Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

When our Feeling Brain feels something, our Thinking Brain sets to work constructing a narrative to explain that something.

One religion falls and opens up space for the next. People who lose faith in their spiritual God will look for a worldly God. People who lose their family will give themselves away to their race, creed, or nation. People who lose faith in their government or country will look to extremist ideologies to give them hope.

Kant argued that the most fundamental moral duty is the preservation and growth of consciousness, both in ourselves and in others.

See, the problem with hope is that it is fundamentally transactional—it is a bargain between one’s current actions for some imagined, pleasant future.

To transcend the transactional realm of hope, one must act unconditionally.