Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope - by Mark Manson
Date read: 2019-06-08How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
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This book dives into why humans do what they do and the fact that although we should be the happiest society in history given the luxuries we have today, we still need pain and struggle to feel human. Stoic philosophy mixed in with Nietzsche theories mixed with the future religion known as artificial intelligence.
My Notes
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, the more likely you are to commit suicide.
Hope doesn't care about the problems that have already been solved. Hope cares only about the problems that still need to be solved. Because the better the world gets, the more we have to lose. And the more we have to lose, the less we feel we have to hope for.
To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community.
The fact is that we require more than willpower to achieve self-control. It turns out that our emotions are instrumental in our decision making and our actions. We just don't always realize it.
Ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. This leads to the simplest and most obvious answer to the timeless question, why don't we do things we know we should do? Because we don't feel like it.
Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason but, rather, of emotion. Self-control is an emotional problem; laziness is an emotional problem; procrastination is an emotional problem; underachievement is an emotional problem; impulsiveness is an emotional problem.
The problem isn't that we don't know how not 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 decided we deserved it.
We all overestimate our skills and intentions and underestimate the skills and intentions of others.
Reexamine the experiences of your past and rewrite the narratives around them. Wait, did he punch me because I'm an awful person; or is he the awful person?
Begin writing the narratives of your future self, to envision what life would be like if you had certain values or possessed a certain identity.
All religions must start with a faith-based God Value. Doesn't matter what it is. Worshipping cats, believing in lower taxes, never letting your kids leave the house-whatever it is, it is a faith-based value that this one thing will produce the best future reality, and therefore gives the most hope. We then organize our lives, and all other values, around that value. We look for activities that enact that faith, ideas that support it, and most important, communities that share it.
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. Us-versus-them dichotomies give us the enemies we all desperately crave.
Human pain is like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Every time you knock down one kind of pain, another one pops up. And the faster you whack them, the faster they come back.
We all must have faith in something. We must find value somewhere. It's how we psychologically survive and thrive. It's how we find hope. And even if you have a vision for a better future, it's too hard to go it alone. To realize any dream, we need support networks, for both emotional and logistical reasons. It takes an army. Literally.
So, we've got it backward: everything being fucked doesn't require hope; hope requires everything being fucked.
Amor fati, for Nietzsche, meant the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness. It meant loving one's pain, embracing one's suffering. It meant closing the separation between one's desires and reality not by striving for more desires, but by simply desiring reality.
What matters are a person's intentions. 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 Formula of Humanity states, "Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means."
To transcend the transactional realm of hope, one must act unconditionally. You must love someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise it's not truly love. You must respect someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise you don't truly respect him. You must speak honestly without expecting a pat on the back or a high-five or a gold star next to your name; otherwise you aren't truly being honest.
Because Kant understood that when you get into the business of deciding and dictating the future, you unleash the destructive potential of hope. You start worrying about converting people rather than honoring them, destroying evil in others rather than rooting it out in yourself.
Instead, he decided that the only logical way to improve the world is through improving ourselves-by growing up and becoming more virtuous-by making the simple decision, in each moment, to treat ourselves and others as ends, and never merely as means. Be honest. Don't distract or harm yourself. Don't shirk responsibility or succumb to fear. Love openly and fearlessly. Don't cave to tribal impulses or hopeful deceits. Because there is no heaven or hell in the future. There are only the choices you make in each and every moment.
What we find, then, is that our emotional reactions to our problems are 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.
Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons. Because if we're going to be forced to suffer by simply existing, we might as well learn how to suffer well.
If any of these things is fragile in your life, it is because you have chosen to avoid the pain. You have chosen childish values of chasing simple pleasures, desire, and self-satisfaction.
Meditation is, at its core, a practice of antifragility: training your mind to observe and sustain the never-ending ebb and flow of pain and not to let the "self" get sucked away by its riptide. This is why everyone is so bad at something seemingly so simple.
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.
Freedom is not having more brands of cereal to choose from, or more beach vacations to take selfies on, or more satellite channels to fall asleep to. That is variety. And in a vacuum, variety is meaningless. If you are trapped by insecurity, stymied by doubt, and hamstrung by intolerance, you can have all the variety in the world. But you are not free.
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.
The pain of regular physical exercise ultimately enhances your physical freedom-your strength, mobility, endurance, and stamina. The sacrifice of a strong work ethic gives you the freedom to pursue more job opportunities, to steer your own career trajectory, to earn more money and the benefits that come with it. The willingness to engage in conflict with others will free you to talk to anyone, to see if they share your values and beliefs, to discover what they can add to your life and what you can add to theirs.
Freedom itself demands discomfort. It demands dissatisfaction. Because the freer a society becomes, the more each person will be forced to reckon and compromise with views and lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own. The lower our tolerance for pain, the more we indulge in fake freedoms, the less we will be able to uphold the virtues necessary to allow a free, democratic society to function.
AI will reach a point where its intelligence outstrips ours by so much that we will no longer comprehend what it's doing. Cars will pick us up for reasons we don't understand and take us to locations we didn't know existed. We will unexpectedly receive medications for health issues we didn't know we suffered from. It's possible that our kids will switch schools, we will change jobs, economic policies will abruptly shift, governments will rewrite their constitutions-and none of us will comprehend the full reasons why. It will just happen.
I believe artificial intelligence is Nietzsche's "something greater." It is the Final Religion, the religion that lies beyond good and evil, the religion that will finally unite and bind us all, for better or worse.
So, instead of looking for hope, try this: Don't hope. Don't despair, either. In fact, don't deign to believe you know anything. It's that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place. Don't hope for better. Just be better.