Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

heroism isn’t just bravery or guts or shrewd maneuvering. These things are common and are often used in unheroic ways. No, being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none. To strike a match to light up the void. To show us a possibility for a better world—not a better world we want to exist, but a better world we didn’t know could exist.

Here’s what a lot of people don’t get: the opposite of happiness is not anger or sadness.1 If you’re angry or sad, that means you still give a fuck about something. That means something still matters. That means you still have hope.2 No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference.3 It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all?

We want to believe that changing ourselves is as simple as knowing what to change. We want to believe that the ability to do something is as simple as deciding to do it and mustering enough willpower to get there. We want to believe ourselves to be the masters of our own destiny, capable of anything we can dream.

The fact is that we require more than willpower to achieve self-control. It turns out that our emotions are instrumental in our decision making and our actions. We just don’t always realize it.

ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion.

Our crises of hope often start with a basic sense that we do not have control over ourselves or our destiny. We feel victims to the world around us or, worse, to our own minds.

through his observations, Emo Newton realized something painful that we all kind of know, but that few of us ever want to admit: that people are liars, all of us. We lie constantly and habitually.3 We lie about important things and trifling things.

we lie to others because we’re in such a habit of lying to ourselves.4

For Every Action, There Is an Equal and Opposite Emotional Reaction

Equalization is present in every experience because the drive to equalize is emotion itself.

Your Identity Will Stay Your Identity Until a New Experience Acts Against It

Our values aren’t just collections of feelings. Our values are stories.

Psychologists don’t know much for certain,32 but one thing they definitely do know is that childhood trauma fucks us up.33 This “snowball effect” of early values is why our childhood experiences, both good and bad, have long-lasting effects on our identities and generate the fundamental values that go on to define much of our lives.

“There is an emotional gravity to our values: we attract those into our orbit who value the same things we do, and instinctively repel, as if by reverse magnetism, those whose values are contrary to our own.

values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.

We all must have faith in something. Without faith, there is no hope.

Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.

“Talking too much about yourself can also be a means to conceal yourself,”

This is why heroes such as Witold Pilecki inspire us: their ability to muster enough hope to resist evil reminds us that all of us are capable of resisting evil.

This is our challenge, our calling: To act without hope. To not hope for better. To be better. In this moment and the next. And the next. And the next.

The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to immediately destroy them.

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 therefore an end, not a means to some other end.

The best way to teach an adolescent to trust is to trust him. The best way to teach an adolescent respect is to respect him. The best way to teach someone to love is by loving him.

It’s difficult to act unconditionally. You love someone knowing you may not be loved in return, but you do it anyway. You trust someone even though you realize you might get hurt or screwed over. That’s because to act unconditionally requires some degree of faith—faith that it’s the right thing to do even if it results in more pain, even if it doesn’t work out for you or the other person.

Kant started with a simple observation. In all the universe, there is only one thing that, from what we can tell, is completely scarce and unique: consciousness. To Kant, the only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the matter in the universe is our ability to reason—we’re able to take the world around us and, through reasoning and will, improve upon it.

“Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

To transcend the transactional realm of hope, one must act unconditionally. You must love someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise it’s not truly love. You must respect someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise you don’t truly respect him. You must speak honestly without expecting a pat on the back or a high-five or a gold star next to your name; otherwise you aren’t truly being honest.

Kant summed up these unconditional acts with one simple principle: you must treat humanity never merely as a means, but always as an end itself.37

That’s exactly what Kant is talking about. His Formula of Humanity states that treating any human being (or any consciousness) as a means to some other end is the basis of all wrong behavior.

Honesty is good in and of itself because it’s the only form of communication that doesn’t treat people merely as a means. Courage is good in and of itself because to fail to act is to treat either yourself or others as a means to the end of quelling your fear. Humility is good in and of itself because to fall into blind certainty is to treat others as a means to your own ends.

the only logical way to improve the world is through improving ourselves—by growing up and becoming more virtuous—by making the simple decision, in each moment, to treat ourselves and others as ends, and never merely as means.

Be honest. Don’t distract or harm yourself. Don’t shirk responsibility or succumb to fear. Love openly and fearlessly. Don’t cave to tribal impulses or hopeful deceits.

Don’t hope for a better life. Simply be a better life.

The values that define our identity are the templates that we apply to our interactions with others, and little progress can be made with others until we’ve made progress within ourselves.

self-improvement is not the cultivation of greater happiness but, rather, a cultivation of greater self-respect.

Telling ourselves that we are worthless and shitty is just as wrong as telling others that they are worthless and shitty. Lying to ourselves is just as unethical as lying to others. Harming ourselves is just as repugnant as harming others. Self-love and self-care are therefore not something you learn about or practice. They are something you are ethically called to cultivate within yourself, even if they are all that you have left.

Then Einstein came along and said, “Fuck your common sense; you know nothing, Jon Snow,” and changed the world.

there is funny story of why he mentions Einstein 😂

Yeah, “What the fuck?” is what I said, too. As Einstein once said, “Dude, that doesn’t even make sense.” Except it does (and Einstein never said that).

😂😂 ai thought this was funny. There is a story behind it.

It seems that humans, regardless of our external circumstances, live in a constant state of mild-but-not-fully-satisfying happiness. Put another way, things are pretty much always fine, but they could also always be better.

To numb one’s pain is to numb all feeling, all emotion. It is to quietly remove oneself from living.

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.

When struck by chaos and disorder, our minds set to work making sense of it all, deducing principles and constructing mental models, predicting future events and evaluating the past. This is called “learning,” and it makes us better; it allows us to gain from failure and disorder.

Meditation is, at its core, a practice of antifragility: training your mind to observe and sustain the never-ending ebb and flow of pain and not to let the “self” get sucked away by its riptide.

The Buddha said that suffering is like being shot by two arrows. The first arrow is the physical pain—it’s the metal piercing the skin, the force colliding into the body. The second arrow is the mental pain, the meaning and emotion we attach to the being struck, the narratives that we spin in our minds about whether we deserved or didn’t deserve what happened.

Buddha said that if we could train ourselves to be struck only by the first arrow, we could essentially render ourselves invincible to any mental or emotional pain.

That while pain is inevitable, suffering is always a choice.

That there is always a separation between what we experience and how we interpret that experience.

The adult has an incredibly high threshold for pain because the adult understands that life, in order to be meaningful, requires pain,

The more terrifying the world is, the more important it is to summon up the courage to face it.

You don’t know what something is worth until you experience the potential to lose it.