Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none. To strike a match to light up the void. To show us a possibility for a better world—not a better world we want to exist, but a better world we didn’t know could exist. To take a situation where everything seems to be absolutely fucked and still somehow make it good.

Bravery is common. Resilience is common. But heroism has a philosophical component to it. There’s some great “Why?” that heroes bring to the table—some incredible cause or belief that goes unshaken, no matter what. And this is why, as a culture, we are so desperate for a hero today: not because things are necessarily so bad, but because we’ve lost the clear “Why?” that drove previous generations.

“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”

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. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue

speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing. Enjoy your fucking coffee.

the opposite of happiness is not anger or sadness.

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?

Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction.

Depression is a crisis of hope. It is the belief in a meaningless future.

When people prattle on about needing to find their “life’s purpose,” what they really mean is that it’s no longer clear to them what matters, what is a worthy use of their limited time here on earth6—in short, what to hope for. They are struggling to see what the before/after of their lives should be.

It’s a paradox of progress: the better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel.9

Basically, we are the safest and most prosperous humans in the history of the world, yet we are feeling more hopeless than ever before. The better things get, the more we seem to despair. It’s the paradox of progress. And perhaps it can be summed up in one startling fact: the wealthier and safer the place you live, the more

likely you are to commit suicide.

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.

“Control” means we feel as though we’re in control of our own life, that we can affect our fate. “Values” means we find something important enough to work toward, something better, that’s worth striving for. And “community” means we are part of a group that values the same things we do and is working toward achieving those things. Without a community, we feel isolated, and our values cease to mean anything. Without values, nothing appears worth pursuing. And without control, we fe...

into the human condition could be startling. Waits’s quip about the lobotomy makes us laugh, but there’s a hidden wisdom to it: that he’d rather have the problem of passion with the bottle than have no passion at all; that it’s better to find hope in lowly places than to find none; that without our unruly impulses, we are nothing.

who declared reason the root of all virtue.

Here’s the truth: the Feeling Brain is driving our Consciousness Car.

The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion.

That’s because action is emotion.16

Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason but, rather, of emotion. Self-control is an emotional problem; laziness is an emotional problem; procrastination is an emotional problem; underachievement is an emotional problem; impulsiveness is an emotional problem.

emotional problems can only have emotional solutions.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt compares the two brains to an elephant and its rider: the rider can gently steer and pull the elephant in a particular direction, but ultimately the elephant is going to go where it wants to go.

It’s incredibly easy to let your Thinking Brain fall into the trap of merely drawing the maps the Feeling Brain wants to follow. This is called the “self-serving bias,” and it’s the basis for pretty much everything awful about humanity.

The metaphorical Clown Car is what inspired ancient philosophers to warn against the overindulgence and worship of feelings.

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.27

And 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.

But whatever you do, do not fight the Feeling Brain.

Because 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, much the same as playing water polo or juggling knives is a skill. It takes work. And there will be failures along the way. You might slice your arm open and bleed everywhere. But that’s just the cost of admission.

And through his observations, Emo Newton realized something painful that we all kind of know, but that few of us ever want to admit: that people are liars, all of us. We lie constantly and habitually.3 We lie about important things and trifling things. And we usually don’t lie out of malice—rather, we lie to others because we’re in such a habit of lying to ourselves.

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’.

Self-worth is an illusion.21 It’s a psychological construct that our Feeling Brain spins in order to predict what will help it and what will hurt it. Ultimately, we must feel something about ourselves in order to feel something about the world, and without those feelings, it’s impossible for us to find hope.

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. The same way that getting punched will cause a violent emotional reaction, someone coming up and saying you’re a shitty boat captain will produce a similarly negative emotional reaction, because we react to protect the metaphysical body just as we protect the physical.

“There is an emotional gravity to our values: we attract those into our orbit who value the same things we do, and instinctively repel, as if by reverse magnetism, those whose values are contrary to our own.41 These attractions form large orbits of like-minded people around the same principle. Each falls along the same path, circling and revolving around the same cherished thing.”

“All peoples are more the same than they are different. We all mostly want the same things out of life. But those slight differences generate emotion, and emotion generates a sense of importance. Therefore, we come to perceive our differences as disproportionately more important than our similarities. And this is the true tragedy of man. That we are doomed to perpetual conflict over the slight difference.43 “This theory of emotional gravitation, the coherence and attraction of like values, explains the history of peoples.44 Different parts of the world have different geographic factors. One region may be hard and rugged and well defended from invaders. Its people would then naturally value neutrality and isolation. This would then become their group identity. Another region may overflow with food and wine, and its people would come to value hospitality, festivities, and family. This, too, would become their identity. Another region may be arid and a difficult place to live, but with wide-open vistas connecting it to many distant lands, its people would come to value authority, strong military leadership, and absolute dominion. This, too, is their identity.45 “And just as the individual protects her identity through beliefs, rationalizations, and biases, communities, tribes, and nations protect their identities the same way.46 These cultures eventually solidify themselves into nations, which then expand, bringing more and more peoples into the umbrella of their value system...

“That’s fucking stupid,” I said. Our “discussion” went on like this for another few minutes. Back then, I didn’t know any better. I still thought stuff like this was about reason and evidence, not feelings and values. And values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.

Now that your fledgling religion has its core tenets of faith, you need to find a way to protect that faith from the inevitable criticism that will be flung its way. The trick is to adopt a belief that creates a self-reinforcing us-versus-them dichotomy—that is, create a perception of “us” versus “them” in such a way that anyone who criticizes or questions “us” immediately becomes a “them.” This sounds difficult, but is actually quite easy. Here are some examples: If you don’t support the war, then you support the terrorists. God created science to test our faith in God. Therefore, anything that contradicts the Bible is merely a test of our faith in God. Anyone who criticizes feminism is sexist. Anyone who criticizes capitalism is a Communist. Anyone who criticizes the president is a traitor. Anyone who thinks Kobe Bryant was better than Michael Jordan doesn’t understand basketball; therefore, any opinion they hold about basketball is invalid.

But if I’m being totally honest, I didn’t like being a Christian, and I didn’t like it for a really dumb reason: my parents made me wear lame dress clothes. That’s right. I questioned my family’s faith and went atheist at age twelve over kiddie suspenders and bow ties.

The open questioning and skepticism eventually got so bad that my Sunday school teacher took me aside one morning and made me a deal: he’d give me perfect marks in our confirmation class and tell my parents I was a model student as long as I stopped questioning the logical inconsistencies of the Bible in front of all the other kids. I agreed.

Rituals are designed to be repeated over a long period of time, which only lends them an even greater sense of importance—after all, it’s not often you get to do the exact same thing that people five hundred years ago did. That’s some heavy shit. Rituals are also symbolic. As values, they must also embody some story or narrative. Churches have guys in robes dipping bread in wine (or grape juice) and feeding it to a bunch of people to represent the body of Christ. The symbolism represents Christ’s sacrifice (he didn’t deserve it!) for our salvation (neither do we, but that’s why it’s powerful!).

Married couples create their own little rituals and habits, their inside jokes, all to reaffirm their relationship’s value, their own private interpersonal religion. Rituals connect us with the past. They connect us to our values. And they affirm who we are.

Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.

You don’t want to bargain with your father for love, or your friends for companionship, or your boss for respect. Bargaining with people into loving or respecting you feels shitty. It undermines the whole project. If you have to convince someone to love you, then they don’t love you. If you have to cajole someone into respecting you, then they will never respect you. If you have to convince someone to trust you, then they won’t actually trust you.

You are helping them understand that life is far more complicated than their own impulses or desires. Parents who fail to do this fail their children in an incredibly fundamental way because it won’t take long for the child to have the shocking realization that the world does not cater to his whims.

This is why children who are abused and children who are coddled often end up with the same issues when they become adults: they remain stuck in their childhood value system.

CHILDHOOD ADOLESCENCE ADULTHOOD VALUES Pleasure/pain Rules and roles Virtues SEES RELATIONSHIPS AS . . . Power struggles Performances Vulnerability SELF-WORTH Narcissistic: wide swings between “I’m the best” and “I’m the worst” Other-dependent: externally validated Independent: largely internally validated MOTIVATION Self-aggrandizement Self-acceptance Amor fati POLITICS Extremist/nihilist Pragmatic, ideological Pragmatic, nonideological IN ORDER TO GROW, HE/SHE NEEDS . . . Trustworthy institutions and dependable people Courage to let go of outcomes and faith in unconditional acts Consistent self-awareness

When you attempt to barter for happiness, you destroy happiness. When you try to enforce freedom, you negate freedom. When you try to create equality, you undermine equality.

To transcend the transactional realm of hope, one must act unconditionally. You must love someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise it’s not truly love. You must respect someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise you don’t truly respect him. You must speak honestly without expecting a pat on the back or a high-five or a gold star next to your name; otherwise you aren’t truly being honest.