Everything is F*cked
Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope by Mark Manson
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
Everything we do has no cosmic meaning. This is the uncomfortable truth that we all attempt to hide with hope.
But hope is fucked for all kinds of reasons.
Therefore, we should not hope for better. But, be better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.
🎨 Impressions
This book uncovers some revolutionary ideas about the meaning of life. We all hope that things will be better, but Mark shows that we will never get that life we hope for. Maybe life would be better without hope - and he demonstrates what this would look like. Excellent studies and easy to remember, comical examples are used. And it is written in Mark's usual tone - as if he is talking to you.
How I Discovered It
Mark Manson is one of my all time favourite authors and thinkers. I have re-read this book and will re-read again in the future.
Who Should Read It?
If want a different perspective to the meaning of life, to uncover some radical truths about the world we live in this is the book. The ideas are definitely radical.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
The opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless grey horizon of resignation and indifference.3 It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all?
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 only true meaning in existence is the ability to form meaning
📒 Summary + Notes
The Uncomfortable Truth
Being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none. To strike a match to light up the void. To show us a possibility for a better world - not a better world we want to exist, but a better world that we didn't know could exist. To take a situation where everything seems to be fucked, and to somehow make it good.
Bravery and resilience are common. But heroism has a philosophical component to it - there is some great 'why' - some incredible cause or belief.
This is why as a culture we are so desperate for a hero today - not because things are necessarily so bad but because we've lost that clear why that drove previous generations.
We are a culture in need not of peace or prosperity or anything material. We have all that. We are a culture in need of something much more precarious. We are a culture in need of hope.
The universe doesn't care about anything. We care and convince ourselves that as we care that it must have some great cosmic meaning to it. We care because deep down we need to feel that sense of importance in order to avoid the Uncomfortable Truth, to avoid the incomprehensibility of our existence, to avoid being crushed by our own material insignificance. We, like everyone, project that imagined sense of importance onto the world around us as it gives us hope.
Our psyche needs hope to survive. Hope is the fuel of our mental engine.
The opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless grey horizon of resignation and indifference. It is the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all.
Chronic anxiety is the crisis of hope. The avoidance of hopelessness - that is the construction of hope - becomes our minds primary project. Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves.
When people talk about needing to find their 'life purpose' what they really mean is that it’s no longer clear what matters, what is worthy of their limited time on Earth - or what to hope for.
The better the world gets, the more we have to lose, the less we have to hope for.
To build and maintain hope we need:
a sense of control
a belief in the value of something
a community
Without a community we feel isolated, and our values cease to mean anything. Without values, nothing appears worth pursing. And without control we feel powerless to pursue anything. Lose any of the three and you lose hope.
Self-Control is an Illusion
The classic assumption - that we use our rational mind to dominate our emotions - this idea has trickled down through the centuries to define much of our culture today. People judge people based of this - obese people are ridiculed and shamed because there obesity is seen as a failure of self-control - they know they should be thin but continue to eat.
We see succumbing to our emotional impulses as a moral failure. We see a lack of self-control as a sign of deficient character.
We decide in order to maintain hope, we must decide to change ourselves. This desire to change ourselves refills us with hope. The 'old me' couldn't shake that smoking habit but the 'new me' will.
The constant desire to change yourself can become an addiction in itself. Changing yourself results in similar failures of self-control therefore making you feel you need to change again. Each cycle refuels you with the hope you are looking for.
But we require more than just willpower to achieve self-control. It turns out our emotions are instrumental to our decision making and actions. We just don't always realise it.
We are only moved to action by emotion.
Why don't we do things we know we should? Because we don't feel like it. Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information, disciplines or reason but of emotion. This sucks - because emotional problems are harder to solve than logical ones. There are no equations to help you end a bad relationship. Intellectually understanding how to change your behaviour doesn't change your behaviour.
Emotional problems can only have emotional solutions.
We should create an environment that bring about the feeling brains best impulses and intuition, rather than its worst. Accept and work with, rather than against, whatever the feeling brain spews out.
Newtons Law of Emotions
1: For every action there is an equal and opposite emotional reaction
The idea that we experience pain without justification, without us deserving pain generates injustice between 2 people/2 things. A moral gap opens up: one feels inherently righteous and the other inferior.
Pain causes moral gaps. When confronted with moral gap, we develop overwhelming emotions towards equalisation or a return of moral equality.
This desire of equalisation underlines our sense of justice that has been codified throughout the ages into rules and laws.
2: Our self-worth equals the sum of our emotions over time
When moral gaps persist for long enough, they normalise. They become our default expectation. They lodge themselves into our value hierarchy.
This is part of a hope response - if equalisation seems impossible we do the next best thing - accept defeat, give in and judge ourselves as inferior and of low value.
People make mistakes, life is difficult, most of us are winging it all the time. We have some sense of false belief in our own superiority (or inferiority) or a deluded belief that we are extraordinary at something. Without that little bit of delusion, that perpetual lie we tell ourselves about our specialness, we'd likely give up hope. But this comes at a cost - if we believe we are best or worst in the world than we believe we are in some way separate from the world. And this separateness is what perpetuates unnecessary suffering.
3: Your identity will stay your identity until a new experience acts against it
The longer we hold a value, the deeper inside the snowball it is and the more fundamental it is to how we see ourselves and how we see the world. Our values compound over time, growing stronger and colouring future experiences.
The only way to change our values is to have experiences that our contrary to our values. And any attempt to break free from those values through our new or contrary experiences will inevitable be met with pain ad discomfort. There is no growth without discomfort.
How to Make All Your Dreams Come True
If someone really could solve all your problems -they would instantly go our of business. Leaders need their followers to be perpetually dissatisfied - its good for the leadership business. If everything were perfect and great there'd be no reason to follow anybody.
True freedom doesn't really exist because we all must sacrifice some autonomy for stability.
Everything is fucked. it always has been and it always will be. There are no solutions, only stop-gap measures, only incremental improvements, only slightly better forms of fuckedness than others, And it’s time we stop running from that and instead embrace it. This is our fucked up world and we're the fucked up ones in it.
We must have faith in something. But experiencing our hopes, we lose them. Because the only thing that can every truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.
Hope is Fucked
Science is arguably the most effective religion because it is the most effective religion because it is the first religion that is able to evolve and improve upon itself. It is open to anybody and everybody. It is not moored to a single book or creed. It is not beholden to some ancient land or people. It is an ongoing, ever-changing body of evidence-based belies that can grow and shift as evidence dictates.
It also introduced the world to the concept of growth. People previously would live their entire lives and nothing changed. It was a slow, gruelling, miserable existence. And with no prospect for change or a better life in this lifetime, people drew their hopes form spiritual promises of a better life in the next lifetime.
People started to look back 10 years and say 'can you believe we used to live like that?' - this ability to look back and see progress, see growth happen, changed how people viewed the future. It changed how they viewed themselves. Forever. Now, you didn't have to wait until death to improve your lot. You could improve it in the here and now. You now had control of your destiny - you had responsibility for it.
Ideologies, because they are constantly challenged, changed, proven and disproven offer scant psychological stability upon which to build ones hope. And when the ideological foundation of our belief system and value hierarchies are shaken - it throws us into the uncomfortable truth.
Experiences generate emotions. Emotions generate values. Values generate narrative of meaning. And people who share similar narratives of meaning and come together to generate religions. The more disciplines and industrious the religion, the more likely it is to spread, to give them a sense of self-control and a feeling of hope. These religions expand and define in-groups and out-groups, create rituals and taboos and spur conflict between groups with opposing values. These conflicts exist because they maintain the meaning and purpose for people within the group.
Therefore this conflict maintains hope. We have it backwards - everything being fucked doesn't require hope; hope requires everything being fucked. The sources of hope that gives our lives a sense of meaning are the same sources of division and hate.
Hope is therefore destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what currently is. Hope requires something to be broken. It requires us to be anti-something.
Therefore we should develop an unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs, lows, meaning and meaningless. Loving ones pain and embracing ones suffering.
Hope for nothing - hope for what already is - because hope is ultimately empty.
Hope for this. Hope for the infinite opportunity and oppression in every single moment.
And then act despite it. This is our challenge. To act without hope. To not hope for better. To be better. In this moment and the next, and the next.
Part 2: What a life without hope may look like
The Formula of Humanity
Everything is seen as a trade-off. Adolescents approach life as an endless series of bargains. I will do what my boss says for money. I will call my mother so I don't get yelled at. I will do my homework to have better chances in the future. Nothing is done for its own sake. Everything is a means to some pleasurable end. Everything resolves around maximising pleasure and minimising pain.
If you have to convince someone to trust you, they will never trust you. The most precious and important things in life are non-transactional. Honesty is inherently good and valuable in and of itself. Honest is therefore an end and not a means to another end.
When you enforce freedom, you negate freedom. When you try to create equality, you undermine quality.
The most dangerous extremists know how to dress up their childish values in the language of transaction or universal principle. If someone says they desire freedom above all else, they are willing to make sacrifices for that freedom. But what they really mean is they want freedom from having to deal with any values that do not map onto theirs. Therefore they are willing to limit and destroy the freedom of others in the name of their own freedom.
Pain is the Universal Constant
The Blue Dot Effect: humans warp their perceptions to fit their expectations. Eg researchers showed participants a large number of threatening faces, but as the experiment went on they showed fewer and fewer. The subjects then began to misread friendly, neutral faces as being threatening. They had a pre-set number of threatening faces it expected to see. Peoples minds moved the fence to maintain the perception that a certain number of faces were threatening, without being aware they were doing so. Ultimately, the better things get, the more we perceive threats where there are none and the more upset we get - this is the heart of the paradox of progress.
If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn't feel good about it. We would get equally upset about the minor stuff.
No matter how much progress is made, no matter how peaceful, comfortable, happy our life becomes, the Blue Dot Effect will snap us back to a perception of a certain amount of pain and dissatisfaction.
This is why hope is self-defeating and self-perpetuating, no matter what peace and prosperity we fin, out mind will quickly adjust its expectations to achieve a steady sense of adversity. Forcing the formulation of a new hope, a new religion, a new conflict to keep us going. No matter how sunny our day is, we'll always find that one cloud in the sky.
Living well does not mean avoiding to suffer - it means suffering for the right reasons. Because, if we are going to be forced to suffer for existing - we might as well learn how to suffer well.
Death is psychologically necessary because it creates stakes in life - there is something to lose. 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.
When we pursue pain, we are able to choose what pain we bring into our lives. And this choice makes the pain meaningful , it is what makes life meaningful. All that is required is that we engage with it, and find value and meaning in it. Pain is the source of all value. To numb ourselves of pain is to numb ourselves to anything that matters in the world. When we deny ourselves to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.
The Feelings Economy
The more you numb pain, the worse it becomes thus impelling you to numb it further. Most economic progress switches from innovation to diversion, from upgrading pain to avoiding pain.
Real freedom is not choosing the thing you want in life, it is choosing what to give up. 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.
Greater commitment allows for greater depth. A lack of commitment requires superficiality.
Fake freedom puts us on a treadmill chasing more, whereas real freedom is the conscious decision to live with less. Fake freedom is addictive no matter how much you have, you always feel as though it’s not enough. Real freedom is repetitive, predictable and sometimes dull. Real freedom is seeing the world unconditionally, with the only victory being over your own desires. Fake freedom requires the world to conform to your will. Real freedom requires nothing of the world.
Democracy can only exist when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some things you might want for the sake of a healthy and safe community. When you are willing to compromise and accept that somethings things don't go your way.
People seen to have confused their basic human rights with not experiencing any discomfort.
People want equality but they don't want to accept that equality requires everybody to experience the same pain, not that everybody experience the same pleasure.
The lower our tolerance of pain, the more we indulge in fake freedom.
The Final Religion
While technology has liberated much of the planet from poverty and tyranny, it has produced a new kind of tyranny: a tyranny of empty, meaningless variety, a never-ending stream of unnecessary options.
The key message: Don't hope for better. Be better. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.
