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arrowpusher · 8 months

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Book Review #4: Everything is Fucked, A Book About Hope (by Mark Manson)

For a long time, I had wanted to read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, but it's always checked out at the library. I read the author's other book which also has good reviews.

I've heard of the concept of "caring too much". It sounds narcissistic, but I feel like my perfectionist mindset makes me OCD and uselessly stress over the tiniest details. I thought this would be a good read for myself.

I read ~3/4. It was the only entertainment I brought while waiting all day for a concert, but still, I got bored and couldn't really bring myself to finish it. While some parts were interesting, most of it either felt like it was rambling or got too philosophical.

The basic premise of the book is that, realistically speaking, problems are inevitable.

"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."

"You blame yourself for failing to live up to your God Value, regardless of how ill-advised that God Value is. You can see this same cycle of desperation play out in all sorts of other areas. Fitness and diet plans, political activism, self-help seminars… the message is always the same: the more you do it, the more you're told you need to do it to finally experience the satisfaction you've been promised. Yet that satisfaction never comes."

"Human pain is like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Every time you knock down one kind of pain, another one pops up. And the faster you whack them, the faster they come back."

It delves into why and how we feel hope.

"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 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 on achieving those things."

"Here's the funny thing about value hierarchies: when they change, you don't actually lose anything… That's because 'fun' is the product of our value hierarchies. When we stop valuing something, it ceases to be fun or interesting to us. Therefore, there is no sense of loss, no sense of missing out when we stop doing it it. On the contrary, we look back and wonder how we ever so much time caring about such a silly, trivial thing, why we wasted so much energy on issues and causes that didn't matter. These pangs of regret or embarrassment are good; they signify growth. They are the product of our achieving our hopes."

"Experiences generate emotions. Emotions generate values. Values generate narratives of meaning. And people who share similar narratives of meaning come together."

It also explores feelings from a psychological angle.

"Some people's Thinking Brains have ignored their Feeling Brains for so long that it takes them a while to learn how to listen again."

"This whole 'teach your Thinking Brain to decipher and cooperate with your Feeling Brain instead of judging him and thinking he's an evil piece of shit' is the basis for CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy)."

"Equalization is present in every experience because the drive to equalize is emotion itself. Sadness is a feeling of powerlessness to make up for a perceived loss. Anger is the desire to equalize through force and aggression. Happiness is feeling liberated from pain, while guilt is the feeling that you deserve some pain that never arrived."

More specifically, it analyzes how your upbringing affects your outlook on life.

"Our identities snowball through our lives, accumulating more and more values and meaning as they tumble along... The longer we've held a value, the deeper inside the snowball it is and the more fundamental it is to how we see ourselves and how we see the world. Like interest on a bank loan, our values compound compound over time, growing stronger and coloring future experiences. It's not just the bullying from when you were in grade school that fucks you up. It's the bullying plus all the self-loathing and narcissism you brought to decades worth of future relationships, causing them all to fail, that adds up over time."

"...the longer we've held onto these narratives, the less aware we are that we have them... Despite being arbitrary and completely made up, they seem not only natural but inevitable."

"The only way to change our values is to have experiences contrary to our values. And any attempt to break free from these values through new or contrary experiences will inevitably be met with pain and discomfort. It's why it is impossible to become someone new without first grieving the loss of who you used to be."

"Ideologies, because they're constantly challenged, changed, proven, and then disprove, offer scant psychological stability upon which to build one's hope."

It goes further into different stages in life, how experiences are processed, and how that leads to frustration or satisfaction. It's simplified in a diagram: Child -> pleasure. Adolescent -> principles -> pleasure. Adult -> principles

Children who are abused or coddled often end up stuck in their childhood value system. "Instead of predictable failures, his experience is just random and cruel… Therefore, no lesson is learned. No higher values are produced. No development takes place. The child never learns to control his own behavior and develops coping mechanisms to deal with the incessant pain." "People get stuck in the adolescent stage of values for similar reasons that they get stuck with childish values: trauma and/or neglect… 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."

"Adolescents need to be shown that bargaining is a never-ending treadmill, that the only things in life of real value and meaning are achieved without conditions, without transactions.

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

And this random witty quote that I have mentally bookmarked in case I ever need a catchy snappy comeback phrase.

"I think your mind is so open your brain fell out." --Carl Sagan

I think the biggest takeaway was the concept of amor fati (This is also the name of an Epik High song; now I'm curious to look more into the lyrics).

Amor fati is "love of one's fate". "Amor fati... 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 striving for more desires, but by simply desiring reality."

"Hope for nothing... 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.

"To act without hope. To not hope for better. To be better."

My critique in a nutshell: this book laments existential crises while unfortunately tripping the reader into them.

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