Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

Chronic anxiety is a crisis of hope. It is the fear of a failed future. Depression is a crisis of hope. It is the belief in a meaningless future.

Nihilism and the pure indulgence of desire that accompanies it are gripping the modern world.

To become an emotionally healthy individual, you must break out of this constant bargaining, endlessly treating everyone as a means to some pleasurable end, and come to understand even higher and more abstract guiding principles.

Political extremists, because they are intractable and impossible to bargain with, are, by definition, childish. They’re a bunch of fucking babies. Extremists want the world to be a certain way, and they refuse to acknowledge any interests or values outside their own. They refuse to negotiate. They refuse to appeal to a higher virtue or principle above their own selfish desires. And they cannot be trusted to follow through on the expectations of others. They are also unabashedly authoritarian because, as children, they are desperate for an all-powerful parent to come and make everything “all right.”40

But when we avoid pain, when we avoid stress and chaos and tragedy and disorder, we become fragile. Our tolerance for day-to-day setbacks diminishes, and our life must shrink accordingly for us to engage only in the little bit of the world we can handle at one time.