“Don’t Try” — The Strange Life Lessons of Charles Bukowski

Source: “Don’t Try” — The Strange Life Lessons of Charles Bukowski, Mark Manson, 9:27, uploaded 2025-03-30, playlist index 112.

Mark Manson opens with the usual catalogue of success stories and then turns to the people who rarely receive the honour of giving advice. Charles Bukowski arrives as the wrong sort of teacher: an alcoholic, gambler, womaniser, cheapskate and deadbeat who wrote poems on his worst days. Manson’s wager is that Bukowski’s value comes from the parts of his life that respectable success stories leave out.

Bukowski’s long failure

The video presents Bukowski’s writing career as three decades of rejection. Magazines, newspapers, journals, agents and publishers returned his work with judgments such as “crude” and “depraved”. He worked as a letter filer at the post office, spent most of his small wage on alcohol, gambled at the racetrack and sometimes wrote at night on an old typewriter. Manson describes those years as a blur of alcohol, drugs, gambling and prostitutes, followed by an alcohol-fuelled depression and a deep sense of failure.

At fifty, an editor at a small independent publishing house took an interest in him. Bukowski described the choice in stark terms: he could stay at the post office and go crazy, or leave and play at being a writer while starving. He chose the second option. After signing the contract, he wrote his first novel, Post Office, in three weeks and dedicated it to nobody.

The video then gives the story its familiar success-story shape. Manson says Bukowski went on to publish six novels and hundreds of poems, selling more than two million copies. The caption track and description provide no source for those figures, so they remain claims made within the video. Manson also places Bukowski inside the American dream: a man fights for what he wants, refuses to give up and eventually gets the life he imagined.

The tombstone unsettles that version. Its epitaph reads “Don’t try”. Bukowski’s success, in Manson’s account, grew from his willingness to accept that he was a loser and write from that position without shame. Manson gives him a different discipline: he stopped trying to appear like something else.

The epitaph and the work of honesty

Manson treats “trying” as a word that can disguise avoidance. Saying that one is trying to work on a problem or become a different kind of person sounds responsible because it announces effort and good intentions. The phrase can also leave the desired change safely in the future. Bukowski’s example gives Manson a harsher test: describe what is happening, including the parts that damage the image one wants to present, and then let the work proceed from there.

That is why Manson locates Bukowski’s achievement in honesty rather than self-improvement. Manson keeps him as an untidy literary figure. Bukowski wrote about failure, regret, fear, self-destruction and emotional dysfunction with the same directness that he brought to pride. Manson calls this comfort with failure the real story of Bukowski’s success.

The distinction matters because fame did not make Bukowski kind or well behaved. Manson recalls readings where he arrived drunk and abused people in the audience, along with public indecency, an arrest and his pursuit of almost every woman he met. Those scenes keep the lesson from becoming a redemption story. The video uses Bukowski’s conduct to show that success and moral improvement can travel together without sharing a cause. Bukowski became famous without first becoming a good person, and his fame did not erase the damage in his behaviour.

This becomes Manson’s second lesson: success does not require getting every part of life right. A person may have to become more comfortable with being wrong before they can do the work that matters to them. The claim describes a psychological condition for some forms of work. Bukowski’s cruelty and self-destruction remain facts about his conduct rather than virtues to adopt.

Purpose under pressure

Manson next brings in Bukowski’s instruction that anyone who tries should go all the way. The passage names the costs as losing relationships, going hungry, facing mockery and living through isolation. Rejection becomes a test of whether the desire can survive contact with the world. The video treats that endurance as the difference between a wish that sounds good and a practice that continues when it produces little approval.

The argument then moves from endurance to the shape of a meaningful life. Manson says that people often imagine happiness, confidence, success and good relationships arriving as one package. Bukowski’s writing keeps the unpleasant parts in view. A life that gives someone purpose can also bring pain, sacrifice and shame. Manson’s own examples move from love and heartache to the cost of pursuing a goal that matters. The defensible point is that meaningful work often includes difficulty that the person cannot remove without also removing the work.

Purpose therefore develops through repeated contact with experience. A person does something, notices how it feels, adjusts and tries another course. Manson says that nobody gets this right on the first attempt, the tenth or sometimes even the two-hundredth. He also says that people may recognise meaning because they feel called to suffer for it. That language belongs to the video’s existential and motivational frame. Difficulty can show that a practice matters to someone, yet suffering alone cannot prove that the practice is right or worthwhile.

The process has no permanent finish line. One morning cannot supply an activity that will make a person happy for the rest of their life. Purpose remains a relation between a person and the work they keep choosing. Bukowski’s life supplies the video’s extreme example because poetry looked pointless from the outside and still became something he could not keep inside himself.

Trying as a substitute for living

The closing movement turns from writing to responsibility. Manson describes people who complain that they have done nothing and then wait for reassurance. In his reading of Bukowski, the complaint is sometimes accurate. A person can follow instructions, avoid resistance and keep their own thoughts at a distance until the years contain very little that they chose.

“Don’t try” then becomes an instruction to live, fight, love, mourn, fail and accept the consequences of wanting something. Manson calls trying a cheap replacement for living because the word can separate desire from responsibility. Someone who says they are trying can claim effort whilst leaving failure outside their name. Someone who acts has to find out what the desire requires and decide whether to continue.

Manson gives purpose an almost physical force. The important choices can feel as though they have chosen us. A vocation or practice may seem inevitable, as though it was born into the person and will keep pressing outward until it takes form. He ends with Bukowski’s line, “Find what you love, and let it kill you,” then recasts purpose as a person’s preferred route towards death. The point is not cheerful fulfilment. It is that a life can become organised around the activity a person accepts as worth the cost.

Limits of the lesson

The video offers an interpretation of Bukowski’s life, with biography used to support a set of lessons about honesty, failure, pain and purpose. It gives no citations for the sales figures, the account of Bukowski’s working life or the claim that his success came from accepting failure. The examples of drunken readings, public exposure and sexual behaviour also come without dates or sources. They work as scenes in Manson’s argument rather than as a documented biography.

Bukowski’s life can show that artistic success sometimes grows beside addiction, bad conduct and shame. Those conditions cannot prove that pain produces good work, that purpose requires suffering or that a person should imitate his conduct. Its soundest claim ties “trying” to action. Its admiration sometimes turns damage into proof of artistic seriousness.