Everything Is F*cked by Mark Manson (Book Summary)
The Uncomfortable Truth and The Paradox of Progress
If Mark Manso worked at Starbucks, instead of writing people’s names on their coffee cup, he’d write the following:
“ 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 f*cking coffee.
He’d have to write it in really tiny lettering, of course. And it’d take a while to write, meaning the line of morning rush-hour customers would be backed out the door. Not exactly stellar customer service, either. This is probably just one of the reasons why he is not employable.
But seriously, how could you tell someone, in good conscience, to “have a nice day” while knowing that all their thoughts and motivations stem from a never-ending need to avoid the inherent meaninglessness of human existence.
Because, in the infinite expanse of space/time, the universe does not care whether your mother’s him replacement goes well, or your kids attend college, or your boss thinks you made a bitching spreadsheet. It doesn't care if the Democrats or the Republicans win the presidential election. It doesn't care if a celebrity gets caught doing cocaine while furiously masturbating in an airport bathroom (again). It doesn't care if the forests burn or the ice melts, or the waters rise, or the air simmers, or we all get vaporized by a superior alien race. You care.
You care, and you desperately convince yourself that because you care, it all must have some great cosmic meaning behind it. You care because, deep down, you need to feel that sense of importance to avoid the Uncomfortable Truth, to avoid the incomprehensibility of your existence, to avoid being crushed by the weight of your own material insignificance. And you — like me, like everyone — then project that imagined sense of importance onto the world around you because it gives you hope.
We live in an interesting time in that, materially, things are arguably better than they have ever been before, yet we all seem to be losing our minds think the world is one giant toilet bowl about to be flushed. An irrational sense of hopelessness is spreading across the rich, developed world. It’s the paradox of progress: the better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel.
In recent years, writers such as Steven Punker and Hans Rosling have been making the case that we’re wrong to feel so pessimistic, that things are, in fact, the best they’ve even been and likely going to get even better. Both men have filled long, heave books with many charts and graphs that start at one corner and always seem somehow to end up in the opposite corner.
Both men have explained, at length, the biases and incorrect assumptions we all carry that cause us to feel that things are much worse than they are. Progress, they argue, has continued, uninterrupted, throughout modern history. People are more educated and literate than ever before. Violence has trended down for decades possibly centuries. Racism, sexism, discrimination, and violence against women are at their lowest points in recorded history.
The Sad Paradox Of Progress
We have more rights than ever before. Half the planet has access to the internet. Extreme poverty is at an all-time low worldwide. Ware are smaller and less frequent than at any other time in recorded history. Children are dying less, and people are living longer. There’s more wealth than ever before. We’ve, like, cure and a bunch of diseases and stuff.
And they’re right. It’s important to know these facts. But for all the good news being published today, here are some other surprising statistics: in the United States, symptoms of depressions and anxiety are on an eighty-year upswing among young people and a twenty-year upswing among the adult population.
Not only are people experiencing depression in greater numbers, but they’re experiencing it at earlier ages with each generation- Drug overdoses have recently hit an all-time high the opioid crisis has wrecked much of the United States and Canada. Across the U.S. population, feelings of loneliness and social isolation are up. Nearly half of all Americans now report feeling isolated, left out, or alone in their lives. Social trust is also not only down across the developed world but plummeting, meaning fewer people than ever trust their government, the media, or one another.
Meanwhile, the environment is completely fucked. Nutjobs either have access to nuclear weapons or are a hop, skip, and a jump away from getting them. Extremism across the world continues to grow — in all forms, on both the right and the left, both religious and secular. Conspiracy theorists, citizen militias, survivalists, and “preppers” (as in, prepping for Armageddon) are all becoming more popular subcultures, to the point where they are borderline mainstream.
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.
Self-Control Is An Illusion: Emotion is the biologic hydraulic system that pushes our bodies into movement
The assumption that we must use our rational mind to dominate our emotions has tricked down through the centuries and continues to define much of our culture today. Let’s call it the “Classic Assumption”.
The Classic Assumptions 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. The Classic Assumptions sees passion and emotion as flaws, errors within the human psyche and must be overcome and fixed within the self.
Today, we usually judge people based on the Classic Assumption. Obese people are ridiculed and shamed because their obesity is seen as a failure of self-control. They know they should be thin, yet they continue to eat. Why?
Something must be wrong with them, we assume. Smokers: same deal. Drug addicts receive the same treatment, of course, but often with the extra stigma of being defined as criminals.
We see succumbing to our emotions impulses as a moral failing. We see a lack of self-control as a sign of a deficient character. Conversely, we celebrate people who beat their emotions into submission. We get collective hard-ons for athletes and businessmen and leaders who are ruthless and robotic in their efficiency. If a CEO sleeps under his desk and doesn’t see his kids for six weeks at a time — fuck yeah, that’s determination! See? Anyone can be successful.
Let’s pretend your mind is a car. Let’s call it the “ Consciousness Car”. Your Consciousness Car is driving along the road of life, and there are intersections, on-ramps, and off-ramps. These roads and intersections represent the decisions you must make as you drive, and they will determine your destination.
Now, there are two travelers in your Consciousness Car: a Thinking Brain and a Feeling Brain. The Thinking Brain represents your conscious thoughts, your ability to make calculations, and your ability to reason through various options and express ideas through language. Your Feeling Brain represents your emotions, impulses, and instincts. While your thinking brain is calculating payment schedules on our credit card statement, your Feeling Brain wants to sell everything and run away to Tahiti.
The Thinking Brain is conscientious, accurate, and impartial. It is methodical and rational, but it is also slow. It requires a lot of effort and energy, and like a muscle, it must be built up over time and can become fatigued if overexerted. The Feeling Brain, however, arrives at its conclusions quickly and effortlessly. The problem is that it is often inaccurate and irrational. The Feeling brain is also a bit of a drama queen and has a bad having of overreacting.
When we think fo ourselves and our decision making, we generally assume that the Thinking Brain is driving our Consciousness Car and the Feeling Brain is sitting in the passenger seat shouting out where it wants to go. We’re driving along, accomplishing our goals and figuring out how to get home, when that damn Feeling Brain sees something shiny or sexy or fun-looking and yanks the tearing wheel in another direction, thus causing us to careen into oncoming traffic, harming other people’s Consciousness Cars as well as our own.
This is the Classic Assumption, the belief that our reason is ultimately in control of our life and that we must train our emotions to sit the fuck down and shut up while the adult is driving. We then applaud this kidnapping and abuse of our emotions by congratulating ourselves on our self-control.
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 the action is emotion. Emotion is the biological hydraulic system that pushes our bodies into movement. Fear is not this magical thing your brain invents. No, it happens in our bodies. It’s the tightening of your stomach, the tensing of your muscles, the release of adrenaline, the overwhelming desire for space and emptiness around your body.
While the Thinking Brain exists solely within the synaptic arrangements inside your skull, the Feeling Brain is the wisdom and stupidity of the entire body. Anger pushes your body to move. Anxiety pulls into retreat. Joy lights up the facial muscles, while sadness attempts to shade your existence from view.
Emotion inspires action, and action inspires emotion. The two are inseparable. This leads to the simplest and most obvious answer to the timeless question, why don’t we do things we know we should do? Because we don't feel like it.
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.
Newton’s Laws of Emotion
Newton’s First Law of Emotion: For Every Action, There Is An Equal and Opposite Emotional Reaction.
Imagine that I punch you in the face. No reason. No justification. Just pure violence. Your instinctual reaction might be to retaliate in some way. Maybe it’d be verbal: you’d call me a bunch of four-letter words. Or maybe your retaliation would be social: you’d call the police or some other authority and have me punished dor assaulting you.
Regardless of your response, you would feel a rush of negative emotion directed toward me. And rightly so — clearly, I’m an awful person. After all, the idea that I get to cause you pain with no justification, without your serving pain generates a sense of injustice between us. A kind of moral gap opens between us: the sense that one of us is inherently righteous, and the other is an inferior piece of shit.
Pain causes moral tabs. And it’s not just between people. If a dog bites you, your instinct is to punish it. If you stub your toe on a coffee table, what do you do? You yell at the damn coffee table. If your home is washed away in flood, you are overcome with grief and become furious with God, the universe, life itself.
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 a pain.
Newton’s Second Law of Emotion: Our Self-Worth Equals the Sum of Our Emotions Over Time
Let’s return to the punching example, except this time, let’s pretend I exist within this magical force field that prevents any consequences from ever befalling me. You can’t punch me back. You can’t say anything to me. You can’t even say anything to anyone else about me. I am impervious — an all-seeing, all-powerful, evil ass-face.
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.
But what if that equalization never comes? What if someone (or something) makes us feel awful, yet we are incapable of ever retaliating or reconciling? What if we feel powerless to do anything to equalize or “make things right?” What if my force field is just too powerful for you?
When moral gaps persist for a long enough time, they normalize. They become our default expectation. They lodge themselves into our value hierarchy. 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.
After all, if we didn’t deserve it, we would have been able to equalize, right? 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.
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. When our Feeling brain feels something, our Thinking Brain sets to work constructing a narrative to explain that something. Losing your job doesn’t just suck; you’ve constructed an entire narrative around it: Your asshole boss wronged you after years of loyalty! You have yourself to that company! And what did you get in return?
Our narratives are sticky, clinging to our minds, and hanging onto our identities like tight, wet clothes. W 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.
Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.
Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.
Every book, myth, fable, history — all human meaning that’s communicated and remembered is merely the daisy-chaining of these little value-laden narratives, one after the other, from now until eternity.
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 success or not — and they define what we know and understand about ourselves.
Hope Is F*cked: The Pandora Box
In Greek mythology, the world started out with only men. Everyone drank a lot and didn't do any work. It was one big, everlasting frat party. The ancient Greeks called this “paradise”. The gods realized this was one boring party decide to spice things up a bit and create a companion for man. The aim was to introduce confusion and uncertainty to the easy life of men.
So they decide to create the first woman. Aphrodite gave her beauty. Athena gave her wisdom. Hera gave her the ability to create a family. Hermes gave her a charismatic speech. On and on, the gods installed gifs and talents and intrigues into a woman like apps in the new iPhone. The result was Pandora.
The gods sent Pandora to search with a box, a beautiful box, embossed in gold and covered in intricate and delicate designs. The gods told Pandora to give the box to men but also instructed her that it could never be opened.
Surprise, surprise, someone opened Pandora’s box, the men would all blame the woman for it — and it free all the evils into the world: death, disease, hatred, envy, and Twitter.
The party was no more. Now men could kill each other. And, more important, now men had something to kill each other for — women and the resources that attracted women. Thus, began the stupid dick-measuring contest, also known as human history.
Wars started. Kingdoms and rivalries arose. Slavery happened. Emperors started conquering one another, leaving hundreds of thousands slaughtered in their wake. Entire cities were built and then destroyed.
Meanwhile, women were treated as property, traded, and bartered among men like fancy goats or something.
Basically, humans started being humans.
Everything appeared to be fucked. But at the bottom of that box there remained something shiny and beautiful.
There remained hope.
There are many interpretations of the Pandora’s box myth, the most common being that while the gods punished us with all the evils of the world, they also equipped us with the one antidote to those evils: hope. Think of it as the yin and the yang of mankind’s but the more fucked things become, the more we must mobilize hope to sustain and overcome the world’s fuckedness.
The sickness may spread, but so does the cure, because hope is contagious. Hope is what saves the world.
But there’s another, the less popular interpretations of the Pandora’s box myth: What is hope is not the antidote to evil? What if hope is just another form of evil? hat if hope just got left in the box?
Hope inspired the Communist revolutions and the Nazi genocides. Hitler hoped to exterminate the Jews to bring about an evolutionary superior human race. The Soviets hoped to instigate a global revolution. to unique the world in true equality under communism.
And let's be honest, most of the atrocities committed by the Western, capitalist societies over the past one hundred years were done in the name of hope: hope for a greater global economic freedom and wealth.
Like a surgeon's scalpel, hope can save a life, and hope can take a life. It can uplift us, and it can destroy us. Just as there are healthy and damaging forms of confidence and healthy and damaging forms of love, there are also healthy and damaging forms of hope. And the difference between the two is not always clear.
The Most Precious And Important Things In Life Are Nontransactional
When you Google “how to be an adult”, most of the results focus on preparing for job interviews, managing your finances, cleaning up after yourself, and not being a total asshole. These things are all great, and indeed, they are all things that adults are expected to do. But I would argue that, by themselves, they do not make you an adult. They simply prevent you from being a child, which is not the same thing.
That's because most people who do these things do them because they are rule-based and transaction-based. They are a means to some superficial end. You prepare for a job interview because you want to get a good job. You learn how to clean your house because its level of cleanliness has directed consequences on what people think of you. You manage your finances because if you don’t you will be really f*cked one day down the road.
Bargaining with rules and the social order allows us to be well-functioning human beings in the world.
Eventually, though, we realize that the most important things in life cannot be gained through bargaining. 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.
The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to destroy them immediately. You cannot conspire for happiness; it is impossible. But this is often what people try to do, especially when they seek out self-help and other personal development advice — they are essentially saying, “Show me the rules of the game I have to play, and I’ll play it”, not realizing that its the very fact that they think there are rules to happiness that is preventing them from being happy.
While people who navigate life through bargaining and rules can get far in the material world, they remain crippled and alone in their emotional world. This is because transactional values create relationships that are built upon manipulation.
The Opportunities To Grow From Pain Are Constant In Life, Engage It And Find The Value And Meaning In It.
Pain is the current of our values. Without the pain of loss (or potential loss), it becomes impossible to determine the value of anything at all. Pain is at the heart of all emotions. Negative emotions are caused by experiencing pain. Positive emotions are caused by alleviating pain.
When we avoid pain and make ourselves more fragile, the result is our emotional reactions will be wildly disproportionate to the importance of the event. We will flip our shit when our burger comes with too many leaves of lettuce. We will brim with self-importance after watching a bullshit YouTube video telling us how righteous we are. Life will become an ineffable roller coater, sweeping our hearts up and down as we scroll up and down on our touchscreen.
The more antifragile we become, the more graceful our emotional responses are, the more control we exercise over ourselves, and the more principled our values. antifragility is, therefore, synonymous with growth and maturity. Life is one never-ending stream of pain, and to grow is not to find a way to avoid that stream but, rather, to five into it successfully navigate its depths.
The pursuit of happiness is, then, an avoidance of growth, an avoidance of maturity, an avoidance of virtue. It is treating ourselves and our minds as a means to some emotionally giddy end. It is sacrificing our consciousness for feeling good. It’s giving up our dignity for more comfort.
The ancient philosophers knew this. Plato and Aristotle and Stoics spoke of a life not of happiness, but of character, developing the ability to sustain the pain and make appropriate sacrifices — as that’s really what life was in their time: one long, drawn-out sacrifice. The ancient virtues of bravery, honesty and humility are all different forms of practicing antifragility: they are principles that gain from chaos and adversity.
It wasn’t until the Enlightenment, the age of science and technology, and the promise of never-ending economic growth, that thinkers and philosophers conceived of the idea summed up by Thomas Jefferson as “the pursuit of happiness”. As the Enlightenment thinkers saw science and wealth alleviate poverty, starvation, and disease from the population, they mistook this improvement of pain to be the elimination of pain.
What the Enlightenment did get right is the idea that, on average, some pain is better than others. All else being equal, it is better to die at ninety than at twenty. It’s better to be healthy than to be sick. It’s better to be free to pursue your own goals than to be forced into servitude of others. In fact, you could define “wealth” in terms of how desirable your pain is.
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 towards childishness, and 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.
When we pursue pain, we are able to choose what pain we bring into our lives. And this choice makes the pain meaningful — and therefore, it is what makes life feel meaningful.
Because pain is the universal constant of life, the opportunities to grow from that pain are constant in life. All that is required is that we don’t numb it, that we don’t look away. All that is required is that we engage it and find the value and meaning in it.
Pain is the source of all value. To numb ourselves to our pain is to numb ourselves to anything that matters in the world. Pain opens up the moral gaps that eventually become our most deeply held values and beliefs. When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.
Conclusion
The Thining 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. This is the real problem of hope. It’s rare that we don’t understand intellectually he 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 is the fundamental problem of self-control. This is the fundamental problem of hope — not an uneducated Think Brain but an uneducated Feeling Brain, a Feeling Brain that has adopted and accepted poor value judgment about itself and the world. And this is the real work of anything that even resembles psychological healing: getting our values straight with ourselves so that we can get our values straight with the world.
Hope for nothing. Hope for what already is — because hope is ultimately empty. Anything your mind can conceptualize is fundamentally flawed and limited and therefore damaging if worshipped unconditionally. Don’t hope for more happiness. Don't hope for less suffering. Don’t hope to improve your character. Don't hope to eliminate your flaws.
I hope for this. I hope for the infinity opportunity and oppression present in every single moment. I hope for the suffering that comes with freedom. For the pain that comes from happiness. For the wisdom that comes from ignorance. For the power that comes from surrender.
And then act despite it.
This is our challenge, our calling: To act without hope. To not hope for better. To be better. In this moment and the next. And the next. And the next. Everything is f*cked. And hope is both the cause and the effect of that f*ckedness.
Writer’s notes:
This is a summary of the book Everything Is F*cked by Mark Manson. — These are not his words but rather a re-write of what was taken away from reading the book. Reading this summary will not give you the same feel and impact as reading the full book, so if you liked what you’ve read here, it is recommended to acquire the kindle, audio, or hardcover. This will not only support the author that inspired this post and dive into this perspective a bit more.
