Everything Is F*cked

So I’d come across Mark Manson’s writing online in 2017 or 2018 and in late 2018 I heard he was going to be doing a book reading in Toronto, where I was livign. So I got on the TTC and schlepped up to Bloor and Younge or somewhere and went along and caught the end of his reading. He had some interesting stuff to say and subsequenty the next year I read a couple of his books.

Here are some excerpts from this book:

Hope is fundamental to our psychology. We need something to look forward to, a belief that we’re in control of our fate enough to reach it, and a community to reach it with. When we lack one or all of these for too long, we lose hope and spiral into the void of the uncomfortable truth.

The chain runs like this: experiences generate emotions, emotions generate values, values generate narratives of meaning — and people who share similar narratives come together to form religions. The more affecting the religion, the more industrious and disciplined its adherents; the more disciplined the adherents, the more likely it is to spread and give others a sense of control and hope.

These religions grow, define in-groups against out-groups, create rituals and taboos, and spur conflict between groups with opposing values. The conflict has to exist, because it’s what maintains meaning and purpose for the people inside the group. So the conflict is what maintains the hope. We’ve got it backward: hope requires everything being broken.

The sources of hope that give our lives meaning are the same sources of division and hate. The hope that brings the most joy 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 depends on the rejection of what currently is — it requires that something be broken, that we renounce part of ourselves or part of the world, that we be anti-something. Otherwise we hope for nothing.

It paints a bleak picture: that our psychological makeup leaves us choosing between perpetual conflict and nihilism. Tribalism or isolation. Religious war or the uncomfortable truth.