Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”

the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference.

Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves. Without it, we believe we are nothing.

It’s a paradox of progress: the better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel.

The better things get, the more we seem to despair. It’s the paradox of progress. And perhaps it can be summed up in one startling fact: the wealthier and safer the place you live, the more likely you are to commit suicide.

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.

Emotion inspires action, and action inspires emotion. The two are inseparable.

The overindulgence of emotion leads to a crisis of hope, but so does the repression of emotion.

Moral gaps are where our values are born.

If your country elects a bozo whom you can’t stand, you will feel a disconnect with your nation and government and even other citizens.

Sadness is a feeling of powerlessness to make up for a perceived loss. Anger is the desire to equalize through force and aggression. Happiness is feeling liberated from pain, while guilt is the feeling that you deserve some pain that never arrived.

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

“All peoples are more the same than they are different. We all mostly want the same things out of life. But those slight differences generate emotion, and emotion generates a sense of importance. Therefore, we come to perceive our differences as disproportionately more important than our similarities. And this is the true tragedy of man. That we are doomed to perpetual conflict over the slight difference.

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).

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

Humanity is so vast and complex that our brains have trouble taking it all in.

Bad ideologies such as racism or sexism persist due to ignorance far more than malice.

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

The sickness may spread, but so does the cure, because hope is contagious. Hope is what saves the world.

Like a surgeon’s scalpel, hope can save a life, and hope can take a life. It can uplift us, and it can destroy us.

Experiences generate emotions. Emotions generate values. Values generate narratives of meaning.

Hope for this. Hope for the infinite opportunity and oppression present in every single moment. Hope for the suffering that comes with freedom. For the pain that comes from happiness. For the wisdom that comes from ignorance. For the power that comes from surrender. And then act despite it.

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

What matters are a person’s intentions. The difference between a child, an adolescent, and an adult is not how old they are or what they do, but why they do something.

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.

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

Throughout the rich and developed world, we are not living through a crisis of wealth or material, but a crisis of character, a crisis of virtue, a crisis of means and ends.

protecting people from problems or adversity doesn’t make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure.

our emotional reactions to our problems are not determined by the size of the problem. Rather, our minds simply amplify (or minimize) our problems to fit the degree of stress we expect to experience.

Pain is the universal constant of life. And human perception and expectations warp themselves to fit a predetermined amount of pain. In other words, no matter how sunny our skies get, our mind will always imagine just enough clouds to be slightly disappointed.

The pain is always there. What changes is your perception of it. And as soon as your life “improves,” your expectations shift, and you’re back to being mildly dissatisfied again.

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.

no matter how sunny our day is, we’ll always find that one cloud in the sky.

The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading. 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.

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.

Life is one never-ending stream of pain, and to grow is not to find a way to avoid that stream but, rather, to dive into it and successfully navigate its depths.

no matter how much wealth is generated in the world, the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our character, and the quality of our character is determined by our relationship to our pain.

When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.

The internet, in the end, was not designed to give us what we need. Instead, it gives people what they want.

More stuff doesn’t make us freer, it imprisons us with anxiety over whether we chose or did the best thing. More stuff causes us to become more prone to treating ourselves and others as means rather than ends. It makes us more dependent on the endless cycles of hope.

while technology has liberated much of the planet from poverty and tyranny, it has produced a new kind of tyranny: a tyranny of empty, meaningless variety, a never-ending stream of unnecessary options.

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