has fight club actually changed your values?

One guy changed his name to Tyler Durden. He had serious mental issues but now he's fine and he's confident.

Oh yeah, Fight Club definitely changed the way I deal with things. I let things slide just like the penguin says to. I wouldn't have graduated high school without Fight Club.

a part of me always wonders if these threads are serious

Since Fight Club, I've become anti-consumerism/commercialism... by which I mean, I'm just one of those little whiny bitches who always acts all hardcore and shit, but is really just another mindless pawn who watched a movie and read a book and decided "hey, I should do that".

how dare you insinuate we don't take these threads seriously!

how's your trip, btw?

Books are mean to illuminate, not create ideas. They should be the catalysts that awaken dormant thoughts...You cannot define your life through books and quotes. They should be touch of a lover upon a hardened ideal, not the hammer and chisel blows of a sculptor upon a maleable lump of unimaginitive clay.

And with that particular book, wouldn't changing your life to fit the words and thoughts of some random person be missing the point entirely?

the problem with new books is it stops us from reading the old books.

Isn't that a quote as well?

yeah, it's either John Wooden or Mark Twain. i forget which.

Just don't understand this, cuz' books illuminate you to create new ideas and points of view in your life... I like your argument but I could not get it !!!!

What I meant was is that everyone has an ingrained personality. Books, movies, people...these things are meant to compliment that personality, not create it. If a book speaks to you, it should be because somewhere in your mind, its idea or purpose harmonizes with something you already feel.

This brings to mind Lord Henry's speech in "The picture of Dorian Gray", where he talkes about influence being immoral, because if we allow things to change us, then we are burning with the passions of others, committing sins that are not our own, living by virtues that were never ours to believe in...Allowing things to change your life is like conceeding that you are utterly incapable of forming your own opinion and ideals.

The result of reading a book should be the ability to form new personal opinions in reference to it...

no it hasn't change my values or beliefs, but it has changed the way i view things, if that makes any sense. but i dont think that a book should change ur beliefs.

Fight club offically ended my questioning on self-improvement. The point of it. "The goal isn't to live forever, the goal is to create something that will." I don't think this is from Fight Club, i can't remember. But Fight Club defineately opened some new windows on life.

As far as my life I haven't changed a whole lot. It has made me ponder situations and circumstances but that's about it. I knew this one guy though that was going through a rough patch in his life. He read the book and decided to make drastic changes in his life. His wife divorced him, took left his kids, and left him broke so he had to file for bankruptcy. He decided to get rid of just about everything that was frivolous in his life and make his life simple. Once he realized what was really important in life he decided to build on that. I don't think he took the book literal in philosophy but he got out of the book what he needed.

Have Fun

Don

I think it's changed me in some weird ways. For one, it's allowed me to stop fearing the forces in society I percieve as immasculating me, I'm pretty confident in androgyny and metrosexuality. And you might say that's against the point of Fight Club, but whatever, I really see the book as satirically criticizing the male fear of immasculization and desperate search for father figures.
But anyway, the book I think definitely changed my ideas about consumerism and materialism. I really hate Starbucks now with a burning passion, and I'd rather die before I buy anything from Ikea. Basically, while I recognize that anarcho-syndicalist terrorism is wrong, and the book was saying that the narrator's life towards the end of the book (right before he finds out he and Tyler are the same person) wasn't a moral, healthy or intelligent way to live...I also still appreciate that the book was somewhat criticizing his life at the beginning of the book, his possession/appearance/social standing-obsessed lifestyle. I don't ever want to end up like that, I don't think I'd ever let myself live in a condo...though I do still like sitcoms.
I guess the book has taught me that a deindividualized corporate capitalist consumerist society is wrong, but perhaps not as wrong as a childish search for toughness and testosterone, and that we shouldn't blame things like advertising, pop culture and materialism for our woes when forced to confront the fact that we don't live in a hunter-gatherer society anymore and we have to calm the fuck down and play by the rules. It's definitely had a big effect on my sense of self-preservation, inner strength, counter-culturalism and individual fulfilment. I understand and sympathize with that feeling of wanting to put a bullet between the eyes of every panda who wouldn't screw to save its own species. But unlike the narrator, that doesn't make me want to hurt people or destroy something beautiful, it makes me want to work harder to live up to my own potential, and my society's potential, because I never want to be that panda. And I think thanks to Fight Club, I never will be.

He read the book and decided to make drastic changes in his life. His wife divorced him, took left his kids, and left him broke so he had to file for bankruptcy.

Wait, did he read the book and decide to make the changes before all this stuff happened? Or did he read it and/or make the changes after his wife left him and he went bankrupt and his two grown kids won't return his phone calls? I mean, uh...forget that last part.

Why exactly do you hate them though? Surely it's not because those were the two specifically mentioned in the book, is it?

Well, yeah, I hate Ikea and Starbucks because those were the ones mentioned in the book. And in the movie, too.

I mean, the first time I heard the phrase "Ikea nesting instinct", I realized how much I hated that whole idea of soulless prefabricated Eurotrash furniture shipped across an ocean so people can consider themselves trendy and clever and socially conscious. If I want a sofa, I want it to be a few decades old, something cracked and worn and peeling, something covered in stains from where my uncle spilled his beer while watching the Summit Series. Something with heart. Something I found at a garage sale because someone thought it was too old. Something that's lived. Not something machine-specified and tailor-made to look perfect and stylish. I don't want my house to look like an Epcot ride or some museum of the yuppie age. I want furniture I can be proud of because I don't feel the need to have perfect furniture. I mean, where the hell is the substance in living through a catalogue? The narrator was right, a dining set can't define you as a person.

And the first time I heard phrases like "Planet Starbucks" and "grande latte enema", it struck a chord with me that made me realize how true the portents of that concept were. I mean, we all know Starbucks is freaking everywhere, and I don't like the idea of a monopoly on a certain kind of business just crawling all over the planet. I want some diversity. There's a word for a society that shoves its corporations and customs and ways into every corner of the earth, and that's "monoculture", and I can't stand the thought of it. Every time I look inside a Starbucks, I see all the stuff that I really hate...stupid high-strung businessmen trying to get a cream-covered caffeine fix in their designer travel mugs before dragging themselves to their pull-a-lever pish-a-button jobs, and all those moronic scenesters and preppy twentysomethings typing screenplays and ordering shitty thirty-dollar shots of espressor with soy and foam and spices and their insane specifications and all the drinks with their stupid names in some weird jumbling of Spanish and Italian and Esperanto or whatever the hell that language is...and the worst thing is, people actually consider Starbucks to be a cool indie-alternative hangout, because that's what they're telling you it is. They've taken somewhere nice and hip like a coffeehouse and turned it into a big diorama of pseudo-bohemian pretension. They just play whatever music they can find on Pitchfork over the loudspeakers and point out that they started in Seattle, and somehow that stops Starbucks from being a stupid insidious megalithic corporation? I just really can't stand it. And as if all that's not enough, a friend of mine tried putting up this poster for a gay rights rally in a Starbucks near their house, and the homophobe owner of the franchise refused to put it up. So there's that too.

It opened the door for me to see myself. At one point in my life, not too long ago, I hit this real hard place in my life, kind of like rock bottom. After getting to the point where I hated myself, I sort of began doing things that made me happy. But I don't know if reading FC instigated my changes in my personal life, or if it was because I was sick of where my life was going at that point. But it (along with some other novels and philosophical works) really did instigate the questioning phase in my life.

My values were changing before, during, and after I read Fight Club, all in a way alike and perhaps motivated by Fight Club, though to what degree I can't say. I think people find what they're looking for.

I'll try to say what Mr Naked Lunch said, when he commented on "On the road"

- There anger and all that was already there, he just showed them the way.

I really need to reread Fight Club.

FC didn't really change me. It give me some things to think about - like a good book does. I also think I identified with some of the ideas. I think it's pretty wicked it'll change someone completely. I mean, I viewed Tyler as the bad guy most of the time. Project Mayhem was kind of fascistic, y'know?

I'm with HardCandy. Books are supposed to compliment your personality. I love books which I can agree with/relate to. If a book changes you... maybe you need a backbone. Or a support group.

the thing i dont like about ikea and starbucks

i like black coffee, strong and fresh. starbucks offers that, for three dollars and change. that bothers me too much to find myself there.

and as for ikea..
i just bought a lateral filing cabinet for $100 plus tax but free shipping through office max. the same thing through ikea, on sale for half off even, woulda run in excess of $300, full retail price approx $600. it would definitely last many more years, stronger construction, handcarved oak or whatever. but it's not like ima live forever, and i sure as hell aint gonna be lugging the heavy, bulky think to the cairn at final resolve. i shop at walmart and kroger, and buy a lot of canned goods from a place down the road that sells such things as dented cans that stayed too long at the kroger store at a discount.

but none of this came from fight club. it came from growing up poor as fuck. it came from being in the store with my mom and buying one of those family packs of beef as a one-per-household by paying for it separately in a separate and long as fuck line from her and both of us pretending to not know one another until we got to the car.

and as for the fight club ikea reference, i honestly thought it referenced akira, as in the japanimation movie haha you know, because "jack" was fighting and being rebellious and all.

the thing with fight club, what don lyabb pointed out, chuck just showed what everyone knew was there but just didnt quite put a finger on.

but just because of choke, i am not gonna build a wall out of stones. except metaphorically, of course haha

..

I never had any values apparently.

I read Fight Club after stumbling aimlessly into every brand of angst out there, so I wasn't particularly awakened. Still, I was assured that there was something deeper to disgust toward corporate logos. After reading the book, I became more secure in my distaste for the fashionable and sensationalized.

It wasn't until three years later, however, that I fully embraced the "fuck it!" philosophy of inconsequential impulse. I haven't indulged in anything directly self-destructive, but my mother refuses to excuse my resulting buzz cut and election of "unfeminine" personal style.

u can did burn ur hand wit lye too? we all hve done dis here..

I read Fight Club because I was already nihilistic and anti-commercialism so I wanted to read a book I could get into.

I agree. i think people come on these sites to piss about. Mostly men. I don't get why you men like to read 'Chuck's' books. Fight club really wasn't all that, either was 'choke' what's with his writing???????? Please explain it to me. Or perhaps i'm being too female to actually understand it???

Hi troll!

houseofcards.jpg

forget about your house of cards and i'll do mine

Heh.

God damn vagina's, always getting in the way of rational thinking.
But really, how dare men enjoy reading????????????????????????????????????????? We should be out hunting and spreading our seed. What are we thinking??????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

And I didn't know that only men liked Chuck's books but it could make sense. Maybe Chuck is using his literature to catch himself a mate. It all makes perfect sense now.