Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope
Mark Manson
Description
From the author of the international mega-bestseller The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck comes a counter-intuitive guide to the problems of hope.
Key words: Success, Hope, Happiness
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My Notes
Part One – Hope
The Uncomfortable Truth
This is not an overstatement. Chronic anxiety is a crisis of hope. It is fear of a failed future. Depression is a crisis of hope. It is the belief in a meaningless future. Delusion, addiction, obsession – these are all the mind’s desperate and compulsive attempts at generating hope one neurotic tic or obsessive craving at a time. The avoidance of hopelessness – that is, the construction of hope - then becomes our mind’s primary project.
When people prattle on about needing to find their ‘life’s purpose’, what they really mean is that it’s no longer clear to them what matters, what is worthy use of their limited time here on earth – in short, what to hope for.
That’s the hard part: finding that before/after for yourself. It’s difficult because there’s no way ever to know for sure if you’ve got it right. This is why a lot of people flock to religion, because religions acknowledge this permanent state of unknowing and demand faith in the face of it.
Whether we realise it or not, we all have these narratives we’ve elected to buy into for whatever reason. It doesn’t matter if the way you get to hope is via religious faith or evidence-based theory or an intuition or a well-reasoned argument – they all produce the same result: you have some belief that 9a) there is potential for growth or improvement or salvation in the future, and (b) there are ways we can navigate ourselves to get there. That’s it. Day after day, year after year, our lives are made up of the endless overlapping of these hope narratives. They are the psychological carrot at the end of the stick.
Basically, we are the safest and most prosperous humans in the history of the world, yet we are feeling more hopeless than ever before. The better things get, the more we seem to despair. It’s the paradox of progress. And perhaps it can be summed up in one startling fact: the wealthier and safer the place you live, them more likely you are to commit suicide.
To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and community. Control means we feel as though we’re in control of our own life, that we can affect our fate. Values means we find something important enough to work toward, something better, that’s worth striving for. And Community means we are part of a group that values the same things we do and is working toward achieving those things. Without a community, we feel isolated, and our values cease to mean anything. Without values, nothing appears worth pursuing. And without control, we feel powerless to pursue anything. Lose any of the three, and you lose hope.
Self-Control is an Illusion
That’s when Damasio had a brilliant realization: the psychological tests Elliot had undergone were designed to measure his ability to think, but none of the tests were designed to measure his ability to feel.
To generate hope in our lives, we must first feel as though we have control over our lives.
You have two brains and they’re really bad at talking to each other
Now, there are two travelers in your Consciousness Car: A Thinking Brain and a Feeling Brain. The Thinking Brain represents your conscious thoughts, your ability to make calculations, and your ability to reason through various options and express ideas through language. Your Feeling Brain represents your emotions, impulses, intuition, and instincts. While you’re Thinking Brain is calculating payment schedules on your credit card statement, your Feeling Brain wants to steel everything and run away to Tahiti.
Here’s the trust: the Feeling Brain is driving our Consciousness Car.
The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion. Emotion is the biological hydraulic system that pushes our bodies into movement.
The Thinking Brain makes shit up that the Feeling Brain wants to hear.
The Thinking Brain makes associations among facts, data and observations. Similarly, the Feeling Brain makes value judgements based on those same facts, data and observations. The Feeling Brain decides what is good and what is bad; what is desirable and what is undesirable; and most important, what we deserve and what we don’t deserve.
The Thinking Brain is objective and factual. The Feeling Brain is subjective and relative.
And this is the real work of anything that even resembles psychological healing; getting our values straight with our ourselves so that we can get our values straight with the world.
Put another way, the problem isn’t that we don’t know how to get punched in the face. The problem is that, at some point, likely a long time ago, we got punched in face, and instead of punching back, we decide we deserved it.
Newton’s Laws of Emotion
…people are liars, all of us. We lie constantly and habitually. We lie about important things and trifling things. And we usually don’t lie out of malice – rather, we lie to others because we’re in such a bait of lying to ourselves.
For Every Action, There is an Equal and Opposite Emotional Reaction
Wherever there is pain, there is always inherent sense of superiority/inferiority. And there’s always pain.
When confronted with moral gaps, we develop overwhelming emotions towards equalization, or a return to moral equality.
It’s our natural psychological inclination to equalize across moral gaps, to reciprocate actions: positive for positive; negative for negative. The forces that impel us to fill those gaps are our emotions.
Equalization is present is every experience because the drive to equalize is emotion itself. Sadness is feeling of powerlessness to make up for a perceived loss. Anger is the desire to equalize through force and aggression. Happiness is feeling liberated from pain, while guilt is the feeling that you deserve some pain that never arrived.
While our Thinking Brain creates factual knowledge around observations and logic, the Feeling Brain creates our values around our experiences of pain.
One way to think about it is that the Thinking Brain makes lateral connections between events (sameness, contrasts, cause/effect, etc.), while the Feeling Brain makes hierarchical connections (better/worse, more desirable/less desirable, morally superior/morally inferior). Our Thinking Brain thinks horizontally (how are these things related?), while our Feeling Brain thinks vertically (which of these things is better/worse?). Our Thinking Brain decides how things are, and our Feeling Brain decides how things ought to be.
That’s because “fun” is the product of our value hierarchies.
When moral gaps persists for a long enough time, they normalize. They become our default expectations. They lodge themselves into our value hierarchy. If someone hits us and we’re never able to hit him back, eventually our Feeling Brain will come to a startling conclusion: We deserve to be hit.
How we can come to value everything in life relative to ourselves is the sum of our emotions over time.
Self-worth is an illusion. It’s a psychological construct that our Feeling Brain spins in order to predict what will help it and what will hurt. Ultimately, we must feel something about ourselves in order to feel something about the world, and without those feelings, it’s impossible for us to find hope.
Our values aren’t just collections of feelings. Our values are stories. When our Feeling Brain feels something, our Thinking Brain sets to work constructing a narrative to explain that something.
Our narratives about ourselves and the world are fundamentally about (a) something or someone’s value and (b) whether that something/someone deserves that value.
One of the strategies our Thinking Brain uses to nudge the Feeling Brain into the correct lane of life is asking “what if” questions.
The stories of our past define our identity. The stories of our future define our hopes. And our ability to step into those narratives and live them, to make them reality, is what give our lives meaning.
“There is an emotional gravity to our values: we attract those into our obit who value the same things we do, and instinctively repel, as if by reverse magnetism, those whose values are contrary to our own”.
How to Make All Your Dreams Come True
Remember that in order to feel hope, we need to feel there’s a better future out there (values); we need to feel as though we are capable of getting to that better future (self control); and we need to find other people who share our values and support our efforts (community).
We are the most impressionable when things are at their worst.
Whatever our Feeling Brain adopts as its highest value, this tippy top of our value hierarchy becomes the lens through which we interpret all other values.
Evidence belongs to the Thinking Brain, whereas values are decided by the Feeling Brain.
People interpret the significance of their experiences through their values.
Interpersonal religions give us hope that another human being will bring us salvation and happiness.
Fandom, in general, is a low-level kind of religion.
The worship of that figure gives that fan hope of a better future, even if it’s in the form of something as simple as future films, songs or inventions.
Create a perception of “us” versus “them” in such a way that anyone who criticizes or questions “us” immediately becomes a “them”.
If you don’t’ support the war, then you support the terrorists.
Common enemies create unity within our religion. Some sort of scapegoat, whether justified or not, is necessary to blame for our pain and maintain our hope.
Rituals are visual and experiential representations of what we deem important. That’s why every good religion has them.
Remember, emotions are actions; the two are one and the same. Therefore, to modify (or reinforce) the Feeling Brain’s value hierarchy, you need some easily repeatable yet totally unique and identifiable action for people to perform. That’s where the rituals come in.
What did you ever do to deserve that? (a blessed life). How can you live in such a way as to make your life worthwhile? This is the constant, yet unanswerable question of the human condition, and why the inherent guilt of consciousness is the cornerstone of almost every spiritual religion.
Talking too much about yourself can also be a means to conceal yourself.
Experience generate emotions. Emotions generate values. Values generate narratives of meaning. And people who share similar narratives of meaning come together to generate religions.
Part Two: Everything is Fucked
The Formula of Humanity
Early in life, we are driven to explore the world around us because our Feeling Brains are collecting information on what pleases and harms us, what feels good and bad, what is worth pursuing further and what is worth avoiding. We’re building up our value hierarchy, figuring out what our first and primary values are, so that we can begin to know what to hope for.
This is maturity in action: developing higher-level and more abstract values to enhance decision making in a wider range of contexts.
A child thinks about only his own pleasure, whereas an adolescent learns to navigate the rules and principles to achieve her goals.
Nothing is done for its own sake. Everything is a calculated transaction, usually made out of fear of the negative repercussions. Everything is a means to some pleasurable end.
How to Be an Adult
Eventually though, we realize that the most important things in life cannot be gained through bargaining. You don’t want to bargain with your father for love, or your friends for companionship, or your boss for respect.
…it’s the very fact that they think there are rules to happiness that is preventing them from being happy.
The difference between a child, an adolescent, and an adult is not how old they are or what they do, but why they do something.
The One Rule for Life
The only true meaning in existence is the ability to form meaning. The only importance is the thing that decides importance.
Hope doesn’t even have to enter into the equation. Don’t hope for a better life. Simple be a better life.
Kant understood that there is a fundamental link between our respect for ourselves and our respect for the world. The values that define our identity are the templates that we apply to our interactions with others, and little progress can be made with others until we’re made progress with ourselves.
Pain is a universal constant
People’s minds moved the fence itself to maintain the perception that a certain number of proposals and requests were unethical. Basically, they redefined what was unethical without being consciously aware of doing so.
Task forces designed to check unethical practices within organizations will, when deprived of bad guys to accuse of wrongdoing, begin imagining bad guys where there were none.
Durkheim suggests that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn’t necessarily feel good about it. We’d just get equally upset about more minor stuff.
What we find, then, is that our emotional reactions to our problems and not determined by the size of the problem. Rather, our minds simply amplify (or minimize) our problems to fit the degree of stress we expect to experience.
Travelling at the speed of pain
What we believe is the universal constant of our experience is, in fact, not constant at all. And, instead, much of what we assume to be true and real is relative to our own perception.
Life is apparently nothing but bobbing up and down and around level-seven happiness.
The trick is that our brains tell us, “You know, if I could just have a little bit more, id finally get to ten and stay there.”
Most of us live much of our lives this way, constant chasing our imagined ten.
No matter how sunny our skies get, our mind will always imagine just enough clouds to be slightly disappointed.
The only choice in life
Meditation is, at its core, a practice of antifragility: training your mind to observe and sustain the never-ending ebb and flow or pain and not to let the “self” get sucked away by its riptide. This is why everyone is so bad at something seeming so simple.
While pain is inevitable, suffering is always a choice.
That there is always a separation between what we experience and how we interpret that experience.
Pain is value
Pain is the currency of our values. Without the pain of loss (or potential loss), it becomes impossible to determine the value of anything at all.
Life is one never-ending stream of pain, and to grow is not to find a way to avoid that stream but, rather, to dive into it and successfully navigate its depth.
But we seem to have forgotten what the ancients knew: that no matter how much wealth is generated in the world, the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our character, and the quality of our character is determined by our relationship to our pain.
When we pursue pain, we are able to choose what pain we bring into our lives. And this choice makes the pain meaningful – and therefore, it is what makes life meaningful.
When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.
The Feelings Economy
Bernays understood something nobody else in business had understood before him: that if you can tap into people’s insecurities, they will buy just about any damn thing you tell them too.
One of the first things you learn when you study marketing is how to find customers “pain” points…and then subtly make them feel worse. The idea is that you needle at people’s shame and insecurity and then turn around and tell them your product will resolve that shame and rid them of that insecurity. Put another way, marketing specifically identifies or accentuates the customer’s moral gaps and then offers a way to fill them.
Feelings make the world go round
The world runs on one thing: feelings.
This is because people spend money on things that make them feel good.
Real freedom
The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation. It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life.
This is not only real freedom, this is the only freedom. Diversions come and go. Pleasure never lasts. Variety loses its meaning. But you will always be able to choose what you are willing to sacrifice, what you are willing to give up.
Real freedom is the conscious decision to live with less.
We are bad algorithms
Evolution rewards the most powerful creatures, and power is determined by the ability to access, harness, and manipulate information effectively. A lion can hear its prey over a mile away. A buzzard can see a rat from an altitude of three thousand feet.
Despite all our accomplishments, the human mind is still incredibly flawed. Our ability to process information is hamstrung by our emotional need to validate ourselves.
Don’t hope for better, just “be” better.
Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.
If I dare…
…that people will demand something better of themselves first before demanding something better from the world.
