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.”

Quote re: Death

One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing. Enjoy your fucking coffee.

If there were a Hall of Fame for

But I would argue that, by themselves, they do not make you an adult. They simply prevent you from being a child, which is not the same thing. That’s because most people who do these things do them because they are rule- and transaction-based. They are a means to some superficial end. You prepare for a job interview because you want to get a good job. You learn how to clean your house because its level of cleanliness has direct consequences on what people think of you. You manage your finances because if you don’t, you will be royally fucked one day down the road. Bargaining with rules and the social order allows us to be well-functioning human beings in the world. Eventually, though, we realize that the most important things in life cannot be gained through bargaining.

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

And, as if that weren’t enough, it explains all of it in a single sentence. The Formula of Humanity states, “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.”35 That’s it. The Formula of Humanity is the single principle that pulls people out of adolescent bargaining and into adult virtue.

Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn’t make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered from dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it.