Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

It can’t fathom contradicting the Feeling Brain or challenging it on where it’s going, and it resents you for suggesting that it should. With the Clown Car, there’s no independent thought and no ability to measure contradiction or switch beliefs or opinions. In a sense, the person with a Clown Car mind ceases to have an individual identity at all.

The problem was that people began to go too far the other way. They went from recognizing and honoring their feelings to the other extreme of believing that their feelings were the only thing that mattered. This has been particularly true for white, middle-class yuppies who were raised under the Classic Assumption, grew up miserable, and then got in touch with their Feeling Brains at a much later age. Because these people never had any real problems in their lives other than feeling bad, they erroneously came to believe that feelings were all that mattered and that the Thinking Brain’s maps were merely inconvenient distractions from those feelings. Many of these people called this shutting off of their Thinking Brains in favor of their Feeling Brains “spiritual growth,” and convinced themselves that being self-absorbed twats brought them closer to enlightenment,25 when, really, they were indulging the old Feeling Brain. It was the same old Clown Car with a new, spiritual-looking paint job.26

The overindulgence of emotion leads to a crisis of hope, but so does the repression of emotion.

The person who denies his Feeling Brain numbs himself to the world around him. By rejecting his emotions, he rejects making value judgments, that is, deciding that one thing is better than another. As a result, he becomes indifferent to life and the results of his decisions. He struggles to engage with others. His relationships suffer. And eventually, his chronic indifference leads him to an unpleasant visit with the Uncomfortable Truth. After all, if nothing is more or less important, then there’s no reason to do anything. And if there’s no reason to do anything, then why live at all?

the person who denies his Thinking Brain becomes impulsive and selfish, warping reality to conform to his whims and fancies, which are then never satiated. His crisis of hope is that no matter how much he eats, drinks, dominates, or fucks, it will never be enough—it will never matter enough, it will never feel significant enough. He will be on a perpetual treadmill of desperation, always running, though never moving. And if at any point he stops, the Uncomfortable Truth immediately catches up to him.

Good writing is writing that is able to speak to and stimulate both brains at the same time.

this is the whole problem: speaking to both brains, integrating our brains into a cooperative, coordinated, unified whole. Because if self-control is an illusion of the Thinking Brain’s overblown self-regard, then it’s self-acceptance that will save us—accepting our emotions and working with them rather than against them. But to develop that self-acceptance, we have to do some work, Thinking Brain. Let’s talk. Meet me in the next section.

Basically, you need to bargain with your Feeling Brain the way you’d bargain with a Moroccan rug seller: it needs to believe it’s getting a good deal,

whatever you do, do not fight the Feeling Brain. That just makes things worse. For one, you won’t win, ever. The Feeling Brain is always driving. Second, fighting with the Feeling Brain about feeling bad will only cause the Feeling Brain to feel even worse. So, why would you do that? You were supposed to be the smart one, Thinking Brain.

It’s hard work, but it’s arguably the only work.

you don’t get to control your feelings, Thinking Brain. Self-control is an illusion. It’s an illusion that occurs when both brains are aligned and pursuing the same course of action. It’s an illusion designed to give people hope. And when the Thinking Brain isn’t aligned with the Feeling Brain, people feel powerless, and the world around them begins to feel hopeless. The only way you consistently nail that illusion is by consistently communicating and aligning the brains around the same values. It’s a skill,

Thinking Brain. You may not have self-control, but you do have meaning control. This is your superpower. This is your gift. You get to control the meaning of your impulses and feelings. You get to decipher them however you see fit. You get to draw the map. And this is incredibly powerful, because it’s the meaning that we ascribe to our feelings that can often alter how the Feeling Brain reacts to them.

The Thinking Brain is objective and factual. The Feeling Brain is subjective and relative. And no matter what we do, we can never translate one form of knowledge into the other.33 This is the real problem of hope.

It’s rare that we don’t understand intellectually how to cut back on carbs, or wake up earlier, or stop smoking. It’s that somewhere inside our Feeling Brain, we have decided that we don’t deserve to do those things, that we are unworthy of doing them. And that’s why we feel so bad about them. This feeling of unworthiness is usually the result of some bad shit happening to us at some point. We suffer through some terrible stuff, and our Feeling Brain decides that we deserved those bad experiences. Therefore, it sets out, despite the Thinking Brain’s better knowledge, to repeat and reexperience that suffering.

Put another way, the problem isn’t that we don’t know how not to get punched in the face. The problem is that, at some point, likely a long time ago, we got punched in face, and instead of punching back, we decided we deserved it.

NEWTON’S FIRST LAW OF EMOTION For Every Action, There Is an Equal and Opposite Emotional Reaction

These are moral gaps. They are a sense that something wrong has just happened and you (or someone else) deserve to be made whole again. Wherever there is pain, there is always an inherent sense of superiority/inferiority. And there’s always pain.

This whole sense of “deserving” something is a value judgment we make in the face of a moral gap. We decide that something is better than something else; that one person is more righteous or just than another; that one event is less desirable than another. Moral gaps are where our values are born.

I just bought you a fucking house. This will open up another moral gap between us. But instead of an overwhelming feeling of wanting to equalize the pain I’ve caused you, you will instead experience an overwhelming feeling of wanting to equalize the joy I’ve created. You might hug me, say “thank you” a hundred times, give me a gift in return, or promise to babysit my cat from now until eternity. Or, if you’re particularly well mannered (and have some self-control), you may even attempt to refuse my offer to buy you a house because you recognize that it will open up a moral gap that you will never be able to surmount. You may acknowledge this by saying to me, “Thank you, but absolutely not. There’s no way for me ever to repay you.”

The forces that impel us to fill those gaps are our emotions. In this sense, every action demands an equal and opposite emotional reaction.

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Equalization is present in every experience because the drive to equalize is emotion itself. Sadness is a feeling of powerlessness to make up for a perceived loss. Anger is the desire to equalize through force and aggression. Happiness is feeling liberated from pain, while guilt is the feeling that you deserve some pain that never arrived.

Our Thinking Brain thinks horizontally (how are these things related?), while our Feeling Brain thinks vertically (which of these things is better/worse?). Our Thinking Brain decides how things are, and our Feeling Brain decides how things ought to be.

Both brains have access to the value hierarchy. While the Feeling Brain determines what shelf something is on, the Thinking Brain is able to point out how certain experiences are connected and to suggest how the value hierarchy should be reorganized. This is essentially what “growth” is: reprioritizing one’s value hierarchy in an optimal way.

But here’s the funny thing about value hierarchies: when they change, you don’t actually lose anything. It’s not that my friend decided to start giving up the parties for her career, it’s that the parties stopped being fun. That’s because “fun” is the product of our value hierarchies. When we stop valuing something, it ceases to be fun or interesting to us. Therefore, there is no sense of loss, no sense of missing out when we stop doing it. On the contrary, we look back and wonder how we ever spent so much time caring about such a silly, trivial thing, why we wasted so much energy on issues and causes that didn’t matter. These pangs of regret or embarrassment are good; they signify growth. They are the product of our achieving our hopes.

NEWTON’S SECOND LAW OF EMOTION Our Self-Worth Equals the Sum of Our Emotions Over Time

Newton’s First Law of Emotion states that when someone (or something) causes us pain, a moral gap opens up and our Feeling Brain summons up icky emotions to motivate us to equalize.

If someone hits us and we’re never able to hit him back, eventually our Feeling Brain will come to a startling conclusion: We deserve to be hit.

The fact that we could not equalize means that there must be something inherently inferior about us, and/or something inherently superior about the person who hit us.

if equalization seems impossible, our Feeling Brain comes up with the next best thing: giving in, accepting defeat, judging itself to be inferior and of low value.

When someone harms us, our immediate reaction is usually “He is shit, and I am righteous.” But if we’re not able to equalize and act on that righteousness, our Feeling Brain will believe the only alter...

High and low self-worth appear different on the surface, but they are two sides of the same counterfeit coin. Because whether you feel as though you’re better than the rest of the world or worse than the rest of the world, the same thing is true: you’re imagining yourself as something special, something separate from the world. A person who believes he deserves special treatment because of how great he is isn’t so different from someone who believes she deserves special treatment because of how shitty she is. Both are narcissistic. Both think they’re special. Both think the world should make exceptions and cater to their values and feelings over others’.

We all possess some degree of narcissism. It’s inevitable, as everything we ever know or experience has happened to us or been learned by us. The nature of our consciousness dictates that everything happen through us. It’s only natural, then, that our immediate assumption is that we are at the center of everything—because we are at the center of everything we experience.

Without a little bit of that narcissistic delusion, without that perpetual lie we tell ourselves about our specialness, we’d likely give up hope.

But our inherent narcissism comes at a cost. Whether you believe you’re the best in the world or the worst in the world, one thing is also true: you are separate from the world. And it’s this separateness that ultimately perpetuates unnecessary suffering.28

NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OF EMOTION Your Identity Will Stay Your Identity Until a New Experience Acts Against It

Our values aren’t just collections of feelings. Our values are stories.

Our narratives are sticky, clinging to our minds and hanging onto our identities like tight, wet clothes. We carry them around with us and define ourselves by them. We trade narratives with others, looking for people whose narratives match our own. We call these people friends, allies, good people. And those who carry narratives that contradict our own? We call them evil.

Our narratives about ourselves and the world are fundamentally about (a) something or someone’s value and (b) whether that something/someone deserves that value. All narratives are constructed in this way: Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it. Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it. Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it. Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.

These narratives we invent for ourselves around what’s important and what’s not, what is deserving and what is not—these stories stick with us and define us, they determine how we fit ourselves into the world and with each other. They determine how we feel about ourselves—whether we deserve a good life or not, whether we deserve to be loved or not, whether we deserve success or not—and they define what we know and understand about ourselves.

But here’s the funny thing: when you adopt these little narratives as your identity, you protect them and react emotionally to them as though they were an inherent part of you.

Your mom is a huge part of your life. Your mom is an amazing woman. You owe everything to your mom . . . and other shit people say at the Academy Awards. You then protect that piece of your identity as if it were a part of you. Someone comes along and talks shit about your mom, and you absolutely lose your mind and start breaking things. Then that experience creates a new narrative and new value in your mind. You, you decide, have anger issues . . . especially around your mother. And now that becomes an inherent part of your identity. And on and on it goes. The longer we’ve held a value, the deeper inside the snowball it is and the more fundamental it is to how we see ourselves and how we see the world.

Like interest on a bank loan, our values compound over time, growing stronger and coloring future experiences. It’s not just the bullying from when you were in grade school that fucks you up. It’s the bullying plus all the self-loathing and narcissism you brought to decades worth of future relationships, causing them all to fail, that adds up over time.

We’re completely dependent on our caretakers for everything, and inevitably, they’re going to mess it up. Neglect or harm can cause extreme emotional reactions, resulting in large moral gaps that are never equalized. Dad walks out, and your three-year-old Feeling Brain decides that you were never lovable in the first place. Mom abandons you for some rich new husband, and you decide that intimacy doesn’t exist, that no one can ever be trusted.

And the worst thing is, the longer we’ve held onto these narratives, the less aware we are that we have them. They become the background noise of our thoughts, the interior decoration of our minds. Despite being arbitrary and completely made up, they seem not only natural but inevitable.35

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The only way to change our values is to have experiences contrary to our values. And any attempt to break free from those values through new or contrary experiences will inevitably be met with pain and discomfort.37 This is why there is no such thing as change without pain, no growth without discomfort. It’s why it is impossible to become someone new without first grieving the loss of who you used to be. Because when we lose our values, we grieve the death of those defining narratives as though we’ve lost a part of ourselves—because we have lost a part of ourselves. We grieve the same way we would grieve the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, a house, a community, a spiritual belief, or a friendship. These are all defining, fundamental parts of you. And when they are torn away from you, the hope they offered your life is also torn away, leaving you exposed, once again, to the Uncomfortable Truth.

There are two ways to heal yourself—that is, to replace old, faulty values with better, healthier values. The first is to reexamine the experiences of your past and rewrite the narratives around them. Wait, did he punch...

The other way to change your values is to begin writing the narratives of your future self, to envision what life would be like if you had certain values or possessed a certain identity. By visualizing the future we want for ourselves, we allow our Feeling Brain to try on those values for size, to see what they feel like before we make the final purchase. Eventually, once we’ve done this enough, the Feeling Brain becomes accustomed to the new values and starts to believe them.

This sort of “future projection” is usually taught in the worst of ways. “Imagine you’re fucking rich and own a fleet of yachts! Then it will come true!”38 Sadly, that kind of visualization is not replacing a current unhealthy value (materialism) with a better one. It’s just masturbating to your current value. Real change would entail fantasizing what not wanting yachts in the first place would feel like.