages of psychological research to confirm it. …you want to read a book that explains happiness without mythologizing or worshiping it.
on the genealogy of morality
by friedrich nietzsche
What it’s about: Hidden beneath bombastic prose, angry rhetoric, shameless profanity, and a mustache the size of a small child’s leg, Nietzsche wrote with a cold, stark logic. On the Genealogy of Morals, perhaps his shortest and most influential work, was the crudest of all. In three essays totaling around 100 pages, he states the following:
- In any population, there is going to be a group of people who are more talented/gifted/intelligent than average. let’s call them the strong. you’re also going to have a group of people who are less talented/gifted/intelligent than average. let’s call them the weak.2
- the strong will naturally accumulate power in society for the sole reason that they are more capable and talented than others.
- because the strong gained their greatest power and influence through outwitting or outdoing others, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that might makes right, that they are entitled to their privileged position, that they earned what is theirs. Nietzsche calls this “master morality.”
- Because the weak have lost their power and influence by being outsmarted and outwitted, they will come to adopt ethical beliefs that justify their position: that people deserve help and charity, that one should give your possessions to the less fortunate, that you should live for others and not for yourself. nietzsche calls this “slave morality.”
- master/slave moralities have been in some kind of tension in all societies for all of recorded history. many political/social conflicts are side effects of the struggle between master and slave moralities.
- nietzsche believed that ideas of guilt, punishment and a “bad conscience” are culturally constructed and used by the weak to chip away from the domination and power of the strong. he also believed that the morality of slaves is just as capable of corrupting and oppressing a society as the morality of masters. he used Christianity as his main example of this.
- Nietzsche believed that slave morality stifled the greatest characteristics of man: creativity, innovation, ambition, and even happiness itself.
notable quotes:
“above all, there is no exception to this rule: that the idea of political superiority always resolves into the idea of psychological superiority.”
“no cruelty, no party.”3
Bonus points for: claiming that weak people had to make up a god in order to believe that their suffering really meant something. Nietzsche was a pretty tough guy.
If this book could be summed up in one image, that image would be: bdsm porn featuring a guy with a very, very bushy mustache… and syphilis.4
Read this book if… …you’re the kind of psychopath like me who finds obtuse 19th-century German philosophy to be excellent beach reading. … you won’t be offended if some angry german guy rhetorically punches jesus christ in the vagina and calls your god a fagot over and over again. …you like mustaches.
Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by nassim taleb
What’s it about: Before I explain some of the brilliant ideas in this book, I need to vent: taleb sounds like a pompous idiot. if he’s trolling the world with his writing style, he’s doing a pretty good job, because some passages are nearly impossible to read without rolling your eyes or pushing the book through a shredder. if he really is that arrogant, well, then let’s just say he won’t be getting invited to any of my playdates anytime soon.
taleb has a bunch of amazing ideas. I’m talking about ideas that can change lives and affect the world. these ideas can be explained well in about 50 pages. the other 450 pages is mostly him trying to prove how cool and cultured he is while explaining how much smarter he is than the following groups of people: academics, politicians, nobel prize winners, wall street analysts, economists, journalists, statisticians, historians etc soccer moms, teachers, anyone who uses the bell curve, anyone in the social sciences, and anyone who disagrees with it.
so, what are your handful of transcendental ideas in antifragile? well, this is the starting point:
- Often, the most influential events in history are, by definition, the least anticipated. these are called “black swan” events.5
- As humans, we have an inherent bias against noticing both the number of random events in our lives and the impact these random events have on us.
- that due to the exponential scale of technology, black swan events are becoming more common and influential than ever.
- hence, we must build systems (and ourselves) to be “antifragile”, that is, to build our lives and our societies in such a way that they benefit from major unforeseen events.
if that pinches your nipples and you don’t mind putting up with pages and pages of pretentious wiggling, then go wild, taleb is for you.
notable quotes:
“Anti-fragility goes beyond resilience or robustness. resilient resists shock and stays the same; the antifragile improves.”
“the irony of the thought control process: the more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think, the more your ideas end up controlling you.”
“difficulty is what awakens genius.”
Bonus points for: Being a totally annoying asshole. and wrong about tons of his analogies and examples. but still brilliant somehow, despite itself.
if this book could be summed up in one picture, that picture would be: a rich fat bald guy boring you to death with cappuccinos with silly stories about living in france and smoking slim cigarettes with umberto echo as you repeatedly stab yourself in the face with a sugar spoon trying to stop everything.
Read this book if… …you like to feel like you’re smarter than everyone else, even though you’re not. …you want to have your concept of “success” and “progress” completely inverted. …you want to read a book that, while perhaps 60% nonsense, will keep you thinking of ideas years later.
the true believer
by eric hoffer
What It’s About: The True Believer looks at why people get carried away by fanaticism, fundamentalism, or extremist ideologies.
The book is perhaps the most direct and no-nonsense philosophical work I have ever read. And the power of Hoffer’s short sentences can take your breath away. see below.
notable quotes:
“The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.”
“the less justified a man is in claiming excellence for himself, the more willing he is to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race, or his holy cause.”
“freedom aggravates at least as much as it relieves frustration. freedom of choice places all the blame for failure on the shoulders of the individual. and since freedom encourages a multiplicity of attempts, it inevitably multiplies failure.”
Bonus points for: It was apparently one of President Eisenhower’s favorite books.
If this book could be summed up in one image, that image would be: an open hand, going straight to the side of your face.
read this book if… …you want to know why people reveal their identities for some insane cause. …you wonder how war and revolutions are possible. …you want to read something clever but you don’t want to read hundreds of pages of gibberish and academic jargon to understand it.
civilization and its discontents
by sigmund freud
What it’s about: Freud was an academic sensation in the early 20th century. He had invented psychoanalysis, brought the science of psychology into the mainstream, and was highly respected in intellectual circles in Europe. then the first world war broke out and destroyed, well, almost everything. freud was deeply moved by the devastation and fell into a deep depression and secluded himself for much of the 1920s. civilization and its discontent was the result of this depression.
The book makes a simple argument: that humans have deep animal instincts to eat, kill, or fuck everything. Freud argued that civilization could only emerge when enough humans learned to repress these deeper, more basic impulses, to push them into the unconscious where (according to his model) they would fester and ultimately spawn all kinds of neuroses.
basically, freud concluded that as humans we had one of two shitty choices in life: 1) repress all of our baser instincts in order to maintain some semblance of a safe and cooperative civilization, thus making us miserable and neurotic or 2) to let them out and let the shit hit the fan.
a freud, hitler and the second world war just proved his point of view a few years later. and as an Austrian Jew, he ran for the hills. the hills are london, of course. he lived the last years of his life in a city bombed into oblivion.
notable quotes:
“It is impossible to ignore the extent to which civilization is based on the renunciation of instinct.”
“It seems to me that a love that does not discriminate loses a part of its own value by committing an injustice with its object.”
bonus points for: basically arguing that we’re all screwed and there’s no hope for any of us. and do it convincingly.
if this book could be summed up in one image, that image would be: the eye of sauron looking out at the hordes of his minions advancing towards the realm of gondor as darkness consumes the… oh wait, bad book.
read this book if… …you like the explanation that the only problem any of us have is that we want to fuck and/or kill everyone in sight , but we are not allowed to do so. …basically you hate humans and think they’re a bunch of rape-hungry assholes waiting to stab each other for a sandwich. …Hitler makes you sad.
the singularity is near: when humans transcend biology
by ray kurzweil
what it’s about: at the beginning of the singularity is near, kurzweil shows that the processing power of computers and technology has increased exponentially over time. history and will likely continue to do so.
He then argues that because of this, in the year 2046 all of our brains will be digitally encrypted and uploaded to the cloud where we will all form a single immortal consciousness that will control all the computing power on the planet.
See Also: Connilyn Cossette – Book Series In Order
no, really.
and the fucking thing is that part of your explanation of how this is going to happen makes sense. I mean, it’s probably not going to happen. and the book reads like it was written by a middle-aged engineer who took too much acid and now desperately needs to talk to a therapist. kurzweil claims, among other things, that baby boomers are the first generation to conquer aging and death, and that he wants to digitally transcribe his dead father’s brain into computer software so he can, you know, skype chat with him. good dad. again.
the sofa is there, ray. Why don’t you lie down and tell us how you feel?
I make fun of ray, but the technological possibilities presented in this book are truly amazing. and we will certainly see a significant percentage of them in our lifetime. medical nanobots that live in the bloodstream that we upload vaccines to wirelessly. genetic programming for newborns so that parents can choose not only the physical characteristics of their children but also their talents. uploading and downloading awareness on the internet, so you can download someone else’s life experiences as your own the same way you downloaded the last season of breaking bad.
as neo once said:
The whole immortality thing, the consciousness of the computerized world? I’ll believe it when I see it. But if you can go through hundreds of pages of technical explanations of genetic engineering, quantum computing, and artificial intelligence to see the implications of some of what we’re likely to experience in the next 50 years, well, brace yourself, son: shit! go wild.
notable quotes:
“A cubic inch of nanotube circuitry, once fully developed, would be up to a hundred million times more powerful than the human brain.”
“can the pace of technological progress continue to accelerate indefinitely? isn’t there a point where humans are unable to think fast enough to keep up? for unenhanced humans, clearly. but what would 1,000 scientists achieve, each one 1,000 times smarter than human scientists today, and each operating 1,000 times faster than contemporary humans (because information processing in their mostly non-biological brains is faster)? ? a chronological year would be like a millennium for them. what would happen to them?”
Bonus points for: Delusional optimism to the point where you feel bad for the guy and how scared he is of dying.
if this book could be summed up in one picture, that picture would be: a holographic robot orgy that isn’t really happening, but the nanocomputers embedded in the synapses of your brain just make you think that it’s happening. . 6
Read this book if… …you’re a geek, plain and simple. …you want to see why the internet and smartphones are just the tip of the iceberg of what lies ahead in our lives. …you’re an aging boomer who refuses to see a therapist and needs something to crave.
the denial of death
by ernest becker
What it’s all about: Speaking of being afraid to die… here’s death denial in a nutshell:
Because man is the only animal capable of conceptualizing his own existence —thinking about his life, questioning it, imagining future possibilities—, man is also the only animal capable of conceptualizing his own non-existence, that is, his own death.
In other words, we humans were given the gift of being able to imagine the future and who we want to be, but the price we pay for this gift is the realization that one day we will die. a dog does not realize that he is going to die. neither is a fish. or a cockroach. but we do.
This knowledge of our own inevitable death leads to a kind of ever-present “terror” that underlies everything we do. Becker argues that this terror inspires us all to take on what he calls a “hero project,” in which we try to immortalize ourselves through our deeds and actions, to create something greater than ourselves that will live on beyond. of our own lives.
When people’s heroic projects contradict each other, conflict, violence, intolerance and evil arise. it is when heroic projects fail that we fall into deep despair and depression because once again we are faced with the inevitability of our own death and the meaninglessness of our lives.7
notable quotes:
“man cannot bear his own smallness unless he can translate it into meaning on the highest possible level.”
“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free from the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself that awakens it, and so we must refrain from being fully alive.”
“what does it mean to be a self-aware animal? the idea is ridiculous, if not monstrous. it means knowing that one is food for worms. this is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, self-awareness, deep inner feelings, an unbearable inner yearning for life and self-expression, and yet to die. it seems like a hoax, that’s why a type of cultural man openly rebels against the idea of god. what kind of deity would create such a complex and elegant meal for worms?”
bonus points for: making you contemplate your own non-existence and making you feel good about it.
if this book could be summed up in one picture, it would be: the grim reaper quietly laughing to himself watching you build an elaborate lego set called “life”, and you turning around and saying , “stop laughing, this is important!”
read this book if…
… you plan to die one day. …you think sometimes you take life too seriously and need to relax. …you want to read a compelling argument for why we should embrace our pain and fear instead of avoiding it.
Looking for more books to read?
well, I’ve put together a list of over 200 of the best books to read, organized by topic for members of the school of subtle art.
school is a collection of 6 brand new video courses, each with a nice printable workbook, plus 3 bonus courses, e-books on my favorite topics, commentaries on all my books, and a “library” of the best books to read oh, did I mention I also do a monthly live webinar with members where I’ll answer all your questions and talk about tacos?
If you are already a member of the site, you have full access to the school (just log in). if not, what are you waiting for? check it out.
I also have an all-time recommended reading list that non-members can access. you’re welcome.
See Also: Your Kid&039s Next Read Book Lists: Best Books for 8-10 years – Children&039s Books Daily