Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

Pain is the currency of our values. Without the pain of loss (or potential loss), it becomes impossible to determine the value of anything at all.

The problem then emerges when people achieve happiness: It’s never enough.

They want equality, but they don’t want to accept that equality requires that everybody experience the same pain, not that everybody experience the same pleasure.

Freedom itself demands discomfort. It demands dissatisfaction. Because the freer a society becomes, the more each person will be forced to reckon and compromise with views and lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own.

the only thing all your fucked-up relationships have in common is you. Well, the only thing that all the biggest problems in the world have in common is us.

When it comes to moral questions, humanity has historically flunked the test, over and over again. Superintelligent machines will likely come to understand life and death, creation and destruction, on a much higher level than we ever could on our own. And the idea that they will exterminate us for the simple fact that we aren’t as productive as we used to be, or that sometimes we can be a nuisance, I think, is just projecting the worst aspects of our own psychology onto something we don’t understand and never will.

Don’t hope for better. Just be better. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.

I dare to hope that education will get a much-needed facelift, incorporating not only therapeutic practices to help children with their emotional development, but also letting them run around and scrape their knees and get into all sorts of trouble. Children are the kings and queens of antifragility, the masters of pain. It is we who are afraid.