Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

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.

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.

Truly adult values are antifragile: they benefit from the unexpected. The more fucked up a relationship gets, the more useful honesty becomes.

But once those innovations are integrated and everyone has a cell phone and a McDonald’s Happy Meal, the great modern diversions enter the marketplace. And as soon as the diversions show up, a psychological fragility is introduced, and everything begins to seem fucked.

The internet, in the end, was not designed to give us what we need. Instead, it gives people what they want. And if you’ve learned anything about human psychology in this book, you already know that this is much more dangerous than it sounds.

Loneliness is also a growing issue. Last year, for the first time, a majority of Americans said they were lonely, and new research is suggesting that we’re replacing a few high-quality relationships in our lives with a large number of superficial and temporary relationships.

Plato was such a badass, the word idea itself comes from him—so, you could say he invented the idea of an idea.26

Democracies are designed to reflect the will of the people. We’ve learned that people, when left to their own devices, instinctively run away from pain and toward happiness. The problem then emerges when people achieve happiness: It’s never enough. Due to the Blue Dot Effect, they never feel entirely safe or satisfied. Their desires grow in lockstep with the quality of their circumstances.