Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

My point is that all values are faith-based beliefs. Therefore, all hope (and therefore, all religions) are also based on faith, faith that something can be important and valuable and right despite the fact that there will never be a way to verify it beyond all doubt.

“Easy” mode. That’s because interpersonal religions are as common as people themselves.

Ideological religions generate hope by constructing networks of beliefs that certain actions will produce better outcomes in this life only if they are adopted by the population at large.

religion is all about emotional attachment. And the best way to build those attachments is to get people to stop thinking critically.

announced

everything is always fucked, but the more fucked things become, the more we must mobilize hope to sustain and overcome the world’s fuckedness. 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.

Just as there are healthy and damaging forms of confidence, and healthy and damaging forms of love, there are also healthy and damaging forms of hope. And the difference between the two is not always clear.

Experiences generate emotions. Emotions generate values. Values generate narratives of meaning. And people who share similar narratives of meaning come together to generate religions. The more effective (or affective) a religion, the more industrious and disciplined the

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.

because it liberates them to responsibility. It means that there’s no reason to not love ourselves and one another.

it’s the opposite: the exploratory phase wraps up because as we become older, we begin to recognize that there’s too much world to explore.

The little kid thinks, ice cream is awesome; therefore, I want ice cream. But the adolescent thinks, ice cream is awesome, but stealing stuff pisses my parents off and I’ll get punished; therefore, I’m not going to take the ice cream from the freezer.

avoiding pain often creates problems.

only about his own pleasure, whereas an adolescent learns to navigate rules and principles to achieve her goals.

It’s only when she’s old enough to ask what the pleasure is for, what the pain is for, that she can develop some meaningful narratives for herself, and establish identity.

The adolescent does the same stumbling around the young child does in learning what is pleasurable and what is painful, except the adolescent stumbles around by trying on different social rules and roles. If I wear this, will it make me cool? If I talk like that, will it make people like me? If I pretend to enjoy this music, will I be popular?

an adolescent, and an adult is not how old they are or what they do, but why they do something.

The child steals the ice cream because it feels good, and he is oblivious or indifferent to the consequences. The adolescent doesn’t steal because he knows it will create worse consequences in the future, but his decision is ultimately a bargain with his future self: I’ll forgo some pleasure now to prevent greater future pain.24

You must dress a certain way. You must speak a certain way. You must act a certain way—or else.30 Some people

The best way to teach an adolescent respect is to respect him.

he set out to use his big-biceped Thinking Brain to figure out what value

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

The only importance is the thing that decides importance.33

Kant argued that the most fundamental moral duty is the preservation and growth of consciousness, both in ourselves and in others.

He called this principle of always putting consciousness first “the Formula of Humanity,”

Work

Means are things that we do conditionally. They are what we bargain with. I don’t want to get in my car and drive, and I don’t want to pay for gas, but I do want a burrito. Therefore, I must do these other things to get that burrito.

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

treating a burrito as a means to my wife’s end is fine. It’s good to make your spouse happy sometimes! But if I treat my wife as a means to the end of sex, then I am now treating her merely as a means, and as Kant would argue, that is some shade of wrong.

lying is wrong because you are misleading another person’s conscious behavior in order...

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,

Don’t cave to tribal impulses or hopeful deceits. Because there is no heaven or hell in the future. There are only the choices you make in each and every moment.

Kant understood that there is a fundamental link between our respect for ourselves and our respect for the world. 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.39

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

your improved ability to be honest with yourself will increase how honest you are with others, and your honesty with others will influence them to be more honest with themselves, which will help them to grow and mature. Your ability not to treat yourself as a means to some other end will in turn allow you to better treat others as ends. Therefore, your cleaning up your relationship with yourself has the positive by-product of cleaning up

power attracts corrupt and childish people.

They refuse to negotiate. They refuse to appeal to a higher virtue or principle above their own selfish desires. And they cannot be trusted to follow through on the expectations of others.

Task forces designed to check unethical practices within organizations will, when deprived of bad guys to accuse of wrongdoing, begin imagining bad guys where there are none.

The Blue Dot Effect suggests that, essentially, the more we look for threats, the more we will see them, regardless of how safe or comfortable our environment actually is. And we see this playing out in the world today.

This is the Blue Dot Effect. The better things get, the more we perceive threats where there are none, and the more upset we become. And it is at the heart of the paradox of progress.

protecting people from problems or adversity

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.

On a scale of 1–10, how happy are you at this moment? What has been going on in your life?

Nobody is fully happy all the time, but similarly, nobody is fully unhappy all the time, either. 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.

“You know, if I could just have a little bit more, I’d finally get to ten and stay there.” Most of us live much of our lives this way, constantly chasing our imagined ten.

And while you’re on the awesome beach vacation, you’re like, you know what I fucking need? A goddamn piña colada! Can’t a fucker get a piña colada around here?! So, you stress about

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 slig...