Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope

by Mark Manson

“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.

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

But listen, Thinking Brain, those things you hate so much about your Feeling Brain—the cravings, the impulses, the horrible decision making? You need to find a way to empathize with them. Because that’s the only language the Feeling Brain really understands: empathy. The Feeling Brain is a sensitive creature; it’s made out of your damn feelings, after all. I wish it weren’t true. I wish you could just show it a spreadsheet to make it understand—you know, like we understand. But you can’t. Instead of bombarding the Feeling Brain with facts and reason, start by asking how it’s feeling. Say something like “Hey, Feeling Brain, how do you feel about going to the gym today?” or “How do you feel about changing careers?” or “How do you feel about selling everything and moving to Tahiti?” The Feeling Brain won’t respond with words. No, the Feeling Brain is too quick for words. Instead, it will respond with feelings. Yeah, I know that’s obvious, but sometimes you’re kind of a dumbass, Thinking Brain. The Feeling Brain might respond with a feeling of laziness or a feeling of anxiety. There might even be multiple emotions, a little bit of excitement with a pinch of anger thrown into the mix. Whatever it is, you, as the Thinking Brain (aka, the responsible one in this cranium), need to remain nonjudgmental in the face of whatever feelings arise. Feeling lazy? That’s okay; we all feel lazy sometimes. Feeling self-loathing? Perhaps that’s an invitation to take the conversation further. T...

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, or else there’ll just be a lot of hand waving and shouting with no result. Maybe you agree to do something the Feeling Brain likes, as long as it does something it doesn’t like. Watch your favorite TV show, but only at the gym while you’re on the treadmill. Go out with friends, but only if you’ve paid your bills for the month.29 Start easy. Remember, the Feeling Brain is highly sensitive, and completely unreasonable. When you offer something easy with an emotional benefit (e.g., feeling good after a workout; pursuing a career that feels significant; being admired and respected by your kids), the Feeling Brain will respond with another emotion, either positive or negative. If the emotion is positive, the Feeling Brain will be willing to drive a little bit in that direction—but only a little bit! Remember: feelings never last. That’s why you start small. Just put on your gym shoes today, Feeling Brain. That’s all. Let’s just see what happens.30 If the Feeling Brain’s response is negative, you simply acknowledge that negative emotion and offer another compromise. See how the Feeling Brain responds. Then rinse and repeat. But 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 wi...

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. But here’s what you do have, 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. And this is how you produce hope. This is how you produce a sense that the future can be fruitful and pleasant: by interpreting the shit the Feeling Brain slings at you in a profound and useful way. Instead of justifying and enslaving yourself to the impulses, challenge them and analyze them. Change their character and thei...

There’s a reason that all the major religions in the world have a history of sending missionaries to the poorest and most destitute corners of the globe: starving people will believe anything if it will keep them fed. For your new religion, it’s best to start preaching your message to people whose lives suck the most: the poor, the outcasts, the abused and forgotten. You know, people who sit on Facebook all day.13

Jesus Christ did the same damn thing.14 Buddha, too. Moses—you get the idea. Religious leaders preach to the poor and downtrodden and enslaved, telling them that they deserve the kingdom of heaven—basically, an open “fuck you” to the corrupt elites of the day. It’s a message that’s easy to get behind.

And this is where the corruption begins. When the original values that defined the religion, the movement, the revolution, get tossed aside for the sake of maintaining the status quo, this is narcissism at an organizational level. This is how you go from Jesus to the Crusades, from Marxism to the gulags, from a wedding chapel to divorce court. This corruption of the religion’s original values rots away at the religion’s following, thus leading to the rising up of newer, reactionary religions that eventually conquer the original one. Then the whole process begins again.

People get stuck in the adolescent stage of values for similar reasons that they get stuck with childish values: trauma and/or neglect. Victims of bullying are a particularly notable example. A person who has been bullied in his younger years will move through the world with an assumed understanding that no one will ever like or respect him unconditionally, that all affection must be hard-won through a series of practiced conversation and canned actions. You must dress a certain way. You must speak a certain way. You must act a certain way—or else.30

Adolescents need to be shown that bargaining is a never-ending treadmill, that the only things in life of real value and meaning are achieved without conditions, without transactions. It requires good parents and teachers not to succumb to the adolescent’s bargaining. The best way to do this is by example, of course, by showing unconditionality by being unconditional yourself. The best way to teach an adolescent to trust is to trust him. The best way to teach an adolescent respect is to respect him. The best way to teach someone to love is by loving him. And you don’t force the love or trust or respect on him—after all, that would make those things conditional—you simply give them, understanding that at some point, the adolescent’s bargaining will fail and he’ll understand the value of unconditionality when he’s ready.31

Making the leap of faith into a virtuous adulthood requires not just an ability to endure pain, but also the courage to abandon hope, to let go of the desire for things always to be better or more pleasant or a ton of fun. Your Thinking Brain will tell you that this is illogical, that your assumptions must inevitably be wrong in some way. Yet, you do it anyway. Your Feeling Brain will procrastinate and freak out about the pain of brutal honesty, the vulnerability that comes with loving someone, the fear that comes from humility. Yet, you do it anyway.

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.

But allow me to throw out another one: that the maturity of our culture is deteriorating. Throughout the rich and developed world, we are not living through a crisis of wealth or material, but a crisis of character, a crisis of virtue, a crisis of means and ends. The fundamental political schism in the twenty-first century is no longer right versus left, but the impulsive childish values of the right and left versus the compromising adolescent/adult values of both the right and left. It’s no longer a debate of communism versus capitalism or freedom versus equality but, rather, of maturity versus immaturity, of means versus ends.

Because you can’t get rid of pain—pain is the universal constant of the human condition. Therefore, the attempt to move away from pain, to protect oneself from all harm, can only backfire. Trying to eliminate pain only increases your sensitivity to suffering, rather than alleviating your suffering. It causes you to see dangerous ghosts in every nook, to see tyranny and oppression in every authority, to see hate and deceit behind every embrace.

But we seem to have forgotten what the ancients knew: that no matter how much wealth is generated in the world, the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our character, and the quality of our character is determined by our relationship to our pain. The pursuit of happiness plunges us head-first toward nihilism and frivolity. It leads us toward childishness, an incessant and intolerant desire for something more, a hole that can never be filled, a thirst that can never be quenched. It is at the root of corruption and addiction, of self-pity and self-destruction.

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.

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.

AI will reach a point where its intelligence outstrips ours by so much that we will no longer comprehend what it’s doing. Cars will pick us up for reasons we don’t understand and take us to locations we didn’t know existed. We will unexpectedly receive medications for health issues we didn’t know we suffered from. It’s possible that our kids will switch schools, we will change jobs, economic policies will abruptly shift, governments will rewrite their constitutions—and none of us will comprehend the full reasons why. It will just happen. Our Thinking Brains will be too slow, and our Feeling Brains too erratic and dangerous. Like AlphaZero inventing chess strategies in mere hours that chess’s greatest minds could not anticipate, advanced AI could reorganize society and all our places within it in ways we can’t imagine.