All rise for the ‘fuck yes or no’ girlies

Fed up of mediocre shit clogging up your life!? Girl, same. Here's how to make room for a life you *actually* love

2024 is the year I realised that I am so done with mediocre shit taking up space in my life. So-so clothes, meh friendships, half-hearted decisions, bang average TV shows; the lot of it. If there’s one thing my 30s have taught me so far, it’s that life is too short for anything that doesn’t get your tits truly tingling.

Now, I’ve been dealing with this aversion to mediocrity for a while. Maybe it’s growing up and becoming acutely more aware of the finite hours you get in life, or maybe it’s just a rising intolerance and impatience for anything shit—either way, I was never quite sure how to consistently and neatly steer clear of this stuff for good.

That is, until I stumbled across a phrase that didn’t just resonate like hell with me, but neatly wrapped up all the frustration I’d been carrying and handed me the perfect mantra for respectfully slapping it in the face in the future.

When I say that living by this rule for the last four or so months has upgraded my existence and made me a better, hotter, wiser, richer person; I’m not even joking. And, since I am no gatekeeper, that little slice of life-changing wonderment is this:

If it’s not an unequivocal FUCK YES firing on all cylinders, then it’s a no.

In short, the ‘fuck yes or no’ rule, if you will.

Now, before I go balls deep, let’s get some context going:

• I am a woman in her 30s living in the age of TikTok shop, #OOTD, and LTK.

• I have an embarrassing and enduring affinity to retail therapy.

• I’ll freely admit that I positively bask in those blissful moments after hitting Buy Now and seeing that sweet, sweet confirmation email land in my inbox.

• I’m practically a founding member of the ‘daily treat’ club.

• I get a rush of endorphins every time I return home to find yet another A&F/Zara/Mango/Cos package lovingly awaiting me on the doorstep.

• And, in my shameless defence, being a corporate girlie in a well-paid job, I’m lucky enough to be able to sidestep the typical guilt spiral of these actions because actually I can afford the three beige knitted jumpers I just ordered to sit, smugly, beside the other three beige knitted jumpers I bought last month.

However. 

AND THIS IS A BIG HOWEVER.

I had begun to lose count of the amount of times I’d ordered something online, tried it on, pontificated about it, decided to keep it, gleefully and knowingly run myself right past the 30-day returns period…only to end up selling it—New With Tags—for a tenth of the price on Vinted a few months later. And this vicious, pernicious little cycle was happening over and over and over again. My wardrobe was like a rotating conveyor belt of impulse buys built on fleeting enthusiasm, with many items barely seeing the light of day before being packaged off to my local EvRi parcel shop.

Now, I’m no economist, but even I could tell that this was not a net positive for my bank account. On the one hand, I could claim that I’m just a girl’s girl—splurging my hard-earned cash on full-price items only to ship them off to lucky buyers for a charming £5.25 (after they haggled over 25p, of course, because…Vinted). But on the other hand, it could be argued that I, in fact, am an absolute joke.

My ability to hold onto a piece of clothing to which I felt only 50-60% attached in the first place was a personality trait that I no longer wanted. It was a tough pill to swallow to realise that my sartorial deliberation was leading to bad financial decisions, and making me the owner of a balance sheet that painted me as the world’s worst—but most enthusiastic!!!—wardrobe investor.

And then the fuck yes or no rule appeared in my life. And I realised that I, avid online shopper and retail therapy enthusiast, must start holding myself accountable to its whims if I was to become a better person (and, more importantly, one with more money in her bank account and less weekly conversations with the Yodel delivery driver).

So, for my equation girlies, here’s the (very serious) mathematics of the fuck yes or no rule: 

For my normies, this simply means that if something isn’t an enthusiastic, full-body, heart-beating-faster, cannot-live-without-it FUCK YES, then it’s a no. You either want the thing with the fire of a thousand suns because nothing—I repeat, NOTHING—has ever made you feel so sassy/sexy/put together. Or you don’t want it at all. There is no in-between. No maybes. No grey area. 

If you're eyeing up a pair of boots and are only mildly interested in how they’ll fit into your wardrobe, don’t hit Buy. But if your brain is screaming, ‘I HAVE NEVER SEEN SUCH A BEAUTIFUL PAIR OF BOOTS IN ALL MY LIFE, I HAVE A MILLION OUTFITS FOR THEM, AND I MIGHT ACTUALLY DIE IF I DON’T OWN THEM,’ then that, my friend, is your fuck yes. Whack those fuckers in your basket, babe. 

This logic will save you and your bank balance countless, countless, countless times until you no longer recognise your former credit-card-happy self. She will become an effigy of the past, and you will be so much richer and hotter for it. 

Another case in point: I recently spent £4.50 on a hot chocolate with marshmallows that I didn’t really want, but my husband was getting a coffee so I thought, fuck it, why not!? And do you know what happened? I spent 15 minutes forcing down a drink I didn’t want, only to launch into such a full-blown, self-imposed guilt trip about all the unnecessary sugar I’d just ploughed into the poor, helpless baby growing in my stomach (#sixmonthspreg), that I walked straight into Tesco, bought a fruit platter, and inhaled the entire thing while berating myself for not using the fuck yes or no rule in the first place. And the guilt-ridden fruit platter cost me an additional £3.50. 

Gals, that is an £8 total I could have spent on something else. And yes, I get that £8 might not sound like much, but when you stack up as many of these mediocre purchases as I have over the years, then it adds up to A Fucking Lot. Especially when you consider it’s £8 I could have invested and in 40 years, it could have grown to £1,000. If I could count up the lost compound interest across every single meh purchase I’ve made over the years, it would make Alan Sugar cry into his computer (which is, admittedly, a fantastic vision upon which to meditate every time I’m tempted to hand over my card…again). 

What’s more, since discovering this lil goldmine of a mantra, I learned very, very, very quickly that it works across EVERYTHING. Oh yes. This dynamite of wisdom does not limit itself to wardrobe or hot chocolate purchases. Nope, embracing the fuck yes or no rule actually helps you live more intentionally across every area of your life.

To illustrate, let's pivot from purchases to people.

I once worked with a girl who was debating whether to split up with her boyfriend. So many of our lunch breaks were spent going back and forth, weighing all the what-ifs and maybes. But the harsh, cold truth was that the fuck yes had faded. In the end, she did break up with him, but if she’d embraced the fuck yes mantra sooner, she wouldn’t have wasted an additional seven months—SEVEN MONTHS—of her one, glorious, miraculous life with the wrong guy.

And I can relate. I vividly remember the moment I looked at an ex-boyfriend of mine and thought, ‘Yeah, this is a hard no for me.’ The realisation that the fuck yes part of our relationship—and let’s be real, the actual fucking too (sorry, Mum)—was gone hit me like a wet fish in the face. I no longer felt my titties tingling when I thought about what we’d built together. But I let the thing drag on for months and months because I wasn’t fuck yes or no-ing it. I was, as of then, unenlightened. And though finally breaking up after six years was one of the toughest decisions I’ve ever made, do you know what happened when I did? It opened the door to something better. Something so fuck yes with bells on that I thank my lucky stars I had the courage to ruin the life I’d built because it wasn’t giving fuck yes anymore. I only wish I’d done it sooner.

Now I feel incredibly lucky—and, okay, maybe a little bit smug—to say that not a single day goes by when I don’t look at my now-husband and think about what an absolutely monumental fuck yes he is. After almost seven years together, there’s still no one whose opinion I value more or who I’d rather spend hours arguing over who does more housework (me, but he loves to make a huge deal of the laundry; a domestic task from which I was unceremoniously banned following a rogue red sock incident in 2022). 

It took saying fuck no to something mediocre to allow me to say fuck yes to something great. My life is now infinitely better because of it. The fuck yes or no rule in action, ladies and gentlemen. 

And the thing is there are so many books, online courses, and TedTalks on how to build a life you love, but realistically, when boiled down, it all comes down to the same thing: If you don’t declutter your life of anything and everything that doesn’t make you do a happy little titty dance inside, then you’re not living your best life. Your days will be clogged up with mediocre shit for eternity and you will waste a ton of money on a Vinted business that is only ever in the black. Marie Kondo calls it ‘sparking joy’, but I prefer fuck yes or no.

So whether it’s relationships, career decisions, or your Amazon basket, I promise that becoming a founding father of the fuck yes lifestyle will dramatically upgrade your life. Begin filtering all your choices through it. Just build yourself a life full of fuck yes moments, people, things. Become a fuck yes or no girlie. See how your life improves.

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