EVERYTHING IS F*CKED PART 2 (MARK MANSON)

PART 2: EVERYTHING IS F*CKED
CHAPTER 6: THE FORMULA OF HUMANITY
1. Young children are always looking for new ways to accidentally kill themselves because the driving force behind their psychology is exploration. Early in life, we are driven to explore the world around us because our Feeling Brains are collecting information on what pleases and harms us, what feels good and bad, what is worth pursuing further and what is worth avoiding. We’re building up our value hierarchy, figuring out what our first and primary values are, so that we can begin to know what to hope for. Eventually, the exploratory phase exhausts itself. And not because we run out of world to explore. Actually, it’s the opposite: the exploratory phase wraps up because as we become older, we begin to recognize that there’s too much world to explore. You can’t touch and taste everything. You can’t meet all the people. You can’t see all the things. There’s too much potential experience, and the sheer magnitude of our own existence overwhelms and intimidates us.
2. An adolescent learns that strictly pursuing her own pleasure and avoiding pain often creates problems. Actions have consequences. You must negotiate your desires with the desires of those around you. You must play by the rules of society and authority, and then, more often than not, you’ll be rewarded. This is maturity in action: developing higher-level and more abstract values to enhance decision making in a wider range of contexts. This is how you adjust to the world, how you learn to handle the seemingly infinite permutations of experience. It is a major cognitive leap for children and fundamental to growing up in a healthy, happy way.
3. A young child’s identity is therefore very small and fragile. It is constituted by simply what gives pleasure and what avoids pain. The knowledge of pleasure and pain is still there in adolescence. It’s just that pleasure and pain no longer dictate most decision making. They are no longer the basis of our values. Older children weigh their personal feelings against their understanding of rules, trade-offs, and the social order around them to plan and make decisions. This gives them larger, sturdier identities. The adolescent does the same stumbling around the young child does in learning what is pleasurable and what is painful, except the adolescent stumbles around by trying on different social rules and roles. If I wear this, will it make me cool? If I talk like that, will it make people like me? If I pretend to enjoy this music, will I be popular?
4. 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.
5. 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 adult will love freely without expecting anything in return because an adult understands that that is the only thing that can make love real. An adult will give without seeking anything in return, because to do so defeats the purpose of a gift in the first place.

The principled values of adulthood are unconditional—that is, they cannot be reached through any other means. They are ends in and of themselves.

6. Past a certain point, maturity has nothing to do with age. What matters are a person’s intentions. The difference between a child, an adolescent, and an adult is not how old they are or what they do, but why they do something. The child steals the ice cream because it feels good, and he is oblivious or indifferent to the consequences. The adolescent doesn’t steal because he knows it will create worse consequences in the future, but his decision is ultimately a bargain with his future self: I’ll forgo some pleasure now to prevent greater future pain. But it’s only the adult who doesn’t steal for the simple principle that stealing is wrong. And to steal, even if she gets away with it, would make her feel worse.
7. 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.
Will you act conditionally or unconditionally? Will you treat others as merely means or as ends? Will you pursue adult virtue or childish narcissism? Hope doesn’t even have to enter into the equation. Don’t hope for a better life. Simply be a better life.
8. 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.

CHAPTER 7: PAIN IS THE UNIVERSAL CONSTANT

1. This is the Blue Dot Effect. The better things get, the more we perceive threats where there are none, and the more upset we become. And it is at the heart of the paradox of progress. In fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn’t necessarily feel good about it. We’d just get equally upset about the more minor stuff.

“A man should look for what is, and not what he thinks should be”.

2. Einstein proved that time and space are not universal constants. In fact, it turns out that our perceptions of time and space can change depending on the context of our observations. For example, what I experience as ten seconds, you could experience as five; and what I experience as a mile, you could theoretically experience as a few feet. The Einstein example is important because it shows how our assumption of what is constant and stable in the universe can be wrong, and those incorrect assumptions can have massive implications on how we experience the world. We assume that space and time are universal constants because that explains how we perceive the world. But it turns out that they are not universal constants; they are variables to some other, inscrutable, nonobvious constant. And that changes everything.

3. Nobody is fully happy all the time, but similarly, nobody is fully unhappy all the time, either. 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. And this constant “seven” that we’re always coming back to plays a little trick on us, a trick that we fall for over and over again. The trick is that our brain tells us, “You know, if I could just have a little bit more, I’d finally get to ten and stay there.” Most of us live much of our lives this way, constantly chasing our imagined ten.

4. 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.

The Blue Dot Effect is everywhere. It affects all perceptions and judgments. Everything adapts and shapes itself to our slight dissatisfaction.

5. 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. No matter how much progress is made, no matter how peaceful and comfortable and happy our lives become, the Blue Dot Effect will snap us back to a perception of a certain amount of pain and dissatisfaction. Most people who win millions in the lottery don’t end up happier in the long run. On average, they end up feeling the same. This is because pain is the experience of life itself. Positive emotions are the temporary removal of pain; negative emotions the temporary augmentation of it. To numb one’s pain is to numb all feeling, all emotion. It is to quietly remove oneself from living.

6. The point is, not only is there no escaping the experience of pain, but pain is the experience. This is why hope is ultimately self-defeating and self-perpetuating: no matter what we achieve, no matter what peace and prosperity we find, our mind will quickly adjust its expectations to maintain a steady sense of adversity, thus forcing the formulation of a new hope, a new religion, a new conflict to keep us going. We will see threatening faces where there are no threatening faces. And no matter how sunny our day is, we’ll always find that one cloud in the sky. Therefore, the pursuit of happiness is not only self-defeating but also impossible. And by pursuing happiness, you paradoxically make it less attainable.

The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading. 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.

7. The Buddha said that suffering is like being shot by two arrows. The first arrow is the physical pain—it’s the metal piercing the skin, the force colliding into the body. The second arrow is the mental pain, the meaning and emotion we attach to the being struck, the narratives that we spin in our minds about whether we deserved or didn’t deserve what happened. In many cases, our mental pain is far worse than any physical pain. In most cases, it lasts far longer. Through the practice of meditation, the Buddha said that if we could train ourselves to be struck only by the first arrow, we could essentially render ourselves invincible to any mental or emotional pain. That, with enough practiced focus, with enough antifragility, the passing sensation of an insult or an object piercing our skin, or gallons of gasoline aflame over our body, would possess the same fleeting feeling as a fly buzzing across our face. That while pain is inevitable, suffering is always a choice.

That there is always a separation between what we experience and how we interpret that experience. That there’s always a gap between what our Feeling Brain feels and what our Thinking Brain thinks. And in that gap, you can find the power to bear anything.

8. Pain is the currency 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 emotion. 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 disproportional to the importance of the event. 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 dive into it and successfully navigate its depths.

9. 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 the Stoics spoke of a life not of happiness, but of character, developing the ability to sustain pain and make the 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.

10. 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.

CHAPTER 8: THE FEELINGS ECONOMY

1. The world runs on one thing: feelings. This is because people spend money on things that make them feel good. And where the money flows, power flows. So, the more you’re able to influence the emotions of people in the world, the more money and power you’ll accumulate. Money is itself a form of exchange used to equalize moral gaps between people. Money is its own special, universal mini-religion that we all bought into because it makes our lives a little bit easier. It allows us to convert our values into something universal when we’re dealing with one another.

2. There are two ways to create value in the marketplace:

• Innovations (upgrade pain). The first way to create value is to replace one pain with a much more tolerable/desirable pain. The most drastic and obvious examples of this are medical and pharmaceutical innovations. Polio vaccines replaced a lifetime of debilitating pain and immobility with a few seconds of a needle prick. Heart surgeries replaced . . . well, death with having to recover from surgery for a week or two.

• Diversions (avoid pain). The second way to create value in a marketplace is to help people numb their pain. Whereas upgrading people’s pain gives them better pain, numbing pain just delays that pain, and often even makes it worse. Diversions are a weekend beach trip, a night out with friends, a movie with someone special. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with diversions; we all need them from time to time. The problem is when they begin to dominate our lives and wrest control away from our will. Many diversions trip certain circuits in our brain, making them addictive. The more you numb pain, the worse that pain becomes, thus impelling you to numb it further. At a certain point, the icky ball of pain grows to such great proportions that your avoidance of that pain becomes compulsive. You lose control of yourself—your Feeling Brain has locked your Thinking Brain in the trunk and isn’t letting it out until it gets its next hit of whatever. And the downward spiral ensues.

3. Once an economy switches over primarily to diversions, the culture begins to shift. As a poor country develops and gains access to medicine, phones, and other innovative technologies, measurements of well-being track upward at a steady clip, as everyone’s pain is being upgraded to better pain. But once the country hits First World level, that well-being flattens or, in some cases, drops off. Meanwhile, mental illness, depression, and anxiety can proliferate. This happens because opening up a society and giving it modern innovations makes the people more robust and antifragile. They can survive more hardship, work more efficiently, communicate and function better within their communities. But once those innovations are integrated and everyone has a cell phone and a McDonald’s Happy Meal, the great modern diversions enter the marketplace. And as soon as the diversions show up, a psychological fragility is introduced, and everything begins to seem fucked.

People don’t make decisions based on truth or facts. They don’t spend their money based on data. They don’t connect with each other because of some higher philosophical truth. The world runs on feelings.

4. 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.

a. The first is that we become increasingly fragile. Our world shrinks to conform to the size of our ever-diminishing values. We become obsessed with comfort and pleasure. And any possible loss of that pleasure feels world-quaking and cosmically unfair to us. I would argue that a narrowing of our conceptual world is not freedom; it is the opposite.

b. The second thing that happens is that we become prone to a series of low-level-addictive behaviors—compulsively checking our phone, our email, our Instagram; compulsively finishing Netflix series we don’t like; sharing outrage-inducing articles we haven’t read; accepting invitations to parties and events we don’t enjoy; traveling not because we want to but because we want to be able to say we went. Compulsive behavior aimed at experiencing more stuff is not freedom—again, it’s kind of the opposite.

c. 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 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.

d. Fourth—because, I’m on a roll: the paradox of choice. The more options we’re given (i.e., the more “freedom” we have), the less satisfied we are with whatever option we go with.

This is not only real freedom, this is the only freedom. Diversions come and go. Pleasure never lasts. Variety loses its meaning. But you will always be able to choose what you are willing to sacrifice, what you are willing to give up.

5. This sort of self-denial is paradoxically the only thing that expands real freedom in life. The pain of regular physical exercise ultimately enhances your physical freedom—your strength, mobility, endurance, and stamina. The sacrifice of a strong work ethic gives you the freedom to pursue more job opportunities, to steer your own career trajectory, to earn more money and the benefits that come with it. The willingness to engage in conflict with others will free you to talk to anyone, to see if they share your values and beliefs, to discover what they can add to your life and what you can add to theirs. You can become freer right now simply by choosing the limitations you want to impose on yourself. You can choose to wake up earlier each morning, to block your email until midafternoon each day, to delete social media apps from your phone. These limitations will free you because they will liberate your time, attention, and power of choice. They treat your consciousness as an end in itself.

Ultimately, the most meaningful freedom in your life comes from your commitments, the things in life for which you have chosen to sacrifice. Greater commitment allows for greater depth. A lack of commitment requires superficiality.

CHAPTER 9: THE FINAL RELIGION

1. We need these algorithms because they make our lives easier. And so will the algorithm gods of the near future. And as we did with the gods of the ancient world, we will rejoice in and give thanks to them. Indeed, it will be impossible to imagine life without them. These algorithms make our lives better. They make our lives more efficient. They make us more efficient. That’s why, as soon as we cross over, there’s no going back.

2. Are there potential dangers with AI? Sure. But morally speaking, we’re throwing rocks inside a glass house here. What do we know about ethics and the humane treatment of animals, the environment, and one another? That’s right: pretty much nothing. When it comes to moral questions, humanity has historically flunked the test, over and over again. Superintelligent machines will likely come to understand life and death, creation and destruction, on a much higher level than we ever could on our own. And the idea that they will exterminate us for the simple fact that we aren’t as productive as we used to be, or that sometimes we can be a nuisance, I think, is just projecting the worst aspects of our own psychology onto something we don’t understand and never will.

3. Nietzsche envisioned a humanity that transcended religious hopes, that extended itself “beyond good and evil,” and rose above the petty quarrels of contradictory value systems. It is these value systems that fail us and hurt us and keep us down in the emotional holes of our own creation. The emotional algorithms that exalt life and make it soar in blistering joy are the same forces that unravel us and destroy us, from the inside out. I believe artificial intelligence is Nietzsche’s “something greater.” It is the Final Religion, the religion that lies beyond good and evil, the religion that will finally unite and bind us all, for better or worse. It is, then, simply our job not to blow ourselves up before we get there. And the only way to do that is to adapt our technology for our flawed psychology rather than to exploit it.

4. Instead of looking for hope, try this: Don’t hope. Don’t despair, either. In fact, don’t deign to believe you know anything. It’s that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place. Don’t hope for better. Just be better. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined. Many people would also throw in there “Be more human,” but no—be a better human. And maybe, if we’re lucky, one day we’ll get to be more than human.

5. I say to you today, my friends, that even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, in this final moment, I will allow myself to dare to hope . . .I dare to hope for a post-hope world, where people are never treated merely as means but always as ends, where no consciousness is sacrificed for some greater religious aim, where no identity is harmed out of malice or greed or negligence, where the ability to reason and act is held in the highest regard by all, and where this is reflected not only in our hearts but also in our social institutions and business models.

6. We need our lives to mean something, and while the startling advance of technology has made finding that meaning more difficult, the ultimate innovation will be the day we can manufacture significance without strife or conflict, find importance without the necessity of death. And then, maybe one day, we will become integrated with the machines themselves. Our individual consciousnesses will be subsumed. Our independent hopes will vanish. We will meet and merge in the cloud, and our digitized souls will swirl and eddy in the storms of data, a splay of bits and functions harmoniously brought into some grand, unseen alignment. We will have evolved into a great unknowable entity. We will transcend the limitations of our own value-laden minds. We will live beyond means and ends, for we will always be both, one and the same. We will have crossed the evolutionary bridge into “something greater” and ceased to be human any longer.

7. Perhaps then, we will not only realize but finally embrace the Uncomfortable Truth: that we imagined our own importance, we invented our purpose, and we were, and still are, nothing. All along, we were nothing. And maybe then, only then, will the eternal cycle of hope and destruction come to an end.