everything is f*cked – mark manson

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.”
If I worked at Starbucks, instead of writing people’s names on their coffee cup, I’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 bluepeck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing. Enjoy your fucking coffee. 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 hip 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 in order 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. Is it too early to have this conversation? Here, have another coffee. I even made a winky-smiley face with the steamed milk. Isn’t it cute? I’ll wait while you Instagram it.
If we don’t believe there’s any hope that the future will be better than the present, that our lives will improve in some way, then we spiritually die.
Here’s what a lot of people don’t get: the opposite of happiness is not anger or sadness.
1 If you’re angry or sad, that means you still give a fuck about something. That means something still matters. That means you still have hope.
2 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 a cold and bleak nihilism, a sense that there is no point, so fuck it—why not run with scissors or sleep with your boss’s wife or shoot up a school? It is the Uncomfortable Truth, a silent realization that in the face of infinity, everything we could possibly care about quickly approaches zero. Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction.
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 earth—in short, what to hope for. They are struggling to see what the before/after of their lives should be. That’s the hard part: finding that before/after for yourself. It’s difficult because there’s no way ever to know for sure if you’ve got it right. This is why a lot of people flock to religion, because religions acknowledge this permanent state of unknowing and demand faith in the face of it.
For some people, the before/after story is raising their kids well. For others, it’s saving the environment. For others, it’s making a bunch of money and having a big-ass boat. For others, it’s simply trying to improve their golf swing.
Paradox of progress: the better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel.
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.
To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community.
Once, when asked about his drinking, the musician Tom Waits famously muttered, “I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” He appeared to be hammered when he said it. Oh, and he was on national television. The Soviet Union, of all places, was the first country to outlaw the lobotomy. The Soviets declared the procedure “contrary to human principles” and claimed that it “turned an insane person into an idiot.” This was sort of a wake-up call to the rest of the world, because let’s face it, when Joseph Stalin is lecturing you about ethics and human decency, you know you’ve fucked up.
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.
The constant desire to change yourself then becomes its own sort of addiction: each cycle of “changing yourself” results in similar failures of self-control, therefore making you feel as though you need to “change yourself” all over again. Each cycle refuels you with the hope you’re looking for. Meanwhile, the Classic Assumption, the root of the problem, is never addressed or questioned, let alone thrown out. Like a bad case of acne, a whole industry has sprouted up over the past couple of centuries around this “change yourself” idea. This industry is replete with false promises and clues to the secrets of happiness, success, and self-control. Yet all the industry does is reinforce the same impulses that drive people to feel inadequate in the first place. We cling to this narrative about self-control because the belief that we’re in complete control of ourselves is a major source of hope. We want to believe that changing ourselves is as simple as knowing what to change. We want to believe that the ability to do something is as simple as deciding to do it and mustering enough willpower to get there. We want to believe ourselves to be the masters of our own destiny, capable of anything we can dream.
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, intuition, and instincts. While your Thinking Brain is calculating payment schedules on your credit card statement, your Feeling Brain wants to sell everything and run away to Tahiti. Each of your two brains has its strengths and weaknesses. 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 habit of overreacting. When we think of 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 steering 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. But our Consciousness Car doesn’t work that way. When his tumor was removed, Elliot’s Feeling Brain got thrown out of his moving mental vehicle, and nothing got better for him. In fact, his Consciousness Car stalled out. Lobotomy patients had their Feeling Brains tied up and thrown in the car’s trunk, and that merely caused them to become sedated and lazy, unable to get out of bed or even dress themselves much of the time.
Meanwhile, Tom Waits was pretty much all Feeling Brain all the time, and he got paid copious amounts of money to be drunk on television talk shows. So, there’s that. Here’s the truth: the Feeling Brain is driving our Consciousness Car. And I don’t care how scientific you think you are or how many letters you have after your name, you’re one of us, bucko. You’re a crazy Feeling Brain–piloted meat robot just like the rest of us. Keep your bodily fluids to yourself, please. The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because 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 it 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. This sucks. Because emotional problems are much harder to deal with than logical ones. There are equations to help you calculate the monthly payments on your car loan. There are no equations to help you end a bad relationship. As Daniel Kahneman once put it, the Thinking Brain is “the supporting character who imagines herself to be the hero.”
The Feeling Brain, as great as it is, has its dark side. In the Consciousness Car, your Feeling Brain is like a verbally abusive boyfriend who refuses to pull over and ask for directions—he hates being told where to go and he will absolutely make you fucking miserable if you question his driving. In order to avoid these psychological kerfuffles, and to maintain a sense of hope, the Thinking Brain develops a tendency to draw maps explaining or justifying where the Feeling Brain has already decided it wants to go. The Thinking Brain makes shit up that the Feeling Brain wants to hear. And in return, the Feeling Brain promises not to careen off the side of the road, killing everyone.

Usually, the self-serving bias simply makes you prejudiced and a little bit self-centered. You assume that what feels right is right. You make snap judgments about people, places, groups, and ideas, many of which are unfair or even a little bit bigoted. But in its extreme form, the self-serving bias can become outright delusion, causing you to believe in a reality that is not there, smudging memories and exaggerating facts, all in the service of the Feeling Brain’s never-ending cravings. If the Thinking Brain is weak and/or uneducated, or if the Feeling Brain is riled up, the Thinking Brain will succumb to the Feeling Brain’s fiery whims and dangerous driving. It will lose the ability to think for itself or to contradict the Feeling Brain’s conclusions. This effectively turns your Consciousness Car into a Clown Car, with big, springy red wheels and circus music playing over a loudspeaker wherever you go. Your Consciousness Car becomes a Clown Car when your Thinking Brain has completely capitulated to your Feeling Brain, when your life’s pursuits are determined purely by self-gratification, when truth warps into a cartoon of self-serving assumptions, when all beliefs and principles are lost in a sea of nihilism. The Clown Car invariably drives toward addiction, narcissism, and compulsion. People whose minds are Clown Cars are easily manipulated by whatever person or group makes them feel good consistently—whether it is a religious leader, politician, self-help guru, or sinister internet forum. A Clown Car will gladly steamroll other Consciousness Cars (i.e., other people) with its big, red rubbery tires because its Thinking Brain will justify this by saying they deserved it—they were evil, inferior, or part of some made-up problem. Some Clown Cars merely drive toward fun—they’re all about drinking and fucking and partying. Others drive toward power. A Clown Car will sometimes pursue hate, too, because hate brings its own odd satisfaction and self-assurance. Such a mind is prone to self-righteous anger, as having an external target reassures it of its own moral superiority. Inevitably, it drives toward the destruction of others because it is only through the destruction and subjugation of the outer world that its endless inner impulses can be satisfied. It’s hard to pull someone out of the Clown Car once they’re in it. In the Clown Car, the Thinking Brain has been bullied and abused by the Feeling Brain for so long that it develops a sort of Stockholm syndrome—it can’t imagine a life beyond pleasing and justifying the Feeling Brain. 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. This is why cultish leaders always start by encouraging people to shut off their Thinking Brains as much as possible. Initially, this feels profound to people because the Thinking Brain is often correcting the Feeling Brain, showing it where it took a wrong turn. So, silencing the Thinking Brain will feel extremely good for a short period. For most of history, the world has not been a pleasant place to live, and that was largely because everyone’s Feeling Brains were running amok. The Classic Assumption was often the only thing that stood between civilization and total anarchy. Then something happened in the last couple of hundred years. People built trains and cars and invented central heating and stuff. Economic prosperity outran human impulses. People were no longer worried about not being able to eat or about being killed for insulting the king. Life was more comfortable and easier. People now had a ton of free time to sit and think and worry about all sorts of existential shit that they had never considered before. As a result, several movements arose in the late twentieth century championing the Feeling Brain.And indeed, liberating the Feeling Brain from the Thinking Brain’s suppression was incredibly therapeutic for millions of people (and continues to be so today). 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, when, really, they were indulging the old Feeling Brain. It was the same old Clown Car with a new, spiritual-looking paint job. 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? Meanwhile, 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.
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. This feeling of unworthiness is usually the result of some bad shit happening to us at some point. 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. The victims of abuse are often the keenest observers of human nature. For you and me, people-watching may be something fun to do on a random Sunday in the park. But for the abused, it’s a survival skill.

Newton’s Three Laws of Emotion.
NEWTON’S FIRST LAW OF EMOTION For Every Action, There Is an Equal and Opposite Emotional Reaction
NEWTON’S SECOND LAW OF EMOTION Our Self-Worth Equals the Sum of Our Emotions Over Time
NEWTON’S THIRD LAW OF EMOTION Your Identity Will Stay Your Identity Until a New Experience Acts Against It
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. 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.
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. 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.
The Feeling Brain doesn’t know the difference between past, present, and future; that’s the Thinking Brain’s domain. And one of the strategies our Thinking Brain uses to nudge the Feeling Brain into the correct lane of life is asking “what if” questions: What if you hated boats and instead spent your time helping disabled kids? What if you didn’t have to prove anything to the people in your life for them to like you? What if people’s unavailability has more to do with them than it does with you?
Don’t most people simply want a bit of bread and a safe place to sleep at night?’
“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.
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION Step One: Sell Hope to the Hopeless
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION Step Two: Choose Your Faith
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION Step Three: Preemptively Invalidate All Criticism or Outside Questioning
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION Step Four: Ritual Sacrifice for Dummies—So Easy, Anyone Can Do It!
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION Step Five: Promise Heaven, Deliver Hell
HOW TO START YOUR OWN RELIGION Step Six: Prophet for Profit!
Whether you realize or not, you’ve adopted some group’s beliefs and values, you participate in the rituals and offer up the sacrifices, you draw the us-versus-them lines and intellectually isolate yourself. This is what we all do. Religious beliefs and their constituent tribal behaviors are a fundamental part of our nature. It’s impossible not to adopt them. Victorious religions then stabilize and become the foundation for culture. But here’s the problem: Every time a religion succeeds, every time it spreads its message far and wide and comes to dominate a huge swath of human emotion and endeavor, its values change. The religion’s God Value no longer comprises the principles that inspired the religion in the first place. Its God Value slowly shifts and becomes the preservation of the religion itself: not to lose what it has gained. 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. In this sense, success is in many ways far more precarious than failure. First, because the more you gain the more you have to lose, and second, because the more you have to lose, the harder it is to maintain hope.
The only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.
Talking too much about yourself can also be a means to conceal yourself.

Master morality is the moral belief that people get what they deserve. It’s the moral belief that “might makes right,” that if you earned something through hard work or ingenuity, you deserve it. No one can take that from you; nor should they. You are the best, and because you’ve demonstrated superiority, you should be rewarded for it.
Slave morality believes that people who have suffered the most, those who are the most disadvantaged and exploited, deserve the best treatment because of that suffering. Slave morality believes that it’s the poorest and most unfortunate who deserve the most sympathy and the most respect. Whereas master morality believes in the virtue of strength and dominance, slave morality believes in the virtue of sacrifice and submission. While master morality believes in the necessity of hierarchy, slave morality believes in the necessity of equality. While master morality is generally represented by right-wing political beliefs, slave morality is usually found in left-wing political beliefs.
Each religion is a faith-based attempt to explain reality in such a way that it gives people a steady stream of hope.
Science is arguably the most effective religion because it is the first religion that is able to evolve and improve upon itself. It is open to anybody and everybody.
Now, you didn’t have to wait until death to improve your lot. You could improve it here and now. And this implied all sorts of wonderful things. Freedom, for one: How were you going to choose to grow today? But also responsibility: because you could now control your own destiny, you had to take responsibility for that destiny. And of course, equality: because if a big patriarchal God isn’t dictating who deserves what, that must mean that either no one deserves anything or everyone deserves everything.
Amor fati, for Nietzsche, meant the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness. It meant loving one’s pain, embracing one’s suffering. It meant closing the separation between one’s desires and reality not by striving for more desires, but by simply desiring reality. It basically meant: 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. Hope for this. Hope for the infinite opportunity and oppression present in every single moment. 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 fucked. And hope is both the cause and the effect of that fuckedness. This is hard to swallow, because weaning ourselves off the sweet nectar of hope is like pulling a bottle away from a drunk. Without it, we believe we’ll fall back into the void and be swallowed by the abyss. The Uncomfortable Truth frightens us, and so we spin stories and values and narratives and myths and legends about ourselves and the world to keep that truth at bay. But the only thing that frees us is that truth: You and I and everyone we know will die, and little to nothing that we do will ever matter on a cosmic scale. And while some people fear that this truth will liberate them from all responsibility, that they’ll go snort an eight ball of cocaine and play in traffic, the reality is that this truth scares them because it liberates them to responsibility. It means that there’s no reason to not love ourselves and one another. That there’s no reason to not treat ourselves and our planet with respect. That there’s no reason to not live every moment of our lives as though it were to be lived in eternal recurrence.
Nothing is done for its own sake. Everything is a calculated transaction, usually made out of fear of the negative repercussions. Everything is a means to some pleasurable end. The problem with adolescent values is that if you hold them, you never actually stand for something outside yourself. You are still at heart a child, albeit a cleverer and much more sophisticated child. Everything still revolves around maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, it’s just that the adolescent is savvy enough to think a few moves ahead to get there. In the end, adolescent values are self-defeating. You can’t live your entire life this way, otherwise you’re never actually living your own life. You’re merely living out an aggregation of the desires of the people around you. 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. How to Be an Adult 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.
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 immediately destroy them. 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 it’s 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. Adulthood is the realization that sometimes an abstract principle is right and good for its own sake, that even if it hurts you today, even if it hurts others, being honest is still the right thing to do. In the same way that the adolescent realizes there’s more to the world than the child’s pleasure or pain, the adult realizes that there’s more to the world than the adolescent’s constant bargaining for validation, approval, and satisfaction. Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right. An adolescent will say that she values honesty only because she has learned that saying so produces good results. But when confronted with difficult conversations, she will tell white lies, exaggerate the truth, and become passive-aggressive. An adult will be honest for the simple sake that honesty is more important than her own pleasure or pain. Honesty is more important than getting what you want or achieving a goal. Honesty is inherently good and valuable, in and of itself. Honesty is therefore an end, not a means to some other end. An adolescent will say he loves you, but his conception of love is that he is getting something in return, that love is merely an emotional swap meet, where you each bring everything you have to offer and haggle with each other for the best deal. An adult will love freely without expecting anything in return because an adult understands that that is the only thing that can make love real.
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.
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.
Early in his life, Kant understood the Whac-A-Mole game of maintaining hope in the face of the Uncomfortable Truth. And like everyone who becomes aware of this cruel cosmic game, he despaired. But he refused to accept the game. He refused to believe that there was no inherent value in existence. He refused to believe that we are forever cursed to conjure stories to give our lives an arbitrary sense of meaning.
The Formula of Humanity states, “Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” That’s it. The Formula of Humanity is the single principle that pulls people out of adolescent bargaining and into adult virtue.
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.
Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn’t make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered from dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it.
Material progress and security do not necessarily relax us or make it easier to hope for the future. On the contrary, it appears that perhaps by removing healthy adversity and challenge, people struggle even more. They become more selfish and more childish.
It seems that humans, regardless of our external circumstances, live in a constant state of mild-but-not-fully-satisfying happiness. Put another way, things are pretty much always fine, but they could also always be better. Life is apparently nothing but bobbing up and down and around our level-seven happiness.
Each of us implicitly assumes that we are the universal constant of our own experience, that we are unchanging, and our experiences come and go like the weather. Some days are good and sunny; other days are cloudy and shitty. The skies change, but we remain the same. But this is not true—in fact, this is backward. Pain is the universal constant of life. And human perception and expectations warp themselves to fit a predetermined amount of pain. In other words, no matter how sunny our skies get, our mind will always imagine just enough clouds to be slightly disappointed. This constancy of pain results in what is known as “the hedonic treadmill,” upon which you run and run and run, chasing your imagined ten. But, no matter what, you always end up with a seven. The pain is always there. What changes is your perception of it. And as soon as your life “improves,” your expectations shift, and you’re back to being mildly dissatisfied again.
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.
Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons. Because if we’re going to be forced to suffer by simply existing, we might as well learn how to suffer well.
Death is psychologically necessary because it creates stakes in life. There is something to lose. You don’t know what something is worth until you experience the potential to lose it. You don’t know what you’re willing to struggle for, what you’re willing to give up or sacrifice.
There are two ways to create value in the marketplace: 1. Innovations (upgrade pain). The first way to create value is to replace one pain with a much more tolerable/desirable pain. 2. Diversions (avoid pain). The second way to create value in a marketplace is to help people numb their pain.
But, fuck it, let’s be real: “Give the people what they want” is just #FakeFreedom because what most of us want are diversions. And when we get flooded by diversions, a few things happen. The first is that we become increasingly fragile. Our world shrinks to conform to the size of our ever-diminishing values. The second thing that happens is that we become prone to a series of low-level addictive behaviors. Third thing: an inability to identify, tolerate, and seek out negative emotions is its own kind of confinement. Fourth—because, fuck it, I’m on a roll: the paradox of choice. Variety is not freedom. Variety is just different permutations of the same meaningless shit. More stuff doesn’t make us freer, it imprisons us with anxiety over whether we chose or did the best thing.
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.
Over the last couple of decades, people seem to have confused their basic human rights with not experiencing any discomfort. People want freedom to express themselves, but they don’t want to have to deal with views that may upset or offend them in some way. They want freedom of enterprise, but they don’t want to pay taxes to support the legal machinery that makes that freedom possible. They want equality, but they don’t want to accept that equality requires that everybody experience the same pain, not that everybody experience the same pleasure.
Advanced AI could reorganize society and all our places within it in ways we can’t imagine. Then, we will end up right back where we began: worshipping impossible and unknowable forces that seemingly control our fates. The old gods will be replaced by the new gods: the algorithms. And in a twist of evolutionary irony, the same science that killed the gods of old will have built the gods of new. We will be like their pet dogs, convinced that we are protecting and fighting for our territory at all costs but, in reality, merely peeing on an endless series of digital fire hydrants. This may frighten you. This may excite you. Either way, it is likely inevitable. Power emerges from the ability to manipulate and process information, and we always end up worshipping whatever has the most power over us. We are algorithms. Consciousness itself is a vast network of algorithms and decision trees—algorithms based on values and knowledge and hope.
I dare to hope that there will be tools to help people understand statistics, proportions, and probability in real time and realize that, no, a few people getting shot in the far corners of the globe does not have any bearing on you, no matter how scary it looks on TV; that most “crises” are statistically insignificant and/or just noise; and that most real crises are too slow-moving and unexciting to get the attention they deserve.
The ultimate innovation will be the day we can manufacture significance without strife or conflict, find importance without the necessity of death.

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