Welcome to the fourth and final part of You Do You. After this, it’s just a zippy epilogue that will neatly sum up the ideas of the book and then drop a philosophical bombshell to inform your future doing-you practices well after the last page is turned.
But no peeking. We still have five more amendments to go—ones which modify the especially soul-crushing clauses born of obligation.
This is my JAM, guys.
I began publicly expressing my disdain for obligation in The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck, in which I said that feeling obligated to do (or not do) something was the worst possible reason to do (or not do) something. I stand by that assessment. In that book, I argued that the best way to balance your Fuck Budget and avoid Fuck OverloadTM is to allocate your time, energy, and money to what you want to do rather than what you feel obligated to do.
As for the nonnegotiable fucks that you have to give whether you like it or not?
I dealt with those in Get Your Shit Together, where I explained how to knock out that “must do” stuff so you can—once again, with feeling—focus on doing what you really want, instead of only what you feel obligated to do on any given day.
The first two entries in the no-fucks-given guide canon stress the importance of “joy over annoy” and “choice over obligation.” By now, I’m sure you realize You Do You is a peacock of identical plumage. (That’s no accident—everybody loves a three-peat.)
In this book, I’m going to concentrate on five specific cultural obligations that are condescending, unnecessarily limiting, and/or profoundly stupid. These clauses of the social contract deal in the imperative, a tense that makes me very tense.
Part IV opens with the chapter “You should always put family first,” a nod to all the black sheep grazing calmly at the fringes of the yard while their fuzzy white brethren point hooves and baa, baa behind their backs. I’ll also talk about chosen family, and the benefits of sloughing off your kin to seek out your own kind—forming bonds that inspire you to drop everything for someone you love who doesn’t even share your genetic profile. Imagine that!
Next, in “You shouldn’t act so crazy,” we’ll don our aptly named pants to address the stigma surrounding anxiety and other forms of mental illness. I speak from experience when I say that availing yourself of proud, public self-care is a million times healthier than enduring a private mental breakdown. Probably a billion, but I was an English major, I don’t count that high.
In “You should smile more,” I’ll examine the fetishization of niceness with regard to looking, acting, and the saying of things. I don’t support mouthing off, making enemies, and being mean for no good reason. But nor should you feel compelled to present a veneer of beatific calm to the world when inside, you’re minorly irritated or majorly pissed off.
(Unless you are Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge. You made your bed, girl, but thanks for reading!)
Afterward, we’ll snuggle up to body image issues in “You shouldn’t eat that,” and I’ll explain why they’re the same as every other issue you’re having. And finally, in “You should check your ego at the door,” I’ll argue that [unless you are the blustering, incompetent commander-in-chief of the world’s most fearsome army, dangling your diminutive trigger finger over the nuclear codes] a big ego is no liability; it’s actually your biggest asset.
We’ll wrap up You Do You with a thorough stroking of the asset in question (which will have already swollen in size like the Grinch’s heart as you’ve absorbed the last couple hundred pages of positive reinforcement).
Remember, guys: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU.
I hate to be pushy, but you should listen to me on this.