Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

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.

To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community.

values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.

We are the most impressionable when things are at their worst.11 When our life is falling apart, it signifies that our values have failed us, and we’re grasping in the dark for new values to replace them.

Hope is based on future experience. And you must always rely on some degree of faith that something will occur again in the future.

we must all believe, on faith, that something is important.

it is a faith-based value that this one thing will produce the best future reality, and therefore gives the most hope. We then organize our lives, and all other values, around that value. We look for activities that enact that faith, ideas that support it, and most important, communities that share it.

Evidence serves the interests of the God Value, not the other way around. The only loophole to this arrangement is when evidence itself becomes your God Value. The religion built around the worship of evidence is more commonly known as “science,”

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

it’s the very fact that they think there are rules to happiness that is preventing them from being happy.21

This “hacking” of life, though, simply amounts to trying to reap the rewards of commitment without actually making a commitment. It’s another sad form of fake freedom. It’s empty calories for the soul.

Plato said that democracies inevitably lead to moral decay because as they indulge more in fake freedom, people’s values deteriorate and become more childish and self-centered, resulting in the citizenry turning on the democratic system itself. Once childish values take over, people no longer want to negotiate for power, they don’t want to bargain with other groups and other religions, they don’t want to endure pain for the sake of greater freedom or prosperity. What they want instead is a strong leader to come make everything right at a moment’s notice. They want a tyrant.29

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