# Everything Is F*cked - Mark Manson Synced: [[2023_11_30]] 6:03 AM Last Highlighted: [[2020_01_22]]  ## Highlights [[2020_01_06]] (Location 248) > 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. [[2020_01_07]] (Location 376) > The Soviet Union, of all places, was the first country to outlaw the lobotomy. The Soviets declared the procedure “contrary to human principles” and claimed that it “turned an insane person into an idiot.”7 This was sort of a wake-up call to the rest of the world, because let’s face it, when Joseph Stalin is lecturing you about ethics and human decency, you know you’ve fucked up. [[2020_01_07]] (Location 458) > The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion. [[2020_01_07]] (Location 466) > 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. [[2020_01_07]] (Location 481) > As Daniel Kahneman once put it, the Thinking Brain is “the supporting character who imagines herself to be the hero.” [[2020_01_07]] (Location 555) > The overindulgence of emotion leads to a crisis of hope, but so does the repression of emotion. [[2020_01_07]] (Location 557) > The person who denies his Feeling Brain numbs himself to the world around him. By rejecting his emotions, he rejects making value judgments, that is, deciding that one thing is better than another. As a result, he becomes indifferent to life and the results of his decisions. He struggles to engage with others. His relationships suffer. And eventually, his chronic indifference leads him to an unpleasant visit with the Uncomfortable Truth. After all, if nothing is more or less important, then there’s no reason to do anything. And if there’s no reason to do anything, then why live at all? Meanwhile, the person who denies his Thinking Brain becomes impulsive and selfish, warping reality to conform to his whims and fancies, which are then never satiated. His crisis of hope is that no matter how much he eats, drinks, dominates, or fucks, it will never be enough—it will never matter enough, it will never feel significant enough. He will be on a perpetual treadmill of desperation, always running, though never moving. And if at any point he stops, the Uncomfortable Truth immediately catches up to him. [[2020_01_07]] (Location 658) > Put another way, 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. [[2020_01_09]] (Location 776) [[favorite]] > 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. [[2020_01_09]] (Location 809) > Our Self-Worth Equals the Sum of Our Emotions Over Time [[2020_01_11]] (Location 1470) > someone really could solve all your problems, they’d go out of business by next Tuesday (or get voted out of office next week). Leaders need their followers to be perpetually dissatisfied; it’s good for the leadership business. If everything were perfect and great, there’d be no reason to follow anybody. No religion will ever make you feel blissful and peaceful all the time. No country will ever feel completely fair and safe. No political philosophy will solve everyone’s problems all the time. True equality can never be achieved; someone somewhere will always be screwed over. True freedom doesn’t really exist because we all must sacrifice some autonomy for stability. No one, no matter how much you love them or they love you, will ever absolve that internal guilt you feel simply for existing. It’s all fucked. Everything is fucked. It always has been and always will be. There are no solutions, only stopgap 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.42 This is our fucked-up world. And we’re the fucked-up ones in it. [[2020_01_15]] (Location 1737) > genocides. Hitler hoped to exterminate the Jews to bring about an evolutionarily superior human race. The Soviets hoped to instigate a [[2020_01_15]] (Location 1743) > So far, I’ve argued that hope is fundamental to our psychology, that we need to (a) have something to look forward to, (b) believe ourselves in control of our fate enough to achieve that something, and (c) find a community to achieve it with us. [[2020_01_15]] (Location 1746) > Experiences generate emotions. Emotions generate values. Values generate narratives of meaning. And people who share similar narratives of meaning come together to generate religions. The more effective (or affective) a religion, the more industrious and disciplined the adherents. And the more industrious and disciplined the adherents, the more likely the religion is to spread to other people, to give them a sense of self-control and a feeling of hope. These religions grow and expand and eventually define in-groups versus out-groups, create rituals and taboos, and spur conflict between groups with opposing values. These conflicts must exist because they maintain the meaning and purpose for people within the group. [[2020_01_15]] (Location 1753) > The sources of hope that give our lives a sense of meaning are the same sources of division and hate. The hope that brings the most joy to our lives is the same hope that brings the greatest danger. The hope that brings people closest together is often the same hope that tears them apart. Hope is, therefore, destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what currently is. Because hope requires that something be broken. Hope requires that we renounce a part of ourselves and/or a part of the world. It requires us to be anti-something. This paints an unbelievably bleak picture of the human condition. It means that our psychological makeup is such that our only choices in life are either perpetual conflict or nihilism—tribalism or isolation, religious war or the Uncomfortable Truth. [[2020_01_17]] (Location 2415) [[favorite]] > The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading. 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. [[2020_01_20]] (Location 2618) > As the Enlightenment thinkers saw science and wealth alleviate poverty, starvation, and disease from the population, they mistook this improvement of pain to be the elimination of pain. Many public intellectuals and pundits continue to make this mistake today: they believe that growth has liberated us from suffering, rather than merely transmuting that suffering from a physical form to a psychological form.28 [[2020_01_20]] (Location 2739) > The commercial age commenced in the early twentieth century with Bernays’s discovery that you could market to people’s unconscious feelings and desires.9 Bernays wasn’t concerned with penicillin or heart surgery. He was hawking cigarettes and tabloid magazines and beauty products—shit people didn’t need. And until then, nobody had figured out how to get people to spend copious amounts of money on stuff that wasn’t necessary for their survival. [[2020_01_20]] (Location 2836) > This is the problem with exalting freedom over human consciousness. More stuff doesn’t make us freer, it imprisons us with anxiety over whether we chose or did the best thing. More stuff causes us to become more prone to treating ourselves and others as means rather than ends. It makes us more dependent on the endless cycles of hope. [[2020_01_21]] (Location 3040) > The old gods will be replaced by the new gods: the algorithms. And in a twist of evolutionary irony, the same science that killed the gods of old will have built the gods of new. There will be a great return to religiosity among mankind. And our religions won’t necessarily be so different from the religions of the ancient world—after all, our psychology is fundamentally evolved to deify what it doesn’t understand, to exalt the forces that help or harm us, to construct systems of values around our experiences, to seek out conflict that generates hope. [[2020_01_22]] (Location 3194) > dare to hope that there will be tools to help people understand statistics, proportions, and probability in real time and realize that, no, a few people getting shot in the far corners of the globe does not have any bearing on you, no matter how scary it looks on TV; that most “crises” are statistically insignificant and/or just noise; and that most real crises are too slow-moving and unexciting to get the attention they deserve. [[2020_01_22]] (Location 3197) > I dare to hope that education will get a much-needed facelift, incorporating not only therapeutic practices to help children with their emotional development, but also letting them run around and scrape their knees and get into all sorts of trouble. Children are the kings and queens of antifragility, the masters of pain. It is we who are afraid. [[2020_01_22]] (Location 3203) > dare to hope that AI hurries along and develops some new virtual reality religion that is so enticing that none of us can tear ourselves away from it long enough to get back to fucking and killing each other. It will be a church in the cloud, except it will be experienced as one universal video game. There will be offerings and rites and sacraments just as there will points and rewards and progression systems for strict adherence. We will all log on, and stay on, because it will be our only conduit for influencing the AI gods and, therefore, the only wellspring that can quench our insatiable desire for meaning and hope.