Hang in there. Lifecycles manage themselves, mostly. You can write large, complete applications without handling a single explicit lifetime. The borrow checker becomes second nature once you get the hang of it. Don't feel bad for using Rc/Refcell/Clone everywhere. Your code will still be faster than it would have been in most other languages.

The thing about GC is that it doesn't free you from having to think about lifecycle management, it just frees you from having to write it down. I've seen a few memory leaks in Java programs due to people not putting enough thought into when a piece of data is no longer needed.

Granted, most programs don't run long enough/process enough data for poor lifecycle hygiene to become noticeable in GC'd languages.