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“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”
No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference.3 It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all?
Hope doesn’t care about the problems that have already been solved. Hope cares only about the problems that still need to be solved. Because the better the world gets, the more we have to lose. And the more we have to lose, the less we feel we have to hope for. To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community.32 “Control” means
Yet Elliot’s case called all this into question. It called into question the very idea of self-control, the idea that we can logically force ourselves to do things that are good for us despite our impulses and emotions.
To generate hope in our lives, we must first feel as though we have control over our lives.
Egas Moniz discovered that if you took people with extreme anxiety, suicidal depression, or other mental health issues (aka crises of hope) and maimed their brain in just the right way, they’d chill the fuck out.
But by the 1950s, people began to notice that—and this might sound crazy—drilling a hole through somebody’s face and scraping their brain the same way you clean ice off your windshield can produce a few negative side effects.
The Soviets declared the procedure “contrary to human principles” and claimed that it “turned an insane person into an idiot.”
The Classic Assumption says that if a person is undisciplined, unruly, or malicious, it’s because he lacks the ability to subjugate his feelings, that he is weak-willed
or just plain fucked up.
Obese people are ridiculed and shamed because their obesity is seen as a failure of self-control.
Conversely, we celebrate people who beat their emotions into submission.
The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion
And as you’ve probably figured out by now, intellectually understanding how to change your behavior doesn’t change your behavior. (Trust me, I’ve read like twelve books on nutrition and am still chomping on a burrito as I write this.)
One day, he wrote in his school notebook, “I am a little fellow. Pale and weak. There is no room for me. Not in the house or in the bottom of hell. What can I do? What am I good for? I cannot but weep.”
I am impervious—an all-seeing, all-powerful, evil ass-face.
If you’re living in a democratic society that protects individual freedoms, you have Kant partially to thank for that. He was one of the first to argue that all people have an inherent dignity that must be regarded and respected.
He was one of the first to suggest the possibility of animal rights.5
Instead, he decided that the only 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, and never merely as means.
A healthy love relationship is antifragile: misfortune and pain make the relationship stronger rather than weaker.24
The human body can go either way, depending on how you use it. If you get off your ass and actively seek out pain, the body is antifragile, meaning it gets stronger the more stress and strain you put on it. The breaking down of your body through exercise and physical labor builds muscle and bone density, improves circulation, and gives you a really nice butt. But if you avoid stress and pain (i.e., if you sit on your damn couch all day watching Netflix), your muscles will atrophy, your bones will become brittle, and you will degenerate into weakness.
I will wake up at the ass-crack of dawn to work out because it will make me look sexy.
If Bernays could just hitch his “smoking equals freedom” message onto the women’s liberation movement . . . well, tobacco sales would double and he’d be a rich man. It worked. Women started smoking, and ever since, we’ve had equal-opportunity lung cancer.
The pain of regular physical exercise ultimately enhances your physical freedom—your strength, mobility, endurance, and stamina. The sacrifice of a strong work ethic gives you the freedom to pursue more job opportunities, to steer your own career trajectory, to earn more money and the benefits that come with it. The willingness to engage in conflict with others will free you to talk to anyone, to see if they share your values and beliefs, to discover what they can add to your life and what you can add to theirs.
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. Limit yourself to two to three social events each week, so you are forced to spend time with the people you care about most. Write a check to a close friend or family member for three thousand dollars and tell them that if you ever smoke a cigarette again, they get to cash it.14
So, instead of looking for hope, try this: Don’t hope. Don’t despair, either. In fact, don’t deign to believe you know anything. It’s that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place. Don’t hope for better. Just be better. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined. Many people would also throw in there “Be more human,” but no—be a better human. And maybe, if we’re lucky, one day we’ll get to be more than human.
