The Art of Thinking Clearly

 This will be typed from my phone. I had to wait like a day or two to see if I could get my thoughts in order about this particular book. It was another one that came up on my For You page. The reviews were quite...spot on. Which is almost rare for a book because everyone interprets things differently. This book almost broke me. 

It was about an 8 hour audiobook from Libby, one of the few which I could find at my current library but that didn't prepare me at all. Aside from the vague reviews, I went into this book blindly. That was prolly my first mistake. See, I thought it would list a couple of reasons. Maybe like, 10-15 and talk through them. Hahaha... absolutely not. 

It was 99. 99 chapters, 99 reasons to not trust your own brain. He questioned everything. Everything you could possibly imagine, from how humans worked, to how advertising worked, to 99 different biases we all fall into. This book may not have been dense in quantity, but it was definitely dense in quality. 

Confirmation bias

Familiarity bias

Making connections when they're not there bias 

Guilt manipulation and how advertisements use this against us- bias

Why we always go with the crowd bias

Swimmers body bias (which I don't necessarily agree with) 

Those are just some. I prolly won't be able to see the world the same way again. This fucking hurt my brain. I already second guess myself. I was quadruple guessing myself all throughout the book so much so I was thinking "well damn, what even is a thought then?" Like how much is myself and how of it was ingrained from society? I was fighting for my life going through these chapters.

It's not really a self help book, it's more of "here's how the world works and you are the proof it works" kind of thing. It was sooooo much information, I think he was kind of repeating and overlapping on different chapters which is bound to happen if you have NINETY NINE REASONS. But I also was thinking from an outsiders perspective too, aside from myself. I think, he definitely arrived at the right conclusions in areas, like the Swimmers Body bias, but the way in which he arrived was not quite right to me. It was like...right answer wrong formula thing. And it took me a while to figure out where he was trying to go and I did get there eventually. His reasoning may be questionable but he did arrive to the general conclusion. There were definitely a lot of these. Some of the biases were obvious, while others had me thinking differently about things. Especially some of the percentages biases he listed and some of the advertisement biases. Advertisements have really looked into how humans worked and it's scary. 

There's a lot of psychology which I'm always a sucker for. By the time I reached #86 of reasons not to trust myself, I was definitely very overwhelmed and in a purely and funny way, I started thinking "now I know why nerdy people used to get shoved in lockers in those 2000s bully movies." At this point, I was getting annoyed. Like, I get it. I get what you're trying to say. What do you mean I'm only at 84% of the book?? I just wanted to tell him:

1. Congratulations. You've discovered humans

2. Humans are not very logical creatures. We know this

3. You have made your point. You've convinced me. Please just...stop. 

At this point, I wanted to finish the book out of pure spite.

4. We are allowed to like things without needing a logical reason behind it. We're allowed to be nonsensical about things. 

5. We are not 100% purely logical. Not every decision we make will always be logical.

Compassion comes into play and just human emotions come into play and he had the audacity to be like "you're a slave to your emotions".

I understand this book is about thinking. Therefore there's no need to include other things. But only seeing the logic behind ever movement we make is literally leaving out the things which make up our logic. 

At the beginning of this book, he stated "I've complied a list." 

"This is by no means everything".

You've complied a volume. This wasn't just some random journal or piece of paper. This is a volume of human behavior. 

What do you mean this isn't everything? What could you have POSSIBLY forgotten my guy? I've never questioned the existence of my own cells WHAT DO YOU MEAN 'WASN'T EVERYTHING'?

At some point you need to learn to just stop. At #86 did you ever think "ya know, I think readers got the point." 

Clearly he didn't think we got the point. I enjoyed some of the reasons, won't remember like 80% of them, but I did learn from this book. More than I ever wanted to. But I learned. 

But it was like being stuck in a conversation that you can't get out of. 

I finished this like, 70% out of sheer spite CAUSE WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE WAS STILL MORE?? And the 30% out of calm curiosity. But like, unwilling curiosity. 

I begrudgingly like the book. But I never thought it would turn me inside out.

I didn't think clearly. I was thinking about thinking. It was such a mind boggling book. This book gave me a fucking migraine. Like I needed a break from everything after I finished it.

The Art of Thinking Clearly....more like the art of just thinking in general. 

I want to get a physical copy and put a pen to this book. 

I fed the blog! It survives! 

09/09/2026 1319