Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

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

“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.” And if that’s not the most hardcore thing you’ve ever heard, then I want some of what you’re having.

You care because, deep down, you need to feel that sense of importance in order to avoid the Uncomfortable Truth, to avoid the incomprehensibility of your existence, to avoid being crushed by the weight of your own material insignificance. And you—like me, like everyone—then project that imagined sense of importance onto the world around you because it gives you hope.

If we don’t believe there’s any hope that the future will be better than the present, that our lives will improve in some way, then we spiritually die. After all, if there’s no hope of things ever being better, then why live—why do anything?

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?

Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction.

Basically, we are the safest and most prosperous humans in the history of the world, yet we are feeling more hopeless than ever before. The better things get, the more we seem to despair. It’s the paradox of progress.

Hope doesn’t care about the problems that have already been solved. Hope cares only about the problems that still need to be solved. Because the better the world gets, the more we have to lose. And the more we have to lose, the less we feel we have to hope for.

The constant desire to change yourself then becomes its own sort of addiction: each cycle of “changing yourself” results in similar failures of self-control, therefore making you feel as though you need to “change yourself” all over again.

The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion.

Others drive toward power. These are the most dangerous Clown Cars, as their Thinking Brains set to work justifying their abuse and subjugation of others through intellectual-sounding theories about economics, politics, race, genetics, gender, biology, history, and so on.

The problem was that people began to go too far the other way. They went from recognizing and honoring their feelings to the other extreme of believing that their feelings were the only thing that mattered.

Our Thinking Brain thinks horizontally (how are these things related?), while our Feeling Brain thinks vertically (which of these things is better/worse?). Our Thinking Brain decides how things are, and our Feeling Brain decides how things ought to be.

A person who believes he deserves special treatment because of how great he is isn’t so different from someone who believes she deserves special treatment because of how shitty she is. Both are narcissistic. Both think they’re special. Both think the world should make exceptions and cater to their values and feelings over others’.

We all overestimate our skills and intentions and underestimate the skills and intentions of others. Most people believe that they are of above-average intelligence and have an above-average ability at most things, especially when they are not and do not.

Our identities snowball through our lives, accumulating more and more values and meaning as they tumble along.

The longer we’ve held a value, the deeper inside the snowball it is and the more fundamental it is to how we see ourselves and how we see the world.

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

The stories of our past define our identity. The stories of our future define our hopes. And our ability to step into those narratives and live them, to make them reality, is what gives our lives meaning.

“Most people do not value themselves above their cultural and group values. Therefore, many people are willing to die for their highest values—for their family, their loved ones, their nation, their god.

Remember that in order to feel hope, we need to feel there’s a better future out there (values); we need to feel as though we are capable of getting to that better future (self-control); and we need to find other people who share our values and support our efforts (community).

My point is that we must all believe, on faith, that something is important. Even if you’re a nihilist, you are believing, on faith, that nothing is more important than anything else. So, in the end, it’s all faith.18

Common enemies create unity within our religion. Some sort of scapegoat, whether justified or not, is necessary to blame for our pain and maintain our hope.

Religious beliefs and their constituent tribal behaviors are a fundamental part of our nature.43 It’s impossible not to adopt them. If you think you’re above religion, that you use logic and reason, I’m sorry to say, you’re wrong: you are one of us.44 If you think you’re well informed and highly educated, you’re not: you still suck.

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

Everything is fucked. And hope is both the cause and the effect of that fuckedness.

This is maturity in action: developing higher-level and more abstract values to enhance decision making in a wider range of contexts.

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

Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.

Making the leap of faith into a virtuous adulthood requires not just an ability to endure pain, but also the courage to abandon hope, to let go of the desire for things always to be better or more pleasant or a ton of fun.

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.

Pain is the universal constant of life.

This is because pain is the experience of life itself. Positive emotions are the temporary removal of pain; negative emotions the temporary augmentation of it. 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.

Our tolerance for pain, as a culture, is diminishing rapidly. And not only is this diminishment failing to bring us more happiness, but it’s generating greater amounts of emotional fragility, which is why everything appears to be so fucked.

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

Death is psychologically necessary because it creates stakes in life. There is something to lose. You don’t know what something is worth until you experience the potential to lose it.

Ultimately, the most meaningful freedom in your life comes from your commitments, the things in life for which you have chosen to sacrifice.

Fake freedom requires the world to conform to your will. Real freedom requires nothing of the world. It is only your will.

Democracy can exist only when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you’re willing to give up some things you might want for the sake of a safe and healthy community, when you’re willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don’t go your way.

Children are the kings and queens of antifragility, the masters of pain. It is we who are afraid.