美国国家公共电台 NPR In 'F*ck No!', Sarah Knight Suggests You Do Less And Live More（在线收听）

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Sarah Knight has built a career saying no, specifically, "[Expletive] No!" She is the author of the "No [Expletive] Given Guides," which include the books "Calm The [Expletive] Down" and "The Life Changing Magic Of Not Giving A [Expletive]." And Sarah Knight's latest book, which I referenced at the top, offers advice on how to do what she calls mental decluttering in order to pare down life to the essentials. It's something we've all had to learn to do a lot more of recently. NPR's Samantha Balaban has this profile.

SAMANTHA BALABAN, BYLINE: At the end of a long, winding, tree-lined highway about two and a half hours outside of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic...

SARAH KNIGHT: This is my very favorite end of the beach - Las Ballenas beach in Las Terrenas.

BALABAN: There's a little beach town called Las Terrenas.

KNIGHT: (Speaking Spanish). A snack?

BALABAN: And that's where Sarah Knight sits, looking at the ocean eating fried plantains - or tostones.

KNIGHT: We've already got a friendly beach dog on the approach. This one's around here all the time.

BALABAN: Las Terrenas is a fishing village, and unlike other beachside towns in the country, there are few all-inclusive resorts here. It's cozy and isolated. For Sarah Knight, it's idyllic.

KNIGHT: I wake up when I wake up. I never set an alarm unless I have an appointment. Maybe I sit outside, depending on how hot it is. And if I'm working on a book or if I'm working on an article or something like that, I usually get started around noon.

BALABAN: Knight has written two self-help journals and four books here. She's working on a fifth right now.

KNIGHT: So walking back toward my house along the beach, it's about a half an hour walk from end to end.

BALABAN: She lives about a five-minute walk from the water with two feral cats named Gladys Knight and Mr. Stussy (ph) and her husband. They moved here almost four years ago.

KNIGHT: I was a senior editor at Simon & Schuster in New York. I'd been there for five years and at the other big six publishers for 10 years before that.

BALABAN: And she'd achieved a lot of success - award winners, bestsellers.

KNIGHT: And so I was at a real peak - or at least I was, you know, rising in terms of my professional life. But I just - every day, it was a struggle to get up, to get ready, to put on makeup, to put on heels, to get on the subway, to go to work. I started having a lot of panic attacks and some depression and some just real big questioning - existential - what am I doing with my life? And can I continue doing it in this place for these people until the end of time? And the answer was no.

BALABAN: So she saved up for a year and quit her job. In the process of clearing out her office, Knight brought home a copy of Marie Kondo's "The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up."

KNIGHT: And I read it. And it really resonated. And it allowed me to explore this concept of mental decluttering, which is the core that runs through all of my books.

BALABAN: She describes mental decluttering as a two-step process, discarding and organizing.

KNIGHT: And you have to really sift through it all and go, why am I doing this? Why am I spending my time, energy and money on these things that I don't want to do with people I don't like with time I don't have? And after that, you organize your life around whatever's left. Part of what I've discovered and what I've heard from - you know, from readers over the last few years is that nobody was taking the time to just think for a second before saying yes and also thinking about if you really quote, unquote, "have" to do something.

BALABAN: Meeting her, you get the sense that Sarah Knight is someone who practices what she preaches. She says no all the time - to working for less money than she feels her time is worth, letting friends with kids stay at her house, pub trivia.

KNIGHT: I kept making excuses for years. And then finally, I said, you know what? Instead of just kind of weirdly batting back and forth excuses and things or saying yes and ending up spending, you know, six hours of a night doing something I don't want to do, I'll just say no. And then they're cool with it. And then it's fine, and your life goes on. If you are saying all of these yeses, then you're stretching yourself too thin, and you're not having fun. You're not enjoying yourself, and you're not being the best version of yourself among other people. I really would like to make sure that people understand this is not about just saying, [expletive] off, I don't care, I'm opting out of life. This is - it's really about opting in.

BALABAN: Sarah Knight is much happier since saying no to her old life and moving to the Dominican Republic. But she understands that, under normal circumstances, saying no even on a smaller scale can be really, really hard for a lot of people. Like everyone else, she's been quarantining for the past month and a half. And she's been thinking a lot about how having to social distance, not being able to go out, to say yes to things, to overbook ourselves is kind of like taking a crash course in her books. And maybe that's a silver lining.

KNIGHT: You know, I'm hopeful that we're all going to come out of this with some better perspective on what's important, what isn't. We're all going to have had some time to take a crack at cleaning out our mental barns, you know, and putting some things in the joy column and a lot of things in the annoy column and not letting them back in when the world opens up again. You know, I'm hopeful that we can just go out there and say no.

BALABAN: Sarah Knight says if this pandemic puts her out of business, so be it. Samantha Balaban, NPR News.