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Everything Is F*cked: Two Transformative Guides to Finding Happiness Amidst Life's Chaos (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2 Book Series))

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Everything Is Fcked: Two Transformative Guides to Finding Happiness Amidst Life’s Chaos (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck (2 Book Series))

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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.

We are a culture in need of something far more precarious. We are a culture and a people in need of hope.

have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.”

One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing. Enjoy your fucking coffee.

Our psyche needs hope to survive the way a fish needs water. Hope is the fuel for our mental engine.

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?

No, the opposite of happiness is hopelessness, an endless gray horizon of resignation and indifference.3 It’s the belief that everything is fucked, so why do anything at all?

Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction. This is not an overstatement.4 Chronic anxiety is a crisis of hope. It is the fear of a failed future. Depression is a crisis of hope. It is the belief in a meaningless future. Delusion, addiction, obsession—these are all the mind’s desperate and compulsive attempts at generating hope one neurotic tic or obsessive craving at a time.5 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.

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 earth6—in short, what to hope for. They are struggling to see what the before/after of their lives should be.

For some people, the before/after story is raising their kids well. For others, it’s saving the environment. For others, it’s making a bunch of money and having a big-ass boat. For others, it’s simply trying to improve their golf swing.

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.

It’s a paradox of progress: the better things get, the more anxious and desperate we all seem to feel.

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.

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.32 “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.

We’ve all wished at times that we couldn’t feel emotion, because our emotions often drive us to do stupid shit we later regret.

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. We’ve all had the experience of knowing what we should do yet failing to do it. We’ve all put off important tasks, ignored people we care about, and failed to act in our own self-interest. And usually when we fail to do the things we should, we assume it’s because we can’t sufficiently control our emotions. We’re too undisciplined or we lack knowledge.

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.” Yet many of us struggle with the inability to control ourselves.

but there’s a hidden wisdom to it: that he’d rather have the problem of passion with the bottle than have no passion at all; that it’s better to find hope in lowly places than to find none; that without our unruly impulses, we are nothing.

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!

any failure to do so reflects something inherently faulty or damaged within us. This is why we often develop the false belief that we need to change who we are. Because if we can’t achieve our goals, if we can’t lose the weight or get the promotion or learn the skill, then that signifies some internal deficiency. Therefore, in order to maintain hope, we decide we must change ourselves, become somebody totally new and different. This desire to change ourselves then refills us with hope. The “old me” couldn’t shake that terrible smoking habit, but the “new me” will. And we’re off to the races again. The constant desire to change yourself then becomes its own sort of addiction: each cycle of “changing yourself” results in similar failures of self-control, therefore making you feel as though you need to “change yourself” all over again. Each cycle refuels you with the hope you’re looking for. Meanwhile, the Classic Assumption, the root of the problem, is never addressed or questioned, let alone thrown out.

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 fact is that we require more than willpower to achieve self-control. It turns out that our emotions are instrumental in our decision making and our actions. We just don’t always realize it.

Each of your two brains has its strengths and weaknesses. The Thinking Brain is conscientious, accurate, and impartial. It is methodical and rational, but it is also slow. It requires a lot of effort and energy, and like a muscle, it must be built up over time and can become fatigued if overexerted.15 The Feeling Brain, however, arrives at its conclusions quickly and effortlessly. The problem is that it is often inaccurate and irrational. The Feeling Brain is also a bit of a drama queen and has a bad habit of overreacting.

This is the Classic Assumption, the belief that our reason is ultimately in control of our life and that we must train our emotions to sit the fuck down and shut up while the adult is driving. We then applaud this kidnapping and abuse of our emotions by congratulating ourselves on our self-control.

there’s that. Here’s the truth: the Feeling Brain is driving our Consciousness Car. And I don’t care how scientific you think you are or how many letters you have after your name, you’re one of us, bucko. You’re a crazy Feeling Brain–piloted meat robot just like the rest of us.

The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion.16 Emotion is the biological hydraulic system that pushes our bodies into movement.

While the Thinking Brain exists solely within the synaptic arrangements inside your skull, the Feeling Brain is the wisdom and stupidity of the entire body. Anger pushes your body to move. Anxiety pulls it into retreat. Joy lights up the facial muscles, while sadness attempts to shade your existence from view. Emotion inspires action, and action inspires emotion. The two are inseparable.

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.

Emotional problems are irrational, meaning they cannot be reasoned with. 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.”

Even if sometimes they can’t stand each other, our two brains need each other. 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 Thinking Brain can convince the Feeling Brain to pursue a new road to a better future, to pull a U-turn when it has made a mistake, or to consider new routes or territories once ignored. But the Feeling Brain is stubborn, and if it wants to go in one direction, it will drive that way no matter how many facts or data the Thinking Brain provides.

In order to avoid these psychological kerfuffles, and to maintain a sense of hope, the Thinking Brain develops a tendency to draw maps explaining or justifying where the Feeling Brain has already decided it wants to go. If the Feeling Brain wants ice cream, instead of contradicting it with facts about processed sugar and excess calories, your Thinking Brain decides, “You know what, I worked hard today. I deserve some ice cream,” and your Feeling Brain responds with a sense of ease and satisfaction. If your Feeling Brain decides that your partner is an asshole and you’ve done nothing wrong, your Thinking Brain’s immediate reaction will be to recall instances when you, in fact, were a beacon of patience and humility while your partner was secretly conspiring to ruin your life. In this way, the two brains develop a really unhealthy relationship that might resemble your mom and dad on road trips when you were a kid. The Thinking Brain makes shit up that the Feeling Brain wants to hear. And in return, the Feeling Brain promises not to careen off the side of the road, killing everyone. It’s incredibly easy to let your Thinking Brain fall into the trap of merely drawing the maps the Feeling Brain wants to follow. This is called the “self-serving bias,” and it’s the basis for pretty much everything awful about humanity.

This is why cultish leaders always start by encouraging people to shut off their Thinking Brains as much as possible. Initially, this feels profound to people because the Thinking Brain is often correcting the Feeling Brain, showing it where it took a wrong turn. So, silencing the Thinking Brain will feel extremely good for a short period. And people are always mistaking what feels good for what is good.

The overindulgence of emotion leads to a crisis of hope, but so does the repression of emotion.27 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? Meanwhile, the person who denies his Thinking Brain becomes impulsive and selfish, warping reality to conform to his whims and fancies, which are then never satiated. His crisis of hope is that no matter how much he eats, drinks, dominates, or fucks, it will never be enough—it will never matter enough, it will never feel significant enough. He will be on a perpetual treadmill of desperation, always running, though never moving. And if at any point he stops, the Uncomfortable Truth immediately catches up to him.

Good writing is writing that is able to speak to and stimulate both brains at the same time.

Instead of bombarding the Feeling Brain with facts and reason, start by asking how it’s feeling. Say something like “Hey, Feeling Brain, how do you feel about going to the gym today?” or “How do you feel about changing careers?” or “How do you feel about selling everything and moving to Tahiti?”

Then, once you feel you’ve reached a point of understanding with your Feeling Brain, it’s time to appeal to it in a way it understands: through feelings. Maybe think about all the benefits of some desired new behavior. Maybe mention all the sexy, shiny, fun things at the desired destination. Maybe remind the Feeling Brain how good it feels to have exercised, how great it will feel to look good in a bathing suit this summer, how much you respect yourself when you’ve followed through on your goals, how happy you are when you live by your values, when you act as an example to the ones you love. Basically, you need to bargain with your Feeling Brain the way you’d bargain with a Moroccan rug seller: it needs to believe it’s getting a good deal, or else there’ll just be a lot of hand waving and shouting with no result. Maybe you agree to do something the Feeling Brain likes, as long as it does something it doesn’t like.

Start easy. Remember, the Feeling Brain is highly sensitive, and completely unreasonable. When you offer something easy with an emotional benefit (e.g., feeling good after a workout; pursuing a career that feels significant; being admired and respected by your kids), the Feeling Brain will respond with another emotion, either positive or negative. If the emotion is positive, the Feeling Brain will be willing to drive a little bit in that direction—but only a little bit! Remember: feelings never last. That’s why you start small. Just put on your gym shoes today, Feeling Brain. That’s all. Let’s just see what happens.

But whatever you do, do not fight the Feeling Brain. That just makes things worse. For one, you won’t win, ever. The Feeling Brain is always driving. Second, fighting with the Feeling Brain about feeling bad will only cause the Feeling Brain to feel even worse. So, why would you do that? You were supposed to be the smart one, Thinking Brain.

But here’s what you do have, Thinking Brain. You may not have self-control, but you do have meaning control. This is your superpower. This is your gift. You get to control the meaning of your impulses and feelings. You get to decipher them however you see fit. You get to draw the map. And this is incredibly powerful, because it’s the meaning that we ascribe to our feelings that can often alter how the Feeling Brain reacts to them. And this is how you produce hope. This is how you produce a sense that the future can be fruitful and pleasant: by interpreting the shit the Feeling Brain slings at you in a profound and useful way. Instead of justifying and enslaving yourself to the impulses, challenge them and analyze them. Change their character and their shape.

Our crises of hope often start with a basic sense that we do not have control over ourselves or our destiny. We feel victims to the world around us or, worse, to our own minds. We fight our Feeling Brain, trying to beat it into submission. Or we do the opposite and follow it mindlessly. We ridicule ourselves and hide from the world because of the Classic Assumption. And in many ways, the affluence and connectivity of the modern world only make the pain of the illusion of self-control that much worse.

The Thinking Brain makes associations among facts, data, and observations. Similarly, the Feeling Brain makes value judgments based on those same facts, data, and observations. The Feeling Brain decides what is good and what is bad; what is desirable and what is undesirable; and most important, what we deserve and what we don’t deserve. The Thinking Brain is objective and factual. The Feeling Brain is subjective and relative. And no matter what we do, we can never translate one form of knowledge into the other.33 This is the real problem of hope. It’s rare that we don’t understand intellectually how to cut back on carbs, or wake up earlier, or stop smoking. It’s that somewhere inside our Feeling Brain, we have decided that we don’t deserve to do those things, that we are unworthy of doing them. And that’s why we feel so bad about them.

And this is the real work of anything that even resembles psychological healing: getting our values straight with ourselves so that we can get our values straight with the world. Put another way, the problem isn’t that we don’t know how not to get punched in the face. The problem is that, at some point, likely a long time ago, we got punched in face, and instead of punching back, we decided we deserved it.

something painful that we all kind of know, but that few of us ever want to admit: that people are liars, all of us. We lie constantly and habitually.3 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.4

These are moral gaps. They are a sense that something wrong has just happened and you (or someone else) deserve to be made whole again. Wherever there is pain, there is always an inherent sense of superiority/inferiority. And there’s always pain. 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).

This whole sense of “deserving” something is a value judgment we make in the face of a moral gap. We decide that something is better than something else; that one person is more righteous or just than another; that one event is less desirable than another. Moral gaps are where our values are born.

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.

Newton’s First Law generates our sense of morality. It underlies our perceptions of fairness. It is the bedrock of every human culture. And … It is the operating system of the Feeling Brain.

Experiences that cause us pain create a moral gap within our minds, and our Feeling Brain deems those experiences inferior and undesirable. Experiences that relieve pain create a moral gap in the opposite direction, and our Feeling Brain deems those experiences superior and desirable.

Our Thinking Brain decides how things are, and our Feeling Brain decides how things ought to be.

Both brains have access to the value hierarchy. While the Feeling Brain determines what shelf something is on, the Thinking Brain is able to point out how certain experiences are connected and to suggest how the value hierarchy should be reorganized. 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. On the contrary, we look back and wonder how we ever spent 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.

When moral gaps persist for a long enough time, they normalize.16 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. When someone harms us, our immediate reaction is usually “He is shit, and I am righteous.” But if we’re not able to equalize and act on that righteousness, our Feeling Brain will believe the only alternative explanation: “I am shit, and he is righteous.”

How we come to value everything in life relative to ourselves is the sum of our emotions over time.

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.

High and low self-worth appear different on the surface, but they are two sides of the same counterfeit coin. Because whether you feel as though you’re better than the rest of the world or worse than the rest of the world, the same thing is true: you’re imagining yourself as something special, something separate from the world.

The more insecure you are about something, the more you’ll fly back and forth between delusional feelings of superiority (“I’m the best!”) and delusional feelings of inferiority (“I’m garbage!”)

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.22 We all overestimate our skills and intentions and underestimate the skills and intentions of others.

Our Feeling Brains warp reality in such a way so that we believe that our problems and pain are somehow special and unique in the world, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Without a little bit of that narcissistic delusion, without that perpetual lie we tell ourselves about our specialness, we’d likely give up hope. But our inherent narcissism comes at a cost. Whether you believe you’re the best in the world or the worst in the world, one thing is also true: you are separate from the world. And it’s this separateness that ultimately perpetuates unnecessary suffering.

Sadly, the realization that this boy is not shit is too painful for girl’s Feeling Brain to handle, so she convinces herself that he is, indeed, shit. She nitpicks his tiniest flaws. She notices every errant word, every misplaced gesture, every awkward touch. She zeroes in on his most insignificant mistakes until they stand bright in her mind like a flashing strobe light screaming, “Run away! Save yourself!”

Our values aren’t just collections of feelings. Our values are stories. When our Feeling Brain feels something, our Thinking Brain sets to work constructing a narrative to explain that something.

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.

All narratives are constructed in this way:         Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it.         Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it doesn’t deserve it.         Good thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.         Bad thing happens to person/thing, and he/she/it deserves it.

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 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 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 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.37 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.

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.

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.

And one of the strategies our Thinking Brain uses to nudge the Feeling Brain into the correct lane of life is asking “what if” questions: What if you hated boats and instead spent your time helping disabled kids? What if you didn’t have to prove anything to the people in your life for them to like you? What if people’s unavailability has more to do with them than it does with you?

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.

“Large swaths of people coalesce together, forming tribes and communities based on the similar evaluations of their emotional histories. 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!

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. All human systems eventually reach equilibrium by clustering and conforming into constellations of mutually shared value systems—people come together, altering and modifying their own personal narratives until their narratives are one and the same, and the personal identity thus becomes the group identity.

And this is the true tragedy of man. That we are doomed to perpetual conflict over the slight difference.

“And just as the individual protects her identity through beliefs, rationalizations, and biases, communities, tribes, and nations protect their identities the same way.46 These cultures eventually solidify themselves into nations, which then expand, bringing more and more peoples into the umbrella of their value systems. Eventually, these nations will bump up against each other, and the contradictory values will collide. “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.

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.

We all feel powerless to equalize with the inherent guilt that comes with our existence. We all suffer and are victimized to varying degrees, especially when we’re young. And we all spend a lifetime trying to compensate for that suffering. And in moments of our life when things aren’t going so well, this makes us despair.

I was once just as fucked as you … and I found my way out. Come with me.

Remember that in order to feel hope, we need to feel there’s a better future out there (values); we need to feel as though we are capable of getting to that better future (self-control); and we need to find other people who share our values and support our efforts (community). Young adulthood is a period when many people struggle with values, control, and community. For the first time in their lives, kids are allowed to decide who they want to be. Do they want to become a doctor? Study business? Take a psychology course? The options can be crippling.4 And the inevitable frustration causes a lot of young people to question their values and lose hope. In addition, young adults struggle with self-control.5 For the first time in their lives, they don’t have some authority figure watching over them 24/7. On the one hand, this can be liberating, exciting. On the other, they are now responsible for their own decisions. And if they kind of suck at getting themselves out of bed on time, going to their classes or a job, and studying enough, it’s tough to admit that there’s no one to blame but themselves.

values cannot be changed through reason, only through experience.

I looked back and replied with a Carl Sagan quote I had once read on an internet forum: “I think your mind is so open your brain fell out!”10

People who lose faith in their spiritual God will look for a worldly God. People who lose their family will give themselves away to their race, creed, or nation. People who lose faith in their government or country will look to extremist ideologies to give them hope.12

We all must have faith in something. Without faith, there is no hope.

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. So, in the end, it’s all faith.

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.

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.

But 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.23

Each family is its own mini-church, a group of people who, on faith, believe that being part of the group will give their lives meaning, hope, and salvation.

Common enemies are hugely important. I know we all like to think we’d prefer to live in a world of perfect peace and harmony, but honestly, such a world wouldn’t last for more than a few minutes. Common enemies create unity within our religion. Some sort of scapegoat, whether justified or not, is necessary to blame for our pain and maintain our hope.35 Us-versus-them dichotomies give us the enemies we all desperately crave.

Ever notice that the most important moments in life are always accompanied by somebody in a robe? Weddings, graduations, funerals, court hearings, judicial committee hearings, open heart surgeries, baptisms, and yes, even church sermons.

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.

Rituals are visual and experiential representations of what we deem important. That’s why every good religion has them. Remember, emotions are actions; the two are one and the same. Therefore, to modify (or reinforce) the Feeling Brain’s value hierarchy, you need some easily repeatable yet totally unique and identifiable action for people to perform. That’s where the rituals come in.

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. The pain may get better, it may change shape, it may be less catastrophic each time. But it will always be there. It’s part of us.40 It is us.

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.

We all must have faith in something. We must find value somewhere. It’s how we psychologically survive and thrive. It’s how we find hope. And even if you have a vision for a better future, it’s too hard to go it alone. To realize any dream, we need support networks, for both emotional and logistical reasons. It takes an army. Literally.

Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.

Master morality is the moral belief that people get what they deserve. It’s the moral belief that “might makes right,” that if you earned something through hard work or ingenuity, you deserve it. No one can take that from you; nor should they. You are the best, and because you’ve demonstrated superiority, you should be rewarded for it.

Slave morality believes that people who have suffered the most, those who are the most disadvantaged and exploited, deserve the best treatment because of that suffering. Slave morality believes that it’s the poorest and most unfortunate who deserve the most sympathy and the most respect. Whereas master morality believes in the virtue of strength and dominance, slave morality believes in the virtue of sacrifice and submission. While master morality believes in the necessity of hierarchy, slave morality believes in the necessity of equality. While master morality is generally represented by right-wing political beliefs, slave morality is usually found in left-wing political beliefs.

In Newtonian terms, master morality is the intrinsic desire to create a moral separation between ourselves and the world around us. It is the desire to create moral gaps with us on top. Slave morality is, then, an intrinsic desire to equalize, to close the moral gap and alleviate suffering. Both are fundamental components of our Feeling Brain’s operating system. Both generate and perpetuate strong emotions. And both give us hope.

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.13 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. Ideologies, because they’re constantly challenged, changed, proven, and then disproven, offer scant psychological stability upon which to build one’s hope. And when the ideological foundation of our belief systems and value hierarchies is shaken, it throws us into the maw of the Uncomfortable Truth.

Think of it as the yin and the yang of mankind’s eternal struggle: everything is always fucked, but the more fucked things become, the more we must mobilize hope to sustain and overcome the world’s fuckedness. This is why heroes such as Witold Pilecki inspire us: their ability to muster enough hope to resist evil reminds us that all of us are capable of resisting evil. The sickness may spread, but so does the cure, because hope is contagious. Hope is what saves the world.

Like a surgeon’s scalpel, hope can save a life, and hope can take a life. It can uplift us, and it can destroy us. Just as there are healthy and damaging forms of confidence, and healthy and damaging forms of love, there are also healthy and damaging forms of hope.

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.

Experiences generate emotions. Emotions generate values. Values generate narratives of meaning. And people who share similar narratives of meaning come together to generate religions. The more effective (or affective) a religion, the more industrious and disciplined the adherents. And the more industrious and disciplined the adherents, the more likely the religion is to spread to other people, to give them a sense of self-control and a feeling of hope. These religions grow and expand and eventually define in-groups versus out-groups, create rituals and taboos, and spur conflict between groups with opposing values. These conflicts must exist because they maintain the meaning and purpose for people within the group. Therefore, it is the conflict that maintains the hope. So, we’ve got it backward: everything being fucked doesn’t require hope; hope requires everything being fucked.

Because hope requires that something be broken. Hope requires that we renounce a part of ourselves and/or a part of the world. It requires us to be anti-something.

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. Everything is fucked. And hope is both the cause and the effect of that fuckedness.

We must emerge from our ideological cocoons. We must let the Feeling Brain feel, but deny it the stories of meaning and value that it so desperately craves. We must stretch beyond our conception of good and evil. We must learn to love what is.

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.13

The adolescent applies if/then rules to her decision making, thinking through cause-and-effect chains in a way that a young child cannot. 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.

This is maturity in action: developing higher-level and more abstract values to enhance decision making in a wider range of contexts. This is how you adjust to the world, how you learn to handle the seemingly infinite permutations of experience. It is a major cognitive leap for children and fundamental to growing up in a healthy, happy way.

Adolescents approach life as an endless series of bargains: I will do what my boss says so I can get money. I will call my mother so I don’t get yelled at. I will do my homework so I don’t fuck up my future. I will lie and pretend to be nice so I don’t have to deal with conflict. Nothing is done for its own sake. Everything is a calculated transaction, usually made out of fear of the negative repercussions. Everything is a means to some pleasurable end.

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.

The most precious and important things in life are, by definition, nontransactional. And to try to bargain for them is to immediately destroy them.

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. In the same way that the adolescent realizes there’s more to the world than the child’s pleasure or pain, the adult realizes that there’s more to the world than the adolescent’s constant bargaining for validation, approval, and satisfaction. Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.

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.

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.

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.31

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.

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.

because for everything in the infinite span of existence, we are the only thing (that we know of) that can actually direct existence. In the known cosmos, we are the only sources of ingenuity and creativity. We are the only ones who can direct our own fate. We are the only ones who are self-aware. And for all we know, we are the only shot the universe has at intelligent self-organization.

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.33

The Formula of Humanity states, “Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

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.37

Means are things that we do conditionally. They are what we bargain with. I don’t want to get in my car and drive, and I don’t want to pay for gas, but I do want a burrito. Therefore, I must do these other things to get that burrito.

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.

those actions and behaviors that are good for their own sake. 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.

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.

Will you act conditionally or unconditionally? Will you treat others as merely means or as ends? Will you pursue adult virtue or childish narcissism? Hope doesn’t even have to enter into the equation. Don’t hope for a better life. Simply be a better life.

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. Telling ourselves that we are worthless and shitty is just as wrong as telling others that they are worthless and shitty. Lying to ourselves is just as unethical as lying to others. Harming ourselves is just as repugnant as harming others. Self-love and self-care are therefore not something you learn about or practice. They are something you are ethically called to cultivate within yourself, even if they are all that you have left. The Formula of Humanity has a ripple effect: your improved ability to be honest with yourself will increase how honest you are with others, and your honesty with others will influence them to be more honest with themselves, which will help them to grow and mature. Your ability not to treat yourself as a means to some other end will in turn allow you to better treat others as ends. Therefore, your cleaning up your relationship with yourself has the positive by-product of cleaning up your relationships with others, which then enables them to clean up their relationships with themselves, and so on.

But, as Kant believed, the simple question of dignity and respect in each moment must be universal.

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, guarantees of privacy and of the right to a fair trial—these are all implementations of the Formula of Humanity in social institutions, and they are implemented in such a way that they are incredibly difficult to threaten or change.

the maturity of our culture is deteriorating.

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

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.

the contrary, it appears that perhaps by removing healthy adversity and challenge, people struggle even more. They become more selfish and more childish. They fail to develop and mature out of adolescence. They remain further removed from any virtue. They see mountains where there are molehills. And they scream at each other as though the world were one endless stream of spilled milk.

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

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.

The Einstein example is important because it shows how our assumption of what is constant and stable in the universe can be wrong, and those incorrect assumptions can have massive implications on how we experience the world. We assume that space and time are universal constants because that explains how we perceive the world. But it turns out that they are not universal constants; they are variables to some other, inscrutable, nonobvious constant. And that changes everything. 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.11

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.12 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.

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.

This is because pain is the experience of life itself. Positive emotions are the temporary removal of pain; negative emotions the temporary augmentation of it. To numb one’s pain is to numb all feeling, all emotion. It is to quietly remove oneself from living.

Just as a stream flows smoothly as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind. On the other hand, all that opposes, frustrates and resists our will, that is to say all that is unpleasant and painful, impresses itself upon us instantly, directly and with great clarity. Just as we are conscious not of the healthiness of our whole body but only the little place where the shoe pinches, so we think not of the totality of our successful activities but of some insignificant trifle or other which continues to vex us.

But the point is, not only is there no escaping the experience of pain, but pain is the experience.

The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading. Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons. Because if we’re going to be forced to suffer by simply existing, we might as well learn how to suffer well.

The photo of Quang Duc’s self-immolation triggered something primal and universal in people. It goes beyond politics or religion. It taps into a far more fundamental component of our lived experience: the ability to endure extraordinary amounts of pain.21 I can’t even sit up straight at dinner for more than a few minutes. Meanwhile, this guy was fucking burning alive and he didn’t even move. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t scream. He didn’t smile or wince or grimace or even open his eyes to take one last look at the world he had chosen to leave behind. There was a purity to his act, not to mention an absolutely stunning display of resolve. It is the ultimate example of mind over matter, of will over instinct.22 And despite the horror of it all, it somehow remains … inspiring.

Whereas a fragile system breaks down and a robust system resists change, the antifragile system gains from stressors and external pressures.

The human body can go either way, depending on how you use it. If you get off your ass and actively seek out pain, the body is antifragile, meaning it gets stronger the more stress and strain you put on it. The breaking down of your body through exercise and physical labor builds muscle and bone density, improves circulation, and gives you a really nice butt. But if you avoid stress and pain (i.e., if you sit on your damn couch all day watching Netflix), your muscles will atrophy, your bones will become brittle, and you will degenerate into weakness. The human mind operates on the same principle. It can be fragile or antifragile depending on how you use it. When struck by chaos and disorder, our minds set to work making sense of it all, deducing principles and constructing mental models, predicting future events and evaluating the past. This is called “learning,” and it makes us better; it allows us to gain from failure and disorder. But when we avoid pain, when we avoid stress and chaos and tragedy and disorder, we become fragile. Our tolerance for day-to-day setbacks diminishes, and our life must shrink accordingly for us to engage only in the little bit of the world we can handle at one time. Because pain is the universal constant. No matter how “good” or “bad” your life gets, the pain will be there. And it will eventually feel manageable. The question then, the only question, is: Will you engage it? Will you engage your pain or avoid your pain? Will you choose fragility or antifragility?

If any of these things is fragile in your life, it is because you have chosen to avoid the pain. You have chosen childish values of chasing simple pleasures, desire, and self-satisfaction. 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.

But actual Buddhist meditation is far more intense than simply de-stressing oneself with fancy apps. Rigorous meditation involves sitting quietly and mercilessly observing yourself. Every thought, every judgment, every inclination, every minute fidget and flake of emotion and trace of assumption that passes before your mind’s eye is ideally captured, acknowledged, and then released back into the void. And worst of all, there’s no end to it. People always lament that they’re “not good” at meditation. There is no getting good. That’s the whole point. You are supposed to suck at it. Just accept the suckage. Embrace the suckage. Love the suckage.

Meditation is, at its core, a practice of antifragility: training your mind to observe and sustain the never-ending ebb and flow of pain and not to let the “self” get sucked away by its riptide. This is why everyone is so bad at something seemingly so simple.

The Buddha said that suffering is like being shot by two arrows. The first arrow is the physical pain—it’s the metal piercing the skin, the force colliding into the body. The second arrow is the mental pain, the meaning and emotion we attach to the being struck, the narratives that we spin in our minds about whether we deserved or didn’t deserve what happened. In many cases, our mental pain is far worse than any physical pain. In most cases, it lasts far longer. Through the practice of meditation, the Buddha said that if we could train ourselves to be struck only by the first arrow, we could essentially render ourselves invincible to any mental or emotional pain.

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

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. Pain is at the heart of all emotion. Negative emotions are caused by experiencing pain. Positive emotions are caused by alleviating pain. When we avoid pain and make ourselves more fragile, the result is our emotional reactions will be wildly disproportional to the importance of the event.

The more antifragile we become, the more graceful our emotional responses are, the more control we exercise over ourselves, and the more principled our values. Antifragility is therefore synonymous with growth and maturity. Life is one never-ending stream of pain, and to grow is not to find a way to avoid that stream but, rather, to dive into it and successfully navigate its depths. 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.

In fact, you could define “wealth” in terms of how desirable your pain is.29

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.30 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.

that if you can tap into people’s insecurities, they will buy just about any damn thing you tell them to.

marketing specifically identifies or accentuates the customer’s moral gaps and then offers a way to fill them.

The world runs on one thing: feelings. This is because people spend money on things that make them feel good. And where the money flows, power flows. So, the more you’re able to influence the emotions of people in the world, the more money and power you’ll accumulate.

fortunes are made and lost around things that help people improve upon or avoid pain. These things make people feel good. People get excited. They spend money. Then it’s boom times, baby.

Innovations (upgrade pain). The first way to create value is to replace one pain with a much more tolerable/desirable pain.

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.

This happens because opening up a society and giving it modern innovations makes the people more robust and antifragile. They can survive more hardship, work more efficiently, communicate and function better within their communities. But once those innovations are integrated and everyone has a cell phone and a McDonald’s Happy Meal, the great modern diversions enter the marketplace. And as soon as the diversions show up, a psychological fragility is introduced, and everything begins to seem fucked.

They forgot that the world doesn’t run on information. People don’t make decisions based on truth or facts. They don’t spend their money based on data. They don’t connect with each other because of some higher philosophical truth. The world runs on feelings. And when you give the average person an infinite reservoir of human wisdom, they will not google for the information that contradicts their deepest held beliefs. They will not google for what is true yet unpleasant. Instead, most of us will google for what is pleasant but untrue.

Compulsive behavior aimed at experiencing more stuff is not freedom—again, it’s kind of the opposite.

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. More stuff causes us to become more prone to treating ourselves and others as means rather than ends. It makes us more dependent on the endless cycles of hope.

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

Greater commitment allows for greater depth. A lack of commitment requires superficiality.

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.

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. Freedom itself demands discomfort. It demands dissatisfaction. Because the freer a society becomes, the more each person will be forced to reckon and compromise with views and lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own. 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.

Churchill famously once said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others.”

When that day comes, when an AI can essentially spawn better versions of itself, at will, then buckle your seatbelt, amigo, because it’s going to be a wild ride and we will no longer have control over where we’re going.

Then, we will end up right back where we began: worshipping impossible and unknowable forces that seemingly control our fates. Just as primitive humans prayed to their gods for rain and flame—the same way they made sacrifices, offered gifts, devised rituals, and altered their behavior and appearance to curry favor with the naturalistic gods—so will we. But instead of the primitive gods, we will offer ourselves up to the AI gods. We will develop superstitions about the algorithms. If you wear this, the algorithms will favor you. If you wake at a certain hour and say the right thing and show up at the right place, the machines will bless you with great fortune. If you are honest and you don’t hurt others and you take care of yourself and your family, the AI gods will protect you.

Physically, humans are pretty unexceptional. We are weak, slow, and frail, and we tire easily.11 But we are nature’s ultimate information processors. We are the only species that can conceptualize the past and future, that can deduce long chains of cause and effect, that can plan and strategize in abstract terms, that can build and create and problem-solve in perpetuity.

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.

We are a self-hating, self-destructive species.15 That is not a moral statement; it’s simply a fact. This internal tension we all feel, all the time? That’s what got us here. It’s what got us to this point. It’s our arms race. And we’re about to hand over the evolutionary baton to the defining information processors of the next epoch: the machines.

and destroy us, from the inside out. So far, our technology has exploited the flawed algorithms of our Feeling Brain. Technology has worked to make us less resilient and more addicted to frivolous diversions and pleasures, because these diversions are incredibly profitable. And while technology has liberated much of the planet from poverty and tyranny, it has produced a new kind of tyranny: a tyranny of empty, meaningless variety, a never-ending stream of unnecessary options. It has also armed us with weapons so devastating that we could torpedo this whole “intelligent life” experiment ourselves if we’re not careful. I believe artificial intelligence is Nietzsche’s “something greater.” It is the Final Religion, the religion that lies beyond good and evil, the religion that will finally unite and bind us all, for better or worse. It is, then, simply our job not to blow ourselves up before we get there. And the only way to do that is to adapt our technology for our flawed psychology rather than to exploit it. To create tools that promote greater character and maturity in our cultures rather than diverting us from growth.

So, instead of looking for hope, try this: Don’t hope. Don’t despair, either. In fact, don’t deign to believe you know anything. It’s that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place. Don’t hope for better. Just be better. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.

I dare to hope for a post-hope world, where people are never treated merely as means but always as ends, where no consciousness is sacrificed for some greater religious aim, where no identity is harmed out of malice or greed or negligence, where the ability to reason and act is held in the highest regard by all, and where this is reflected not only in our hearts but also in our social institutions and business models.

That said, I dare to hope that one day the online advertising business model will die in a fucking dumpster fire; that the news media will no longer have incentives to optimize content for emotional impact but, rather, for informational utility; that technology will seek not to exploit our psychological fragility but, rather, to counterbalance it; that information will be worth something again; that anything will be worth something again.

We need our lives to mean something, and while the startling advance of technology has made finding that meaning more difficult, the ultimate innovation will be the day we can manufacture significance without strife or conflict, find importance without the necessity of death.

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