Everything is F*cked – by Mark Manson

‘A book about hope’

In the infinite expanse of space/time, the universe does not care whether your mother’s hip replacement goes well, or your kids attend college, or your boss thinks you make a great spreadsheet

You care, and you desperately convince yourself that because you care, it all must have some great cosmic meaning behind it. You care because deep down, you need to feel that sense of importance in order to avoid the uncomfortable truth, to avoid the incomprehensibility of your existence, to avoid being crushed by the weight of your own material insignificance, and you like everyone – project an imagined sense of importance onto the world around you because it gives you hope.

You might say: “I believe we’re all here for a reason, and nothing is a coincidence, and everyone matters because all our actions affect SOMEBODY, and even if we can help one person, then it was all worth it”

This is hope. That’s a story made up in your mind that your brain spins to convince you that it’s worth waking up in the morning. SOMETHING needs to matter because without something mattering, then there’s no reason to go on living.

Grab a copy of the book here: https://www.bookdepository.com/Everything-Is-F-cked-Mark-Manson/9780062888464/?a_aid=adamsbooks

How may I help you?

Manson has the idea of instead of writing people’s names on their coffee cups, putting

“one day you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extreemly brief period of time, little of what you say or do will even matter. This is the uncomfortable truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it.”

We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumming and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose – we are nothing…

Enjoy your fucking coffee”

That’s the Uncomfortable Truth of Life.

UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH OF LIFE

How could you tell someone have a nice day while knowing all thier thoughts and motivations stem from a never ending need to avoid the inherent meaningless of human existence. In the infinite expanse of space/time, the universe does not care whether your mother’s hip replacement goes well, or your kids attend college, or your boss thinks you make a bitching spreadsheet.

You care, and you desperately convince yourself that because you care, it all must have some great cosmic meaning behind it. You care because deep down, you need to feel that sense of importance in order to avoid the uncomfortable truth, to avoid the incomprehensibility of your existence, to avoid being crushed by the weight of your own material insignificance, and you like everyone – project an imagined sense of importance onto the world around you because it gives you hope.

You might say: “I believe we’re all here for a reason, and nothing is a coincidence, and everyone matters because all our actions affect SOMEBODY, and even if we can help one person, then it was all worth it”

This is hope. That’s a story made up in your mind that your brain spins to convince you that it’s worth waking up in the morning. SOMETHING needs to matter because without something mattering, then there’s no reason to go on living

Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness and depression. It is the source of all misery and all addiction. Chronic anxiety is a crisis of hope, it is the fear of a failed future. The avoidance of hopelessness – that is the construction of hope – then becomes our mind’s primary project. All meaning, everything we understand about ourselves and the world is constructed for the purpose of maintaining hope

You start with the Uncomfortable Truth of Life:

You and everyone you know and love will die, and aside from a miniscule amount of important people, nothing you say or do will ever matter in the grand scheme of things.

From there, you must slowly build up a convincing case for hope.

• A hope that can bring us together rather than tear us apart
• A hope that is robust and powerful, yet still grounded in reason and reality
• A hope that can carry us to the end of our days with a sense of gratitude and satisfaction

The Paradox of Progress

We live in an interesting time that materially things are arguably better than ever before, yet we all seem to be losing our minds thinking the world is a giant toilet bowl about to be flushed. An irrational sense of hopelessness is spreading across the rich, developed world. It’s a paradox of progress, the better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel.

Steve Pinker and Hans Rosling (better angles of our nature & factfulness) write on how progress has continued uninterrupted throughout modern history:

• People are more educated than ever
• Violence has trended down for decades
• Racism, sexism, discrimination, and violence against woman are at their lowest points in history
• Half the planet has access to the internet
• Extreme poverty is at an all time low

For all the good news today, there are some other surprising statistics. In the USA, symptoms of depression and anxiety are on an 8 year upswing among young people and a 20 year upswing in the adult population

Basically we are the safest and mot prosperous humans in the history of hte world, yet we are feeling more hopeless than ever. The better things get, the more we seem to despair. It can be summed up in one startling fact

The wealthier and safer you live, the more likely you are to commit suicide.

TWO BRAINS

There’s pretty much always been a tacit assumption that our emotions cause all our problems, and that our reason must swoop to clean up the mess. This asumption is the ‘classic assumption’

IT SAYS THAT: If a person is undisciplined / unruly / malicious, it’s because he lacks the ability to subjugate his feelings / that he is weak-willed / or that he is just plain fucked up. The Classic Assumption sees passion and emotion as flaws, errors within the human psyche that must be overcome and fixed within the self.

Today we usually judge people based on the Classic Assumption. Obese people are ridiculed and shamed because their obesity is seen as a failure of self-control, they KNOW they should be thin, but they continue to eat. We assume that something must be wrong with them. Smokers, drug addicts, criminals, all get the same treatment. Same as depressed and suicidal epople – they’re told that their inability to create hope and meaning in their lives is their own fault, maybe if they tried a little harder then they would want to go on living happily ever after.

We see succumbing to our emotional impulses as a moral failing. We see a lack of self control as a deficient character. Conversely, we celebrate people who beat their emotions into submission – we get collective hard ons for businessmen, athletes, leaders, anyone who is robotic in their efficiency.

We often develop the false belief that we need to change who we are. If we can’t achieve the goal, lose the weight or get the promotion, then it signifies an internal deficiency. In order to maintain hope we must change ourselves, become somebody different

You have two brains, and they’re really bad at talking to each other.

You mind is a car, the “Consciousness Car”. You drive along the road, there are onramps and offramps, turns and intersections. These are the decisions you must make as you’re driving. These determine the direction of your life.

There are two travellers in the Consciousness Car: the Thinking Brain and the Feeling Brain. The Thinking Brain represents conscious thought, 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 your Thinking Brain is calculating payment schedules on your credit card statement, your Feeling Brain wants to sell everything and run away to Tahiti

Each of your brains have strengths and weaknesses. The Thinking Brain is conscientious, accurate, and impartial

• It is methodical and rational, but also slow
• It requires a lot of effort and energy
• Like a muscle, it must be built up over time and can become exhausted from overuse

The Feeling Brain, however, arrives at conclusions quickly and effortlessly

• The problem is that it is often inaccurate and irrational
• The Feeling Brain is a bit of a Drama Queen and has a bad habit of overreacting

When we think of ourselves and our Decision Making, we generally assume that the Thinking Brain is DRIVING our consciousness car. We see the Feeling Brain as sitting in the passenger seat randomly shouting out where it wants to go.

BUT – our Consciousness Car doesn’t work that way.

Actually, our Feeling Brain is DRIVING the Consciousness Car. It doesn’t matter how scientific you think you re or how many fancy letters you have after your name, you’re still a crazy Feeling Brian piloted meat robot just like the rest of us

The Feeling Brain is driving the Consciousness Car because ultimately we are moved to action only by emotion. 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

ADULT VALUES

As a kid you learn that ice cream is better than a hot stove. It was the discovery of this preference, was the discovery of priorities. After seeing your mum get pissed off enough times you begin to figure out that raiding the freezer and stealing desert is always bad, not just when its ice cream.

As a result some general principles emerge in our minds:

• Take care around dangerous things so you won’t get hurt
• Be honest with your parents and they’ll treat you well
• Share with siblings and they’ll share with you

The adolescent does the same stumbling around the young child does in learning what is pleasurable and what is painful, except the adolescent stumbles around by trying on different social rules and roles:

• If I wear this – will it make me look cool? If I talk like that, will people like me?
• 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 a pleasurable end
• The problem with adolescent values is that you hold them, you never actually stand for something outside yourself

An adolescent will say she values honesty only because she has learned it produces good results. But when confronted with difficult conversations, she will tell white lies, exaggerated the truth and become passive aggressive. An adult will be honest for the simple sake that honesty is more important than her own pleasure or pain:

• Honesty is more important than getting what you want or achieving a goal
• Honesty is inherently good and valuable, in and of itself
• Honesty is an end, not a means to some end

FAKE FREEDOM VS REAL FREEDOM

Corporation hide behind the fact that “we’re just giving people what they want”. They’re just giving us what we WANT, but maybe what we want sucks.

EG: Manson says he WANTS a life-size packet of marshmallows in his living room, he WANTS an $8m mansion that he’ll never be able to pay off, he WANTS to fly to a new beach every week on eat nothing but Wagyu steaks. But what he wants is fucking terrible.

The Feeling Brain is in charge of what we WANT. So – ‘Giving people what they want’ is a pretty low bar…

If people what they want’ if merely giving people diversions from their pain, like social media to scroll through, or cheeseburgers and ice creams to gorge themselves on, or cigarettes to divert them from their stress, then ‘giving what they want’ is a very immoral stance to take as a business. These things, these diversions, give us the feeling of ‘freedom’ (temporary freedom from our pain), but really this if just #FakeFreedom

REAL FREEDOM COMES FROM SACRIFICE AND CHOOSING WHAT TO GIVE UP

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 just ‘real freedom’, it’s the ONLY freedom.

Diversions come and go, pleasures never last, 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. This sort of self-denial is paradoxically the only things that expands real freedom in life.

The pain of regular exercise ultimately enhances your physical freedom (strength, mobility, endurance). The sacrifice of a strong work ethic gives you the freedom to pursure 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 that they can add to your life and what you can add to theirs.

You can become freer right now simply by choosing the limitations you want to impose on yourself. You can choose to wake up earlier each morning, to block your email until midday each day, to delete social media apps from your phone. These limitations will free you because they will liberate your time, attention, and power of choice. They treat your consciousness as an end in itself.