[[Mark Manson]] [[lit/kindle/Everything Is Fcked|Highlights]] In his follow up to The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F\*ck, Mark Manson argues that hope is the enemy of happiness. Manson starts by defining the Uncomfortable Truth: “you and everyone you know will die…\[and] little of what you say or do will ever matter”. Any meaning in our lives is of our own manufacture. The Universe does not care. We project meaning into the world because it gives us hope. Without hope we are unhappy. Hopelessness is the belief that everything is fucked so why do anything at all? Why not let the world burn or end your life? Manson argues that hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, depression, and addiction. And so we create hope by projecting meaning on the Universe, then we use this hope to give purpose to our everyday actions, and from this we derive happiness. He calls these stories we tell ourselves to create hope “hope narratives”; constructing these is the mind’s primary project. If hopelessness is the root of unhappiness, how can hope be the enemy of happiness? Manson points out that in many important dimensions, our lives in the Western world are improving at incredible rates. Despite this, life satisfaction, drug overdoses, reported feelings of loneliness and isolation, social mistrust, anxiety and depression are at all-time highs. He calls this the “paradox of progress”. He argues that the paradox of progress arises from two facts: hope doesn’t care about the problems already solved and the more we have the more we have to lose. This suggests why hope is so problematic—we’ll never be satisfied and, in fact, we may become more distressed the “better” life gets. ## The recipe for hope Before discussing the problems with hope, Mason describes the three elements required for hope: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community (these are derived from the concepts of motivation, value and meaning, respectively). ### Self control In maybe my favorite take away from the book, Mason upends the “classic assumption” of human decision making with a new model: the Consciousness Car. You have two brains, the “Thinking Brain” and “Feeling Brain”. The classic assumption is that your rational self is driving the Consciousness Car while being pestered by your inconvenient and distracting emotions. Using the example of a patient who had a brain tumor removed, Mason flips this idea on its head. The patient, “Elliot”, after having a brain tumor removed from his frontal lobe, lost some functioning related to motivation. He would do things like watch a James Bond marathon instead of going to his son’s parent-teacher conference. Not surprisingly, his life fell completely apart. He stopped performing at work, ended his marriage, got scammed a few times, lost it all. He could explain what decisions he’d made but not the why. He couldn’t say why he picked watching TV over attending his son’s events. But even more interesting, he didn’t seem to care. He was totally rational, but unable to empathize and feel. “The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, *we are moved to action only by emotion…*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.” In the Consciousness Car, the Thinking Brain is navigating. At its best it is helping the Feeling Brain pick a worthwhile destination and find the most expedient route. At its worst it is manufacturing rationale for why the car is going where it’s going, simply appeasing an out-of-control Feeling Brain. Mason argues that every problem of self-control is a problem of emotion. And because emotional problems are irrational, they can’t be reasoned with. The only solution to an emotional problem is an emotional one. The Feeling Brain won’t be impressed with facts and figures, instead it needs to be listened to and empathized with…otherwise it will drive the car off a goddamned cliff. The Thinking Brain and Feeling Brain need to practice a dialog referred to as “emotional regulation”. The Thinking Brain should not just jerk the wheel. The Thinking Brain’s superpower is the ability to assign meaning to impulses and feelings. That meaning can change how the Feeling Brain reacts to its own impulses. One way to create hope is through this meaning creation exercise with the Feeling Brain: instead of rationalizing or feeling enslaved to your impulses, challenge and analyze them. Don’t be judgmental; seek to understand. Create an environment that can bring about the Feeling Brain’s best impulses and intuition. For example, a Feeling Brain who has been through some shit may feel like it deserves the shit. The Thinking Brain should challenge this feeling and help the Feeling Brain know it deserves better. ### Values The Feeling Brain creates a value hierarchy for our experiences. Then it pursues the highest value experiences. You can change your values, but you must have experiences contrary to existing values. That is why growth is uncomfortable. However, once changed, the discomfort resolves. ”…here’s the funny thing about value hierarchies: when they change, you don’t actually lose anything.” You don’t “give up” your previous top priority so you can pursue a lower priority. You continue to pursue your top priority, it’s just different now. To replace old, unhealthy values with new healthy ones, you can either reframe past experiences (tell yourself a different narrative) or write narratives for your future self. This will allow your Feeling Brain to try them on for size and give Thinking Brain some feedback. ### Community Mason takes a bit of a left turn to describe his nine-part infomercial approach to designing your own religion. I think the take home is that having a group to share values with reinforces meaning and thus creates hope. However, hope in the hands of big groups of people is dangerous. For groups, conflicts with other groups create meaning. Wars, hatred, racism, polarization, et cetera are the outcomes of groups in search of meaning. ## Hope is fucked > “Hope is, therefore, destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what actually is.” Mason points out that hope requires the renouncement of a part of ourselves or the world; it requires us to be anti-something. Nietzsche argued that we must look beyond hope. He called this amor fati or “love of one’s fate: 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.” In the parable of Pandora’s Box, the gods create woman and send her to man with a box that is not to be opened, which of course man opens. Out comes all sorts of plagues and pestilences. What is left in the box is hope. In a less popular translation, hope is translated as ”deceptive expectation”. In this telling, hope is just another destructive force, and maybe the worst one. ### The pursuit of happiness By “pursuing happiness” we are treating ourselves as the means, rather than the end. Mason argues “by pursuing happiness you paradoxically make it less attainable. The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture.” Pain is a constant in life. Pain is necessary, even good. We use pain to determine the value of things. “Living well does not mean avoiding suffering, it means suffering for the right reasons…You could even define wealth in terms of how desirable your pain is.” Maturing means being willing to confront and engage pain. The ability to tolerate pain will lead to you becoming anti-fragile. The pursuit of happiness, when seen as the avoidance of pain, is thus an avoidance of growth, maturity, and life itself. > “Pain is the source of all value. To numb ourselves to our pain is to numb ourselves to anything that matters in the world.” ### Hope in society Manson argues that society has transitioned from one where economic and scientific progress resulted in “better pain” through innovation to one where we have become obsessed with avoiding pain through diversions (see your phone). In the former society, people were becoming more anti-fragile by accepting better pain. Now, we are psychologically fragile because we won’t tolerate any pain. This new society is centered around fake freedom: variety over choice, transactional relationships, constant diversion. The internet has made it easy for the Thinking Brain to rationalize all of the whimsy of the Feeling Brain. Ultimately this type of freedom limits our ability to choose, sacrifice and focus, which is real freedom. Real freedom requires being able to engage pain and discomfort, else you are the prisoner of your own emotional weakness. Manson suggests that to increase your freedom you should choose which limitations to impose on yourself. For example, delete social media to reclaim your leisure. Plato predicted that democracies, due to their tendency to pander to the masses, would eventually lead to tyranny. “Extreme freedom can’t be expected to lead to anything but a change to extreme tyranny.” Eventually, institutions won’t be able to keep up with everyone’s pursuit of happiness and one group will install a tyrant to magically make their hopes come true. ## Hope without hope Manson suggests consciousness should be the goal, not happiness. We should exalt and prioritize human consciousness (and maybe all consciousness). That means accepting—in fact celebrating—all kinds of experiences, including the uncomfortable and painful. According to Manson, accepting the Uncomfortable Truth will liberate you to responsibility. Once accepted, there is no reason not to love ourselves and each other, to treat the planet with respect, to live as if this moment is eternity. Nietzsche believed that humanity was a bridge between animal instincts and the “Uber-mensch”. “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture to something greater.” At the end of the book, Manson seems to fail to take his own advice, “daring” to hope for a society free of the ills he believes stem from our avoidance of the Uncomfortable Truth and manic pursuit of happiness. He ends with a Zuckerberg wet dream, hoping that one day we will all worship a virtual reality AI and eventually upload our consciousnesses, fulfilling our destiny to become Nietzsche’s “Uber-mensch”[^1]. I wonder if it is possible to both accept what is and hope for what will be? If you are happy with what you have, will you stop growing? Can we love our current selves (and situation) as we strive to something greater? [^1]: Is this book Manson’s response to Roko’s Basilisk, the thought experiment that asks whether you should start worshipping the eventual AI now so that it is kind to you when it eventually emerges? There are actual churches in existence today worshiping AI. ## Related Books - Albert Camus _The Myth of Sisyphus_ - Daniel Kahneman _Thinking Fast and Slow_ - Antonio Damasio _Descartes Error_