If you have seen Mark Manson’s latest book in your local bookshop, or if you have become aware of it online, you will know that I cannot include its title in this blog, even with appropriate asterisks, because it contains a very rude Anglo-Saxon word not suitable for my usual readership.  Suffice to say, it is along the lines that everything is going to hell in a handcart.  The book is not, however, despite its title, as negative as it sounds and, when I get round to sharing more of it after Christmas, I hope I can show you that it turned out to be rather a good read.

However, before Manson shows us that there is plenty about which to feel encouraged, he starts by breaking things down to a particularly disheartening point.  In what he calls ‘The Uncomfortable Truth of Life’, he writes: ‘One day, you and everyone you love will die.  And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter.   And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it.  We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck.  We imagine our own importance.  We invent our purpose.  We are nothing.’  Well, thanks for that, Mark, you’ve really made everyone’s day!

If you have seen the original 1968 Charlton Heston film ‘Planet of the Apes’, you may remember its ending.  Spoiler alert – if you do not want to know what happened, please skip to the next paragraph.  Having been freed by the apes who rule what Heston and his astronaut crew think is an alien planet, they discover that they have actually crash-landed on Earth in the future, which humans have managed to destroy through nuclear war and which the apes have then evolved to rule.  The final scene shows the top section of the Statue of Liberty, broken off, lying on a beach and left to decay.

This idea that everything is reduced to nothing in the end reminded me of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, written in 1818, which has stayed with me since I first read it:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.  Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.  Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

These ideas are echoed in a quotation from Denis Diderot, the French Enlightenment philosopher, who said, ‘The ideas that ruins evoke in me are grand.  Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures.’  A saying attributed to the Indigenous Australian people makes the same point, though rather more poetically, I think: ‘We are all visitors to this time, this place.  We are just passing through.  Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love…and then we return home.’

So far, so very cheerful!  However, I think we have reached the bottom of the curve in terms of existential angst, so let me see if I can pick things up from here and share some more optimistic thoughts, starting with a piece of advice that a colleague shared with me about ways we can manage some of our anxieties more effectively. 

The story is told of a psychologist who walked around a room while teaching stress management to an audience.  As she raised a glass of water, everyone expected they would be asked the ‘half empty or half full’ question.  Instead, with a smile on her face, she enquired: ‘How heavy is this glass of water?’

The answers called out ranged from 250 grams to a kilogram.  The psychologist replied, ‘The absolute weight does not matter.  It depends on how long I hold it.  If I hold it for a minute, it is not a problem.  If I hold it for an hour, I will have an ache in my arm.  If I hold it for a day, my arm will feel numb.  In each case, the weight of the glass does not change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.'  She continued, ‘The stresses and worries in life are like that glass of water. Think about them for a while and nothing happens.  Think about them a bit longer and they begin to hurt.  And if you think about them all day long, you will feel paralysed and incapable of doing anything.  Therefore, above all else, remember to put the glass down.’

Whether the following is true or not, it purports to be a letter from a head teacher to the parents at their school as the exam season was getting underway.  Perspective, as so often, is everything: ‘Dear Parents, your children’s exams are to start soon.  I know you are all really anxious for your child to do well.  But, please do remember, among the students who will be sitting the exams there is an artist who does not need to understand maths.  There is an entrepreneur who does not need to care about history or English literature.  There is a musician whose marks in chemistry will not matter.  There is an athlete whose physical fitness is more important than his physics.  If your child does get top marks, that is great.  But if he or she does not, please don’t take away their dignity or self-confidence.  Tell them it’s all right, it’s just an exam.  They are cut out for much bigger things in life.  Tell them, no matter what they score, you love them and will not judge them.  Please do this and, when you do, watch your children conquer the world.  One poor exam or a low mark in a test won’t take away their dreams or talent.  And please do not think that doctors and engineers are the only happy people in the world.’

To finish, I suggest we return to Mark Manson to look at his concluding thoughts from his book.  He tells us that instead of looking for hope, we should try this: ‘Don’t hope.  Don’t despair either.  In fact, don’t deign to believe you know anything.  It is that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place.  Don’t hope for better: just be better.  Be something better.  Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.  Many people would throw in there “Be more human”, but no – be a better human.  And maybe, if we’re lucky, one day we’ll get to be more than human.’