Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

Equalization is present in every experience because the drive to equalize is emotion itself.

Anger is the desire to equalize through force and aggression.

Our Thinking Brain decides how things are, and our Feeling Brain decides how things ought to be.

When we stop valuing something, it ceases to be fun or interesting to us.

“Talking too much about yourself can also be a means to conceal yourself,”

Slave morality believes that it’s the poorest and most unfortunate who deserve the most sympathy and the most respect.

While master morality believes in the necessity of hierarchy, slave morality believes in the necessity of equality.

In fact, things like plagues and famine and war and dickhead rulers with large armies often made everything worse. It was a slow, grueling, miserable existence.

And with no prospect for change or a better life in this lifetime, people drew their hope from spiritual promises of a better life in the next lifetime. Spiritual religions flourished, and dominated daily life.

Many diversions trip certain circuits in our brain, making them addictive.

But what happens when a large number of people are relatively healthy and wealthy? At that point, most economic progress switches from innovation to diversion, from upgrading pain to avoiding pain.

And as soon as the diversions show up, a psychological fragility is introduced, and everything begins to seem fucked.

The world runs on feelings.

Instead, most of us will google for what is pleasant but untrue.

Maybe what we want sucks.

But giving people too many of the diversions they want is a dangerous game to play.

The second thing that happens is that we become prone to a series of low-level addictive behaviors—compulsively checking our phone, our email, our Instagram; compulsively finishing Netflix series we don’t like; sharing outrage-inducing articles we haven’t read; accepting invitations to parties and events we don’t enjoy; traveling not because we want to but because

we want to be able to say we went. Compulsive behavior aimed at experiencing more stuff is not freedom—again, it’s kind of the opposite. Third thing: an inability to identify, tolerate, and seek out negative emotions is its own kind of confinement. If you feel okay only when life is happy and easy-breezy-beautiful-Cover-Girl, then guess what? You are not free. You are the opposite of free. You are the prisoner of your own indulgences, enslaved by your own intolerance, crippled by your own emotional weakness. You will constantly feel a need for some external comfort or validation that may or may not ever come.

If Jane has to choose between two boxes of cereal, and Mike can choose from twenty boxes, Mike does not have more freedom than Jane. He has more variety. There’s a difference. Variety is not freedom. Variety is just different permutations of the same meaningless shit.

The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation.

It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life.

You can become freer right now simply by choosing the limitations you want to impose on yourself.

If you struggle to go to the gym, then rent a locker and leave all your work clothes there so you have to go each morning.

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

Greater commitment allows for greater depth. A lack of commitment requires superficiality.

This “hacking” of life, though, simply amounts to trying to reap the rewards of commitment without actually making a commitment.

It’s empty calories for the soul.

Real freedom is repetitive, predictable, and sometimes dull.

Real freedom is seeing the world unconditionally, with the only victory being over your own desires.

They lack freedom not because they are unable to choose their pleasures, but because they are not allowed to choose their pain.

He was the first to argue that one must build character through various forms of self-denial, rather than through self-indulgence.

democracy requires a citizenry of strong maturity and character.

Over the last couple of decades, people seem to have confused their basic human rights with not experiencing any discomfort.

They want equality, but they don’t want to accept that equality requires that everybody experience the same pain, not that everybody experience the same pleasure.

The lower our tolerance for pain, the more we indulge in fake freedoms,

there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the observable universe.

The undisputed champion of the chess software world for the past few years has been an open-source program called Stockfish.

Breaks are for frail humans.

Evolution rewards the most powerful creatures, and power is determined by the ability to access, harness, and manipulate information effectively.

Our ability to process information is hamstrung by our emotional need to validate ourselves.

To create tools that promote greater character and maturity in our cultures rather than diverting us from growth.

To treat people not merely as means but also as ends, and more important, to do it at scale.

To encourage antifragility and self-imposed limitation in each of us, rather than protecting everyone’s feelings.

Don’t hope for better. Just be better.