Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

Our psyche needs hope to survive the way a fish needs water. Hope is the fuel for our mental engine.

It doesn’t matter if the way you get to hope is via religious faith or evidence-based theory or an intuition or a well-reasoned argument—they all produce the same result: you have some belief that (a) there is potential for growth or improvement or salvation in the future, and (b) there are ways we can navigate ourselves to get there. That’s it. Day after day, year after year, our lives are made up of the endless overlapping of these hope narratives. They are the psychological carrot at the end of the stick.

The only way to change our values is to have experiences contrary to our values.