Author: Mark Manson
ISBN: 978-0062888464
Mark is a true master of words. He presents the most plausible psychological in philosophical theories (from Niezsche, Kant to Schwartz) in an easy to read and entertaining fashion. I was laughing my ass off on quite a few occasions. The books is as good as the first part - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. If you know any similar books, please hit me up.
EXCERPTS
Because heroism isn’t just bravery or guts or shrewd maneuvering. These things are common and are often used in unheroic ways. No, 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. Bravery is common. Resilience is common. But heroism has a philosophical component to it. There’s some great “Why?” that heroes bring to the table—some incredible cause or belief that goes unshaken, no matter what. And this is why, as a culture, we are so desperate for a hero today: not because things are necessarily so bad, but because we’ve lost the clear “Why?” that drove previous generations. [Nietzsche: He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.] [Story about Witold Pilecki! Wow!]
We are a culture and a people in need of hope.
“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”
But seriously, how could you tell someone, in good conscience, to “have a nice day” while knowing that all their thoughts and motivations stem from a never-ending need to avoid the inherent meaninglessness of human existence?
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.
Without hope, your whole mental apparatus will stall out or starve. If we don’t believe there’s any hope that the future will be better than the present, that our lives will improve in some way, then we spiritually die. After all, if there’s no hope of things ever being better, then why live—why do anything?
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. No, 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?
It is the Uncomfortable Truth, a silent realization that in the face of infinity, everything we could possibly care about quickly approaches zero.
Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction.
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.
These hope narratives are then what give our lives a sense of purpose. Not only do they imply that there is something better in the future, but also that it’s actually possible to go out and achieve that something. When people prattle on about needing to find their “life’s purpose,” what they really mean is that it’s no longer clear to them what matters, what is a worthy use of their limited time here on earth—in short, what to hope for. They are struggling to see what the before/after of their lives should be.
That’s the hard part: finding that before/after for yourself. It’s difficult because there’s no way ever to know for sure if you’ve got it right. This is why a lot of people flock to religion, because religions acknowledge this permanent state of unknowing and demand faith in the face of it. This is also probably partly why religious people suffer from depression and commit suicide in far fewer numbers than nonreligious people: that practiced faith protects them from the Uncomfortable Truth.
It doesn’t matter if the way you get to hope is via religious faith or evidence-based theory or an intuition or a well-reasoned argument—they all produce the same result: you have some belief that (a) there is potential for growth or improvement or salvation in the future, and (b) there are ways we can navigate ourselves to get there. That’s it. Day after day, year after year, our lives are made up of the endless overlapping of these hope narratives. They are the psychological carrot at the end of the stick.
This book is not an argument for nihilism. It is one against nihilism—both the nihilism within us and the growing sense of nihilism that seems to emerge with the modern world. And to successfully argue against nihilism, you must start at nihilism. You must start at the Uncomfortable Truth. From there, you must slowly build a convincing case for hope. [Great marketing strategy!]
Nihilism acknowledges no broader “Why?” It adheres to no great truth or cause. It’s a simple “Because it feels good.” And this, as we’ll see, is what is making everything seem so bad.
Basically, we are the safest and most prosperous humans in the history of the world, yet we are feeling more hopeless than ever before. The better things get, the more we seem to despair. It’s the paradox of progress. And perhaps it can be summed up in one startling fact: the wealthier and safer the place you live, the more likely you are to commit suicide.
The incredible progress made in health, safety, and material wealth over the past few hundred years is not to be denied. But these are statistics about the past, not the future. And that’s where hope inevitably must be found: in our visions of the future.
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. 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. Without a community, we feel isolated, and our values cease to mean anything. Without values, nothing appears worth pursuing. And without control, we feel powerless to pursue anything. Lose any of the three, and you lose the other two. Lose any of the three, and you lose hope.
Somehow, by losing his ability to feel, Elliot had also lost his ability to make decisions. He’d lost the ability to control his own life.
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.”
We see succumbing to our emotional impulses as a moral failing. We see a lack of self-control as a sign of a deficient character. Conversely, we celebrate people who beat their emotions into submission. We get collective hard-ons for athletes and businessmen and leaders who are ruthless and robotic in their efficiency. If a CEO sleeps under his desk and doesn’t see his kids for six weeks at a time—fuck yeah, that’s determination! See? Anyone can be successful!
If the Classic Assumption is true, then we should be able to exhibit self-control, prevent emotional outbursts and crimes of passion, and stave off addiction and indulgences through mental effort alone. And any failure to do so reflects something inherently faulty or damaged within us.
We cling to this narrative about self-control because the belief that we’re in complete control of ourselves is a major source of hope. We want to believe that changing ourselves is as simple as knowing what to change. We want to believe that the ability to do something is as simple as deciding to do it and mustering enough willpower to get there. We want to believe ourselves to be the masters of our own destiny, capable of anything we can dream.
The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion [and not by reason!].
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. Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason but, rather, of emotion. Self-control is an emotional problem; laziness is an emotional problem; procrastination is an emotional problem; underachievement is an emotional problem; impulsiveness is an emotional problem. 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. And as you’ve probably figured out by now, intellectually understanding how to change your behavior doesn’t change your behavior. (Trust me, I’ve read like twelve books on nutrition and am still chomping on a burrito as I write this.)
And this brings us to even worse news: emotional problems can only have emotional solutions. It’s all up to the Feeling Brain. And if you’ve seen how most people’s Feeling Brains drive, that’s pretty fucking scary.
As Daniel Kahneman once put it, the Thinking Brain is “the supporting character who imagines herself to be the hero.”
The Feeling Brain generates the emotions that cause us to move into action, and the Thinking Brain suggests where to direct that action. The keyword here is suggests. While the Thinking Brain is not able to control the Feeling Brain, it is able to influence it, sometimes to a great degree.
The person who denies his Feeling Brain numbs himself to the world around him. By rejecting his emotions, he rejects making value judgments, that is, deciding that one thing is better than another. As a result, he becomes indifferent to life and the results of his decisions. He struggles to engage with others. His relationships suffer. And eventually, his chronic indifference leads him to an unpleasant visit with the Uncomfortable Truth. After all, if nothing is more or less important, then there’s no reason to do anything. And if there’s no reason to do anything, then why live at all?
Ever wonder why a page-turner is a page-turner? It’s not you turning those pages, idiot; it’s your Feeling Brain. It’s the anticipation and suspense; the joy of discovery and the satisfaction of resolution. Good writing is writing that is able to speak to and stimulate both brains at the same time.
For you and me, people-watching may be something fun to do on a random Sunday in the park. But for the abused, it’s a survival skill. A lilt in someone’s voice, the rise of an eyebrow, the depth of a sigh—anything can set off their internal alarm.
People are liars, all of us. We lie constantly and habitually. We lie about important things and trifling things. And we usually don’t lie out of malice—rather, we lie to others because we’re in such a habit of lying to ourselves.
When confronted with moral gaps, we develop overwhelming emotions toward equalization, or a return to moral equality. These desires for equalization take the form of a sense of deserving. Because I punched you, you feel I deserve to be punched back or punished in some way. This feeling (of my deserving pain) will cause you to have strong emotions about me (most likely anger). You will also have strong emotions around the feeling that you didn’t deserve to be punched, that you did no wrong, and that you deserve better treatment from me and everyone else around you. These feelings might take the form of sadness, self-pity, or confusion. As with the negative moral gap, with the positive moral gap you will feel indebted to me, that you “owe me” something, that I deserve something good or that you need to “make it up” to me somehow. You will have intense feelings of gratitude and appreciation in my presence.
It’s our natural psychological inclination to equalize across moral gaps, to reciprocate actions: positive for positive; negative for negative. The forces that impel us to fill those gaps are our emotions. In this sense, every action demands an equal and opposite emotional reaction.
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.
This is essentially what “growth” is: reprioritizing one’s value hierarchy in an optimal way.
But here’s the funny thing about value hierarchies: when they change, you don’t actually lose anything. It’s not that my friend decided to start giving up the parties for her career, it’s that the parties stopped being fun. 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.
When moral gaps persist for a long enough time, they normalize. They become our default expectation. They lodge themselves into our value hierarchy. If someone hits us and we’re never able to hit him back, eventually our Feeling Brain will come to a startling conclusion: We deserve to be hit. After all, if we didn’t deserve it, we would have been able to equalize, right? The fact that we could not equalize means that there must be something inherently inferior about us, and/or something inherently superior about the person who hit us. This, too, is part of our hope response. Because if equalization seems impossible, our Feeling Brain comes up with the next best thing: giving in, accepting defeat, judging itself to be inferior and of low value.
Of course, the reverse moral gap must be true as well. If we’re given a bunch of stuff without earning it (participation trophies and grade inflation and gold medals for coming in ninth place), we (falsely) come to believe ourselves inherently superior to what we actually are. We therefore develop a deluded version of high self-worth, or, as it’s more commonly known, being an asshole.
Self-worth is contextual. If you were bullied for your geeky glasses and funny nose as a child, your Feeling Brain will “know” that you’re a dweeb, even if you grow up to be a flaming sexpot of hotness. People who are raised in strict religious environments and are punished harshly for their sexual impulses often grow up with their Feeling Brain “knowing” that sex is wrong, even though their Thinking Brain has long worked out that sex is natural and totally awesome.
The nature of our consciousness dictates that everything happen through us. It’s only natural, then, that our immediate assumption is that we are at the center of everything—because we are at the center of everything we experience.
We all overestimate our skills and intentions and underestimate the skills and intentions of others. Most people believe that they are of above-average intelligence and have an above-average ability at most things, especially when they are not and do not. We all tend to believe that we’re more honest and ethical than we actually are. We will each, given the chance, delude ourselves into believing that what’s good for us is also good for everyone else. When we screw up, we tend to assume it was some happy accident. But when someone else screws up, we immediately rush to judge that person’s character.
When our Feeling Brain feels something, our Thinking Brain sets to work constructing a narrative to explain that something. Losing your job doesn’t just suck; you’ve constructed an entire narrative around it: Your asshole boss wronged you after years of loyalty! You gave yourself to that company! And what did you get in return? Our narratives are sticky, clinging to our minds and hanging onto our identities like tight, wet clothes. We carry them around with us and define ourselves by them. We trade narratives with others, looking for people whose narratives match our own. We call these people friends, allies, good people. And those who carry narratives that contradict our own? We call them evil.
This network of value-based narratives is our identity. But here’s the funny thing: when you adopt these little narratives as your identity, you protect them and react emotionally to them as though they were an inherent part of you. The same way that getting punched will cause a violent emotional reaction, someone coming up and saying you’re a shitty boat captain will produce a similarly negative emotional reaction, because we react to protect the metaphysical body just as we protect the physical.
The only way to change our values is to have experiences contrary to our values. And any attempt to break free from those values through new or contrary experiences will inevitably be met with pain and discomfort. This is why there is 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.
Because when we lose our values, we grieve the death of those defining narratives as though we’ve lost a part of ourselves—because we have lost a part of ourselves. We grieve the same way we would grieve the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job, a house, a community, a spiritual belief, or a friendship. These are all defining, fundamental parts of you. And when they are torn away from you, the hope they offered your life is also torn away, leaving you exposed, once again, to the Uncomfortable Truth.
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. Wait, did he punch me because I’m an awful person; or is he the awful person?
- 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. This sort of “future projection” is usually taught in the worst of ways. “Imagine you’re fucking rich and own a fleet of yachts! Then it will come true!” Sadly, that kind of visualization is not replacing a current unhealthy value (materialism) with a better one. It’s just masturbating to your current value. Real change would entail fantasizing what not wanting yachts in the first place would feel like. 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.
The Feeling Brain doesn’t know the difference between past, present, and future; that’s the Thinking Brain’s domain.
Without these narratives—without developing a clear vision of the future we desire, of the values we want to adopt, of the identities we want to shed or step into—we are forever doomed to repeat the failures of our past pain. The stories of our past define our identity. The stories of our future define our hopes. And our ability to step into those narratives and live them, to make them reality, is what gives our lives meaning.
“There is an emotional gravity to our values: we attract those into our orbit who value the same things we do, and instinctively repel, as if by reverse magnetism, those whose values are contrary to our own. These attractions form large orbits of like-minded people around the same principle. Each falls along the same path, circling and revolving around the same cherished thing.”
You, sir, may value science. I, too, value science. Therefore, there is an emotional magnetism between us. Our values attract one another and cause us to fall perpetually into each other’s orbit, in a metaphysical dance of friendship. Our values align, and our cause becomes one!
“The stronger we hold a value,” he wrote, “that is, the stronger we determine something as superior or inferior than all else, the stronger its gravity, the tighter its orbit, and the more difficult it is for outside forces to disrupt its path and purpose." [Newton]
People who love the same thing love each other. People who hate the same thing also love each other. And people who love or hate different things hate each other.
“Now, you may be saying, ‘But, my good man, Newton! Don’t most people value the same things? Don’t most people simply want a bit of bread and a safe place to sleep at night?’ And to that, I say you are correct, my friend! “All peoples are more the same than they are different. We all mostly want the same things out of life. But those slight differences generate emotion, and emotion generates a sense of importance. Therefore, we come to perceive our differences as disproportionately more important than our similarities. And this is the true tragedy of man. That we are doomed to perpetual conflict over the slight difference.
“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.
And in that quiet, dark moment, Isaac Newton looked at the circles on the page and had an upsetting realization: he had no orbit. Through years of trauma and social failure, he had voluntarily separated himself from everything and everyone, like a lone star flung on its own trajectory, unobstructed and uninfluenced by the gravitational pull of any system. He realized that he valued no one—not even himself—and this brought him an overwhelming sense of loneliness and grief, because no amount of logic and calculation could ever compensate for the gnawing desperation of his Feeling Brain’s never-ending struggle to find hope in this world.
Imagine this: it’s 2:00 a.m. and you’re still awake on the couch, staring bleary-eyed and foggy-brained at the television. Why? You don’t know. Inertia simply makes it easier to sit there and keep watching than to get up and go to bed. So, you watch. Perfect. This is how I get you: when you’re feeling apathetic and lost and completely passive in the face of your fate. Nobody sits up staring at a TV at 2:00 a.m. if they have important shit to do the next day. Nobody struggles with the will to move their ass off the couch for hours on end unless they’re having some sort of inner crisis of hope. And it’s exactly this crisis that I want to speak to.
Back then, I didn’t know any better. I still thought stuff like this was about reason and evidence, not feelings and values. And values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.
There’s a reason that all the major religions in the world have a history of sending missionaries to the poorest and most destitute corners of the globe: starving people will believe anything if it will keep them fed. For your new religion, it’s best to start preaching your message to people whose lives suck the most: the poor, the outcasts, the abused and forgotten. You know, people who sit on Facebook all day.
Religious leaders preach to the poor and downtrodden and enslaved, telling them that they deserve the kingdom of heaven—basically, an open “fuck you” to the corrupt elites of the day. It’s a message that’s easy to get behind.
So, there’s no such thing as an atheist. Well, sorta. Depends what you mean by “atheist.” My point is that we must all believe, on faith, that something is important. Even if you’re a nihilist, you are believing, on faith, that nothing is more important than anything else.
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. Their family will love them only if they make enough money. They will be respected only if they have money. All conflict, frustration, jealousy, anxiety—everything boils down to money.
All religions must start with a faith-based God Value. Doesn’t matter what it is. Worshipping cats, believing in lower taxes, never letting your kids leave the house—whatever it is, it is a faith-based value that this one thing will produce the best future reality, and therefore gives the most hope. We then organize our lives, and all other values, around that value. We look for activities that enact that faith, ideas that support it, and most important, communities that share it.
Here’s the thing about evidence: it changes nothing. 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.
Evidence serves the interests of the God Value, not the other way around. The only loophole to this arrangement is when evidence itself becomes your God Value. The religion built around the worship of evidence is more commonly known as “science,” and it’s arguably the best thing we’ve ever done as a species.
My point is that all values are faith-based beliefs. Therefore, all hope (and therefore, all religions) are also based on faith, faith that something can be important and valuable and right despite the fact that there will never be a way to verify it beyond all doubt.
For our purposes, I’ve defined three types of religions, each type based on a different kind of God Value:
- Spiritual religions draw hope from supernatural beliefs, or belief in things that exist outside the physical or material realm. These religions look for a better future outside this world and this life. Christianity, Islam, Judaism, animism, and Greek mythology are examples of spiritual religions.
- Ideological religions draw hope from the natural world. They look for salvation and growth and develop faith-based beliefs regarding this world and this life. Examples include capitalism, communism, environmentalism, liberalism, fascism, and libertarianism.
- Interpersonal religions draw hope from other people in our lives. Examples of interpersonal religions include romantic love, children, sports heroes, political leaders, and celebrities.
In fact, things were so bad in the old days that the only way to keep everyone sane was by promising them hope in an afterlife. Old-school religion held the fabric of society together because it gave the masses a guarantee that their suffering was meaningful, that God was watching, and that they would be duly rewarded.
Because, as we’ll see, religion is all about emotional attachment. And the best way to build those attachments is to get people to stop thinking critically.
This probably won’t surprise you, but I’m not very spiritual—no supernatural beliefs for me, thank you. I get a sick pleasure from chaos and uncertainty. This, unfortunately, has condemned me to a life of struggle with the Uncomfortable Truth. But it’s something I’ve come to accept about myself.
The robe, a visual cue signaling status and importance, is part of the ritual thing. And we need rituals because rituals make our values tangible. You can’t think your way toward valuing something. You have to live it. You have to experience it. And one way of making it easier for others to live and experience a value is to make up cute outfits for them to wear and important-sounding words for them to say—in short, to give them rituals. Rituals are visual and experiential representations of what we deem important. That’s why every good religion has them.
Married couples create their own little rituals and habits, their inside jokes, all to reaffirm their relationship’s value, their own private interpersonal religion. Rituals connect us with the past. They connect us to our values. And they affirm who we are.
Now think of it this way: You exist. You didn’t do anything to deserve existing. You don’t even know why you started existing; you just did. Boom—you have a life. And you have no idea where it came from or why. If you believe God gave it to you, then, holy shit! Do you owe Him big time! But even if you don’t believe in God—damn, you’re blessed with life! What did you ever do to deserve that? How can you live in such a way as to make your life worthwhile? This is the constant, yet unanswerable question of the human condition, and why the inherent guilt of consciousness is the cornerstone of almost every spiritual religion. The sacrifices that pop up in ancient spiritual religions were enacted to give their adherents a feeling of repaying that debt, of living that worthwhile life.
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.
Because, seriously, if someone really could solve all your problems, they’d go out of business by next Tuesday (or get voted out of office next week). Leaders need their followers to be perpetually dissatisfied; it’s good for the leadership business. 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.
To realize any dream, we need support networks, for both emotional and logistical reasons. It takes an army. Literally. It’s our value hierarchies—as expressed through the stories of religion, and shared among thousands or millions—that attract, organize, and propel human systems forward in a sort of Darwinian competition. Religions compete in the world for resources, and the religions that tend to win out are those whose value hierarchies make the most efficient use of labor and capital. 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. When the original values that defined the religion, the movement, the revolution, get tossed aside for the sake of maintaining the status quo, this is narcissism at an organizational level. This is how you go from Jesus to the Crusades, from Marxism to the gulags, from a wedding chapel to divorce court.
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. [Niezsche: The quickest way to destroy your dreams is to experience them.]
Nietzsche was, in fact, everything he claimed to loathe: weak, dependent, and wholly captivated and reliant on powerful, independent women. Yet, in his work, he preached individual strength and self-reliance, and was a woeful misogynist.
Every religion runs into the sticky problem of evidence. You can tell people all this great stuff about God and spirits and angels and whatnot, but if the entire town burns down and your kid loses an arm in a fishing accident, well, then . . . oops. Where was God? Throughout history, authorities have expended a lot of effort to hide the lack of evidence supporting their religion and/or to punish anyone who dared question the validity of their faith-based values. It’s for this reason that, like most atheists, Nietzsche loathed spiritual religions. Natural philosophers, as scientists were called in Isaac Newton’s time, decided that the most reliable faith-based beliefs were those that had the most evidence supporting them. Evidence became the God Value, and any belief that was no longer supported by evidence had to be altered to account for the new observed reality. This produced a new religion: science. 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.
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. And incredibly, the progress begun in that age has only accelerated and continues to accelerate to this day.
The scientific revolution eroded the dominance of spiritual religions and made way for the dominance of ideological religions. And this is what concerned Nietzsche. Because for all of the progress and wealth and tangible benefits that ideological religions produce, they lack something that spiritual religions do not: infallibility. [Nietzsche: We killed God. For most people: meaning was God. By "killing" God most people lost meaning, because they didn't manage to find meaning without God (it's promise that suffering is meaningful and leads to great afterlife). Jung: Lack of meaning -> depression, addiction and all kinds of mental problems.]
You could watch wars and diseases come and go. None of these experiences directly contradicts a belief in a deity, because supernatural entities are evidence-proof. And while atheists see this as a bug, it can also be a feature. The robustness of spiritual religions means that the shit could hit the proverbial fan, and your psychological stability would remain intact. Hope can be preserved because God is always preserved. Not so with ideologies. If you spend a decade of your life lobbying for certain governmental reform, and then that reform leads to the deaths of tens of thousands of people, that’s on you. That piece of hope that sustained you for years is shattered. Your identity, destroyed. Hello darkness, my old friend. [Only if you adopt science as the new religion, do you loose universal values. Hence, the good and the bad do not exist anymore. Everything just is.]
Who are we to determine the meaning and significance of our own existence? Who are we to decide what is good and right in the world? How can we bear this burden?
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.
“My formula for greatness in a human being,” he [Nietzsche] wrote, “is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. [Accepting everything unconditionally, without a hope that it was or will be different.]
Amor fati, for Nietzsche, 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 by striving for more desires, but by simply desiring reality.
It basically meant: hope for nothing. Hope for what already is—because hope is ultimately empty. Anything your mind can conceptualize is fundamentally flawed and limited and therefore damaging if worshipped unconditionally. Don’t hope for more happiness. Don’t hope for less suffering. Don’t hope to improve your character. Don’t hope to eliminate your flaws. 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.
But the only thing that frees us is that truth: You and I and everyone we know will die, and little to nothing that we do will ever matter on a cosmic scale. And while some people fear that this truth will liberate them from all responsibility, that they’ll go snort an eight ball of cocaine and play in traffic, the reality is that this truth scares them because it liberates them to responsibility. It means that there’s no reason to not love ourselves and one another. That there’s no reason to not treat ourselves and our planet with respect. That there’s no reason to not live every moment of our lives as though it were to be lived in eternal recurrence.
“Man is a rope, tied between beast and Superman—a rope over an abyss. 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.]” [Nietzsche in Thus spoke Zarathustra.]
“I love those who do not know how to live,” he said. “For they are the ones who cross over.”
Depending on your perspective, the philosopher Immanuel Kant was either the most boring person who ever lived or a productivity hacker’s wet dream. For forty years he woke up every morning at five o’clock and wrote for exactly three hours. He would then lecture at the same university for exactly four hours, and then eat lunch at the same restaurant every day. Then, in the afternoon, he would go on an extended walk through the same park, on the same route, leaving and returning home at the exact same time. He did this for forty years. Every. Single. Day.
Kant didn’t give a fuck. And I mean that in the truest and profoundest sense of the phrase. He is the only thinker I have ever come across who eschewed hope and the flawed human values it relied upon; who confronted the Uncomfortable Truth and refused to accept its horrible implications; who gazed into the abyss with nothing but logic and pure reason; who, armed with only the brilliance of his mind, stood before the gods and challenged them . . . . . . and somehow won.
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. Therefore, our two brains begin to focus less on trying everything and more on developing some rules to help us navigate the endless complexity of the world before us. We adopt most of these rules from our parents and teachers, but many of them we figure out for ourselves. [Sidenote: Psychedelics have the ability to put adults backo into growth mindset, hence making it possible for them to change their values.]
As a result, 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.
Eventually, though, we realize that the most important things in life cannot be gained through bargaining. You don’t want to bargain with your father for love, or your friends for companionship, or your boss for respect. Bargaining with people into loving or respecting you feels shitty. It undermines the whole project. If you have to convince someone to love you, then they don’t love you. If you have to cajole someone into respecting you, then they will never respect you. If you have to convince someone to trust you, then they won’t actually trust you.
The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to immediately destroy them. You cannot conspire for happiness; it is impossible. But this is often what people try to do, especially when they seek out self-help and other personal development advice—they are essentially saying, “Show me the rules of the game I have to play, and I’ll play it,” not realizing that it’s the very fact that they think there are rules to happiness that is preventing them from being happy. While people who navigate life through bargaining and rules can get far in the material world, they remain crippled and alone in their emotional world. This is because transactional values create relationships that are built upon manipulation.
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. Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.
An adolescent will say that she values honesty only because she has learned that saying so produces good results. But when confronted with difficult conversations, she will tell white lies, exaggerate the truth, and become passive-aggressive. An adult will be honest for the simple sake that honesty is more important than her own pleasure or pain. Honesty is more important than getting what you want or achieving a goal. Honesty is inherently good and valuable, in and of itself. Honesty is therefore an end, not a means to some other end.
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.
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.
This is essentially what good early parenting boils down to: implementing the correct consequences for a child’s pleasure/pain-driven behavior. Punish them for stealing ice cream; reward them for sitting quietly in a restaurant. You are helping them understand that life is far more complicated than their own impulses or desires. Parents who fail to do this fail their children in an incredibly fundamental way because it won’t take long for the child to have the shocking realization that the world does not cater to his whims. Learning this as an adult is incredibly painful—far more painful than it would have been had the child learned the lesson when he was younger. He will be socially punished by his peers and society for not understanding it. Nobody wants to be friends with a selfish brat. No one wants to work with someone who doesn’t consider others’ feelings or appreciate rules. No society accepts someone who metaphorically (or literally) steals the ice cream from the freezer. The untaught child will be shunned, ridiculed, and punished for his behavior in the adult world, which will result in even more pain and suffering.
Ultimately, graduating to adolescence requires trust. A child must trust that her behavior will produce predictable outcomes. Stealing always creates bad outcomes. Touching a hot stove also creates bad outcomes. Trusting in these outcomes is what allows the child to develop rules and principles around them. The same is true once the child grows older and enters society. A society without trustworthy institutions or leaders cannot develop rules and roles. Without trust, there are no reliable principles to dictate decisions, therefore everything devolves back into childish selfishness.
Some people become incredibly good at playing the bargaining game. They tend to be charming and charismatic and are naturally able to sense what other people want of them and to fill that role. This manipulation rarely fails them in any meaningful way, so they come to believe that this is simply how the whole world operates. Life is one big high school gymnasium, and you must shove people into lockers lest ye be shoved first.
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. It requires good parents and teachers not to succumb to the adolescent’s bargaining. The best way to do this is by example, of course, by showing unconditionality by being unconditional yourself. The best way to teach an adolescent to trust is to trust him. The best way to teach an adolescent respect is to respect him. The best way to teach someone to love is by loving him. And you don’t force the love or trust or respect on him—after all, that would make those things conditional—you simply give them, understanding that at some point, the adolescent’s bargaining will fail and he’ll understand the value of unconditionality when he’s ready.
Once older, adolescent-minded people will move through the world assuming that all human relationships are a never-ending trade agreement, that intimacy is no more than a feigned sense of knowing the other person for the mutual benefit of each one, that everyone is a means to some selfish end. And instead of recognizing that their problems are rooted in the transactional approach to the world itself, they will assume that the only problem is that it took them so long to do the transactions correctly.
It’s difficult to act unconditionally. You love someone knowing you may not be loved in return, but you do it anyway. You trust someone even though you realize you might get hurt or screwed over. That’s because to act unconditionally requires some degree of faith—faith that it’s the right thing to do even if it results in more pain, even if it doesn’t work out for you or the other person.
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.
When you attempt to barter for happiness, you destroy happiness. When you try to enforce freedom, you negate freedom. When you try to create equality, you undermine equality.
He [Kant] refused to believe that there was no inherent value in existence. He refused to believe that we are forever cursed to conjure stories to give our lives an arbitrary sense of meaning.
To Kant, the only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the matter in the universe is our ability to reason—we’re able to take the world around us and, through reasoning and will, improve upon it. This, to him, was special, exceedingly special—a miracle, almost—because for everything in the infinite span of existence, we are the only thing (that we know of) that can actually direct existence.
Therefore, Kant cleverly deduced that, logically, the supreme value in the universe is the thing that conceives of value itself. The only true meaning in existence is the ability to form meaning. The only importance is the thing that decides importance. And this ability to choose meaning, to imagine importance, to invent purpose, is the only force in the known universe that can propagate itself, that can spread its intelligence and generate greater and greater levels of organization throughout the cosmos. Kant believed that without rationality, the universe would be a waste, in vain, and without purpose. Without intelligence, and the freedom to exercise that intelligence, we might as well all be a bunch of rocks. Rocks don’t change. They don’t conceive of values, systems, or organizations. They don’t alter, improve, or create. They’re just there. But consciousness—consciousness can reorganize the universe, and that reorganization can add upon itself exponentially. Consciousness is able to take a problem, a system of a certain amount of complexity, and conceive and generate greater complexity. In a thousand years, we went from twiddling sticks in a small cave to designing entire digital realms connecting the minds of billions. In another thousand, we could easily be among the stars, reshaping the planets and space/time itself. Each individual action may not matter in the grand scheme of things, but the preservation and promotion of rational consciousness overall matters more than anything.
Kant argued that the most fundamental moral duty is the preservation and growth of consciousness, both in ourselves and in others.
See, the problem with hope is that it is fundamentally transactional—it is a bargain between one’s current actions for some imagined, pleasant future. Don’t eat this, and you’ll go to heaven. Don’t kill that person, or you’ll get in trouble. Work hard and save your money, because that will make you happy.
To transcend the transactional realm of hope, one must act unconditionally. You must love someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise it’s not truly love. You must respect someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise you don’t truly respect him. You must speak honestly without expecting a pat on the back or a high-five or a gold star next to your name; otherwise you aren’t truly being honest.
Kant summed up these unconditional acts with one simple principle: you must treat humanity never merely as a means, but always as an end itself.
An end is something that is desired for its own sake. It is the defining motivating factor of our decisions and behaviors.
His Formula of Humanity states that treating any human being (or any consciousness) as a means to some other end is the basis of all wrong behavior. So, treating a burrito as a means to my wife’s end is fine. It’s good to make your spouse happy sometimes! But if I treat my wife as a means to the end of sex, then I am now treating her merely as a means, and as Kant would argue, that is some shade of wrong.
Similarly, lying is wrong because you are misleading another person’s conscious behavior in order to achieve your own goal. You are treating that person as a means to your own end. Cheating is unethical for a similar reason. You are violating the expectations of other rational and sentient beings for your own personal aims.
Honesty is good in and of itself because it’s the only form of communication that doesn’t treat people merely as a means. Courage is good in and of itself because to fail to act is to treat either yourself or others as a means to the end of quelling your fear. Humility is good in and of itself because to fall into blind certainty is to treat others as a means to your own ends.
The Formula of Humanity is merely a principle. It doesn’t project some future utopia. It doesn’t lament some hellish past. No one is better or worse or more righteous than anyone else. All that matters is that conscious will is respected and protected.
Because Kant understood that when you get into the business of deciding and dictating the future, you unleash the destructive potential of hope. You start worrying about converting people rather than honoring them, destroying evil in others rather than rooting it out in yourself.
Instead, he decided that the only logical way to improve the world is through improving ourselves—by growing up and becoming more virtuous—by making the simple decision, in each moment, to treat ourselves and others as ends, and never merely as means. Be honest. Don’t distract or harm yourself. Don’t shirk responsibility or succumb to fear. Love openly and fearlessly. Don’t cave to tribal impulses or hopeful deceits. Because there is no heaven or hell in the future. There are only the choices you make in each and every moment.
Don’t hope for a better life. Simply be a better life.
When we pursue a life full of pleasure and simple satisfaction, we are treating ourselves as a means to our pleasurable ends. Therefore, self-improvement is not the cultivation of greater happiness but, rather, a cultivation of greater self-respect.
Your ability not to treat yourself as a means to some other end will in turn allow you to better treat others as ends.
Governmental committees designed to oversee regulations, when provided with a dearth of infractions, may start to perceive infractions where there are none. Task forces designed to check unethical practices within organizations will, when deprived of bad guys to accuse of wrongdoing, begin imagining bad guys where there are none. The Blue Dot Effect suggests that, essentially, the more we look for threats, the more we will see them, regardless of how safe or comfortable our environment actually is. And we see this playing out in the world today.
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.
Durkheim 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.
Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn’t make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered from dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it.
What we find, then, is that our emotional reactions to our problems are not determined by the size of the problem. Rather, our minds simply amplify (or minimize) our problems to fit the degree of stress we expect to experience. Material progress and security do not necessarily relax us or make it easier to hope for the future. On the contrary, it appears that perhaps by removing healthy adversity and challenge, people struggle even more. They become more selfish and more childish. [People should realize that even if politicians' promises turn out to be true, they wouldn't be any happier. Because how happy you are is determined internally and not by external conditions. Hedonic adaptation.]
Einstein demonstrated that space and time change depending on the observer—that is, they are relative. It is the speed of light that is the universal constant, the thing by which everything else must be measured. We are all moving, all the time, and the closer we get to the speed of light, the more time “slows down” and the more space contracts.
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. I belabor this headache-inducing explanation of relativity because I believe a similar thing is going on within our own psychology: what we believe is the universal constant of our experience is, in fact, not constant at all. And, instead, much of what we assume to be true and real is relative to our own perception.
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.
Each of us implicitly assumes that we are the universal constant of our own experience, that we are unchanging, and our experiences come and go like the weather. Some days are good and sunny; other days are cloudy and shitty. The skies change, but we remain the same. But this is not true—in fact, this is backward. 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. But pain works in the other direction, too. I remember when I got my big tattoo, the first few minutes were excruciatingly painful. I couldn’t believe I’d signed up for eight hours of this shit. But by the third hour, I’d actually dozed off while my tattoo artist worked. Nothing had changed: same needle, same arm, same artist. But my perception had shifted: the pain became normal, and I returned to my own internal seven.
The Blue Dot Effect is everywhere. It affects all perceptions and judgments. Everything adapts and shapes itself to our slight dissatisfaction. And that is the problem with the pursuit of happiness. Pursuing happiness is a value of the modern world.
Suffering in the pre-science world was not only an accepted fact; it was often celebrated. The philosophers of antiquity didn’t see happiness as a virtue. On the contrary, they saw humans’ capacity for self-denial as a virtue, because feeling good was just as dangerous as it was desirable. And rightly so—all it took was one jackass getting carried away and the next thing you knew, half the village had burned down.
It wasn’t until the age of science and technology that happiness became a “thing.” Once humanity invented the means to improve life, the next logical question was “So what should we improve?” Several philosophers at the time decided that the ultimate aim of humanity should be to promote happiness—that is, to reduce pain.
Because you can’t get rid of pain—pain is the universal constant of the human condition. Therefore, the attempt to move away from pain, to protect oneself from all harm, can only backfire. 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. People who become paralyzed in freak accidents don’t become unhappier in the long run. On average, they also end up feeling the same.
But 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.
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.
Our tolerance for pain, as a culture, is diminishing rapidly. And not only is this diminishment failing to bring us more happiness, but it’s generating greater amounts of emotional fragility, which is why everything appears to be so fucked.
Most people avoid meditation the same way a kid avoids doing homework. It’s because they know what meditation really is: it’s confronting your pain, it’s observing the interiors of your mind and heart, in all their horror and glory.
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.
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.
The problem arises when the adolescent feels that he got a bad bargain, when the pain exceeds his expectations and the rewards don’t live up to the hype. This will cause the adolescent, like the child, to fall into a crisis of hope: I sacrificed so much and got so little back! What was the point? It will thrust the adolescent into the depths of nihilism and an unkindly visit with the Uncomfortable Truth. The adult has an incredibly high threshold for pain because the adult understands that life, in order to be meaningful, requires pain, that nothing can or necessarily should be controlled or bargained for, that you can simply do the best you can do, regardless of the consequences. [Similarity with burnout!]
Death is psychologically necessary because it creates stakes in life. There is something to lose. You don’t know what something is worth until you experience the potential to lose it. You don’t know what you’re willing to struggle for, what you’re willing to give up or sacrifice.
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.
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.
Many public intellectuals and pundits continue to make this mistake today: they believe that growth has liberated us from suffering, rather than merely transmuting that suffering from a physical form to a psychological form.
But we seem to have forgotten what the ancients knew: that no matter how much wealth is generated in the world, the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our character, and the quality of our character is determined by our relationship to our pain.
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.
If he wanted women to smoke, then he had to appeal not to their thoughts but to their values. He needed to appeal to women’s identities.
Through Freud, Bernays understood something nobody else in business had understood before him: that if you can tap into people’s insecurities, they will buy just about any damn thing you tell them to.
Trucks are marketed to men as ways to assert strength and reliability. Makeup is marketed to women as a way to be more loved and garner more attention. Beer is marketed as a way to have fun and be the center of attention at a party.
One of the first things you learn when you study marketing is how to find customers’ “pain points” . . . and then subtly make them feel worse. The idea is that you needle at people’s shame and insecurity and then turn around and tell them your product will resolve that shame and rid them of that insecurity. Put another way, marketing specifically identifies or accentuates the customer’s moral gaps and then offers a way to fill them.
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.
- 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, or snorting cocaine out of the crack of a hooker’s ass. 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.
But what happens when a large number of people are relatively healthy and wealthy? At that point, most economic progress switches from innovation to diversion, from upgrading pain to avoiding pain. One of the reasons for this is that true innovation is risky, difficult, and often unrewarding. Many of the most important innovations in history left their inventors broke and destitute. If someone is going to start a company and take a risk, going the diversion route is a safer bet.
For him, the new science of marketing offered a way for governments to influence and appease their citizens without the burden of having to maim and torture them left, right, and center.
He saw marketing as an incredible new tool that could give people the feeling of having freedom when, really, you’re just giving them a few more flavors of toothpaste to choose from.
Compulsive behavior aimed at experiencing more stuff is not freedom—again, it’s kind of the opposite.
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 opposite of 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.
Fourth—because, fuck it, 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. If Jane has to choose between two boxes of cereal, and Mike can choose from twenty boxes, Mike does not have more freedom than Jane. He has more variety. There’s a difference. Variety is not freedom. Variety is just different permutations of the same meaningless shit.
This is the problem with exalting freedom over human consciousness. More stuff doesn’t make us freer, it imprisons us with anxiety over whether we chose or did the best thing.
It makes us more dependent on the endless cycles of hope.
If you are trapped by insecurity, stymied by doubt, and hamstrung by intolerance, you can have all the variety in the world. But you are not free.
The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation. It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life.
Greater commitment allows for greater depth. A lack of commitment requires superficiality.
Fake freedom puts us on the treadmill toward chasing more, whereas real freedom is the conscious decision to live with less.
Fake freedom is addictive: no matter how much you have, you always feel as though it’s not enough. Real freedom is repetitive, predictable, and sometimes dull. Fake freedom has diminishing returns: it requires greater and greater amounts of energy to achieve the same joy and meaning. Real freedom has increasing returns: it requires less and less energy to achieve the same joy and meaning. Fake freedom is seeing the world as an endless series of transactions and bargains which you feel you’re winning. Real freedom is seeing the world unconditionally, with the only victory being over your own desires. Fake freedom requires the world to conform to your will. Real freedom requires nothing of the world. It is only your will. Ultimately, the overabundance of diversion and the fake freedom it produces limits our ability to experience real freedom. The more options we have, the more variety before us, the more difficult it becomes to choose, sacrifice, and focus.
Over the last couple of decades, people seem to have confused their basic human rights with not experiencing any discomfort. People want freedom to express themselves, but they don’t want to have to deal with views that may upset or offend them in some way. They want freedom of enterprise, but they don’t want to pay taxes to support the legal machinery that makes that freedom possible. They want equality, but they don’t want to accept that equality requires that everybody experience the same pain, not that everybody experience the same pleasure.
The lower our tolerance for pain, the more we indulge in fake freedoms, the less we will be able to uphold the virtues necessary to allow a free, democratic society to function.
That’s because we are algorithms. Consciousness itself is a vast network of algorithms and decision trees—algorithms based on values and knowledge and hope.
It’s like that brutal advice you sometimes hear, that the only thing all your fucked-up relationships have in common is you.
