PART 1: HOPE
1. 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.
We are a culture in need not of peace or prosperity or new hood ornaments for our electric cars. We have all that. We are a culture in need of something far more precarious. We are a culture and a people in need of hope.2. 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 m imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing.
3. 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.
See, that’s your hope talking. That’s a story your mind spins to make it worth waking up in the morning: something needs to matter because without something mattering, then there’s no reason to go on living. And some form of simple altruism or a reduction in suffering is always our mind’s go-to for making it feel like it’s worth doing anything.4. Here’s what a lot of people don’t get: the opposite of happiness is not anger or sadness. 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. The opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference. 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.5. The avoidance of hopelessness—that is, the construction of hope—then becomes our mind’s primary project. All meaning, everything we understand about ourselves and the world, is constructed for the purpose of maintaining hope. Therefore, hope is the only thing any of us willingly dies for. Hope is what we believe to be greater than ourselves. Without it, we believe we are nothing.
6. 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.
7. 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.
CHAPTER 2: SELF-CONTROL IS AN ILLUSION
1. To generate hope in our lives, we must first feel as though we have control over our lives. We must feel as though we’re following through on what we know is good and right; that we’re chasing after “something better”. Yet many of us struggle with the inability to control ourselves.
2. Ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion. Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason but, rather, of emotion. 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.
4. Thinking Brain produces a logical, factual form of knowledge, the Feeling Brain develops its own type of value-laden knowledge. The Thinking Brain makes associations among facts, data, and observations. Similarly, the Feeling Brain makes value judgments based on those same facts, data, and observations. The Feeling Brain decides what is good and what is bad; what is desirable and what is undesirable; and most important, what we deserve and what we don’t deserve. The Thinking 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.
5. This is the fundamental problem of self control. This is the fundamental problem of hope—not an uneducated Thinking Brain, but an uneducated Feeling Brain, a Feeling Brain that has adopted and accepted poor value judgments 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.
1. To generate hope in our lives, we must first feel as though we have control over our lives. We must feel as though we’re following through on what we know is good and right; that we’re chasing after “something better”. Yet many of us struggle with the inability to control ourselves.
2. Ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion. Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason but, rather, of emotion. 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.
Emotional problems are irrational, meaning they cannot be reasoned with. And this brings us to even worse news: emotional problems can only have emotional solutions.3. Our crises of hope often start with a basic sense that we do not have control over ourselves or our destiny. We feel victims to the world around us or, worse, to our own minds. We fight our Feeling Brain, trying to beat it into submission. Or we do the opposite and follow it mindlessly. We ridicule ourselves and hide from the world because of the Classic Assumption. And in many ways, the affluence and connectivity of the modern world only make the pain of the illusion of self-control that much worse. But this is your mission, Thinking Brain, should you choose to accept it: Engage the Feeling Brain on its own terms. Create an environment that can bring about the Feeling Brain’s best impulses and intuition, rather than its worst. Accept and work with, rather than against, whatever the Feeling Brain spews at you.
The only way to be a good person is through dominance of the Thinking Brain over the Feeling Brain, the championing of reason over emotion, duty over desire.
4. Thinking Brain produces a logical, factual form of knowledge, the Feeling Brain develops its own type of value-laden knowledge. The Thinking Brain makes associations among facts, data, and observations. Similarly, the Feeling Brain makes value judgments based on those same facts, data, and observations. The Feeling Brain decides what is good and what is bad; what is desirable and what is undesirable; and most important, what we deserve and what we don’t deserve. The Thinking 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.
5. This is the fundamental problem of self control. This is the fundamental problem of hope—not an uneducated Thinking Brain, but an uneducated Feeling Brain, a Feeling Brain that has adopted and accepted poor value judgments 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.
CHAPTER 3: NEWTON'S LAWS OF EMOTION
1. Newton’s Three Laws of Emotion:
• For every action, there is an equal and opposite emotional reaction
Pain causes moral gaps. When confronted with moral gaps, we develop overwhelming emotions toward equalization, or a return to moral equality. Equalizing like this restores hope.
• Our self-worth equals the sum of our emotions over time
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. When moral gaps persist for a long enough time, they normalize. They become our default expectation.
• 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.
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.
2. Self-worth is an illusion. 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.
3. Psychologists don’t know much for certain, but one thing they definitely do know is that childhood trauma fucks us up. This “snowball effect” of early values is why our childhood experiences, both good and bad, have long-lasting effects on our identities and generate the fundamental values that go on to define much of our lives. Your early experiences become your core values, and if your core values are fucked up, they create a domino effect of suckage that extends through the years, infecting experiences large and small with their toxicity.
4. 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. Eventually, once we’ve done this enough, the Feeling Brain becomes accustomed to the new values and starts to believe them.
Fruitful visualization should be a little bit uncomfortable. It should challenge you and be difficult to fathom. If it’s not, then it means that nothing is changing.
5. 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?
6. “Most people do not value themselves above their cultural and group values. Therefore, many people are willing to die for their highest values—for their family, their loved ones, their nation, their god. And because of this willingness to die for their values, these collisions of culture will inevitably result in war.
CHAPTER 4: HOW TO MAKE ALL OF YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE
1. Look, we all need communities to build hope. And we all need hope to not go utterly fucking insane and start snorting bath salts. Religions are the basis for that communal hope. And we’re going to learn how to build them from scratch. Religions are a beautiful thing. When you get enough people together with the same values, they behave in ways they never would when alone. Their hopeamplifies in a sort of network effect, and the social validation of being part of a group hijacks their Thinking Brains and lets their Feeling Brains run wild. Religions bring groups of people together to mutually validate one another and make one another feel important. It’s a big silent agreement that if we all come together under some shared purpose, we will feel important and worthy, and the Uncomfortable Truth will be just that much farther away.
2. How to start your own religion:
• Step One: Sell Hope to the Hopeless
Today, appealing to the hopeless is easier than ever before. All you need is a social media account: start posting extreme and crazy shit, and let the algorithm do the rest. The crazier and more extreme your posts, the more attention you’ll garner, and the more the hopeless will flock to you like flies to cow shit. It’s not hard at all. But you can’t just go online and say anything. No, you must have a (semi-)coherent message. You must have a vision. Because it’s easy to get people riled up and angry about nothing—the news media have created a whole business model out of it. But to have hope, people need to feel that they are a part of some greater movement, that they are about to join the winning side of history. And, for that, you must give them faith.
• Step Two: Choose Your Faith
Whatever our Feeling Brain adopts as its highest value, this tippy top of our value hierarchy becomes the lens through which we interpret all other values. Let’s call this highest value the “God Value.” Some people’s God Value is money. These people view all other things (family, love, prestige, politics) through the prism of money. Other people’s God Value is love. They view all other values through the prism of love—they’re against conflict in all its forms, they’re against anything that separates or divides others. Obviously, many people adopt Jesus Christ, or Muhammad, or the Buddha, as their God Value. They then interpret everything they experience through the prism of that spiritual leader’s teachings.
• Step Three: Preemptively Invalidate All Criticism or Outside Questioning
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.”
• Step Four: Ritual Sacrifice for Dummies So Easy, Anyone Can Do It!
Remember, emotions are actions; the two are one and the same. Therefore, to modify (or reinforce) the Feeling Brain’s value hierarchy, you need some easily repeatable yet totally unique and identifiable action for people to perform. That’s where the rituals come in.
• Step Five: Promise Heaven, Deliver Hell
The beauty of a religion is that the more you promise your followers salvation, enlightenment, world peace, perfect happiness, or whatever, the more they will fail to live up to that promise. And the more they fail to live up to that promise, the more they’ll blame themselves and feel guilty. And the more they blame themselves and feel guilty, the more they’ll do whatever you tell them to do to make up for it.
• Step Six: Prophet for Profit!
So, this is it. You’ve come to the end. You have your religion, and it’s time to reap all its benefits. Now that you’ve got your little following giving you their money and cutting your grass, you can finally have everything you’ve ever wished for!
3. Evidence belongs to the Thinking Brain, whereas values are decided by the Feeling Brain. You cannot verify values. They are, by definition, subjective and arbitrary. Therefore, you can argue about facts until you’re blue in the face, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter—people interpret the significance of their experiences through their values.
4. If everything were perfect and great, there’d be no reason to follow anybody. No religion will ever make you feel blissful and peaceful all the time. No country will ever feel completely fair and safe. No political philosophy will solve everyone’s problems all the time. True equality can never be achieved; someone somewhere will always be screwed over. True freedom doesn’t really exist because we all must sacrifice some autonomy for stability. No one, no matter how much you love them or they love you, will ever absolve that internal guilt you feel simply for existing. It’s all fucked. Everything is fucked. It always has been and always will be. There are no solutions, only stopgap measures, only incremental improvements, only slightly better forms of fuckedness than others. And it’s time we stop running from that and, instead, embrace it. This is our fucked-up world. And we’re the fucked-up ones in it.
5. We all must have faith in something. We must find value somewhere. It’s how we psychologically survive and thrive. It’s how we find hope. And even if you have a vision for a better future, it’s too hard to go it alone. To realize any dream, we need support networks, for both emotional and logistical reasons. It takes an army. Literally.
6. 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.
7. 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. But more important, because by experiencing our hopes, we lose them. We see that our beautiful visions for a perfect future are not so perfect, that our dreams and aspirations are themselves riddled with unexpected flaws and unforeseen sacrifices. Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.
CHAPTER 5: HOPE IS FUCKED
1. 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. It is not moored to a single book or creed. It is not beholden to some ancient land or people. It is not tethered to a supernatural spirit whose existence cannot be proven or disproven. It is an ongoing, ever-changing body of evidence-based beliefs, one that is free to mutate, grow, and shift as the evidence dictates.
2. These were concepts that had never been voiced before. With the prospect of so much growth and change in this life, people no longer relied on spiritual beliefs about the next life to give them hope. Instead, they began to invent and rely upon the ideological religions of their time. This changed everything. Church doctrines softened. People stayed home on Sundays. Monarchs conceded power to their subjects. Philosophers began to openly question God—and somehow weren’t burned alive for doing so. It was a golden age for human thought and progress.
3. 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 eternal struggle: everything is always fucked, but the more fucked things become, the more we must mobilize hope to sustain and overcome the world’s fuckedness. This is why heroes such as Witold Pilecki inspire us: their ability to muster enough hope to resist evil reminds us that all of us are capable of resisting evil.
The sickness may spread, but so does the cure, because hope is contagious. Hope is what saves the world.
4. 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. So far, I’ve argued that hope is fundamental to our psychology, that we need to (a) have something to look forward to, (b) believe ourselves in control of our fate enough to achieve that something, and (c) find a community to achieve it with us. When we lack one or all of these for too long, we lose hope and spiral into the void of the Uncomfortable Truth.
5. Therefore, it is the conflict that maintains。the hope. So, we’ve got it backward: everything being fucked doesn’t require hope; hope requires everything being fucked. The sources of hope that give our lives a sense of meaning are the same sources of division and hate. The hope that brings the most joy to our lives is the same hope that brings the greatest danger. The hope that brings people closest together is often the same hope that tears them apart. Hope is, therefore, destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what currently is. Because hope requires that something be broken. Hope requires that we renounce a part of ourselves and/or a part of the world. It requires us to be anti-something.
6. Nietzsche instead believed that we must look beyond hope. We must look beyond values. We must evolve into something “beyond good and evil.” For him, this morality of the future had to begin with something he called amor fati, or “love of one’s fate”: “My formula for greatness in a human being,” he wrote, “is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”
Amor fati, for Nietzsche, meant the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness.
7. 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.
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