Everything Is Fucked

My notes

being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none.

We are a culture in need of something far more precarious. 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.”

You care, and you desperately convince yourself that because you care, it all must have some great cosmic meaning behind it.

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.

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?

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

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.

That’s the hard part: finding that before/after for yourself.

In the 1980s, when researchers asked survey participants how many people they had discussed important personal matters with over the previous six months, the most common answer was “three.” By 2006, the most common answer was “zero.”29

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.

To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community.

The Classic Assumption sees passion and emotion as flaws, errors within the human psyche that must be overcome and fixed within the self.

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.

The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion.

Fear is not this magical thing your brain invents. No, it happens in our bodies. It’s the tightening of your stomach, the tensing of your muscles, the release of adrenaline, the overwhelming desire for space and emptiness around your 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.

Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason but, rather, of emotion.

The Feeling Brain generates the emotions that cause us to move into action, and the Thinking Brain suggests where to direct that action.

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt compares the two brains to an elephant and its rider: the rider can gently steer and pull the elephant in a particular direction, but ultimately the elephant is going to go where it wants to go.

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.

in Chapter 2: Self-Control Is an Illusion

The overindulgence of emotion leads to a crisis of hope, but so does the repression of emotion.

Because if self-control is an illusion of the Thinking Brain’s overblown self-regard, then it’s self-acceptance that will save us—accepting our emotions and working with them rather than against them.

Instead of justifying and enslaving yourself to the impulses, challenge them and analyze them. Change their character and their shape.

Create an environment that can bring about the Feeling Brain’s best impulses and intuition, rather than its worst.

We suffer through some terrible stuff, and our Feeling Brain decides that we deserved those bad experiences.

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.

Moral gaps are where our values are born.

It’s our natural psychological inclination to equalize across moral gaps, to reciprocate actions: positive for positive; negative for negative.

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.10

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

This is essentially what “growth” is: reprioritizing one’s value hierarchy in an optimal way.

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.

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.

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

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.

Narcissists will oscillate between feelings of superiority and inferiority.

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!”)

Self-worth is an illusion.

We all possess some degree of narcissism. It’s inevitable, as everything we ever know or experience has happened to us or been learned by us.

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

When we screw up, we tend to assume it was some happy accident.26 But when someone else screws up, we immediately rush to judge that person’s character

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.

Our narratives about ourselves and the world are fundamentally about (a) something or someone’s value and (b) whether that something/someone deserves that value.

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.

This “snowball effect” of early values is why our childhood experiences, both good and bad, have long-lasting effects on our identities and generate the fundamental values that go on to define much of our lives

And the worst thing is, the longer we’ve held onto these narratives, the less aware we are that we have them.

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

Often, with time, we realize that what we used to believe was important about the world actually isn’t. Other times, we extend the story to get a clearer view of our self-worth—

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“And just as the individual protects her identity through beliefs, rationalizations, and biases, communities, tribes, and nations protect their identities the same way.

And because of this willingness to die for their values, these collisions of culture will inevitably result in war.

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.

Young adulthood is a period when many people struggle with values, control, and community

We are the most impressionable when things are at their worst.11 When our life is falling apart, it signifies that our values have failed us, and we’re grasping in the dark for new values to replace them.

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.

Some people’s God Value is themselves—or, rather, their own pleasure and empowerment. This is narcissism: the religion of self-aggrandizement.

Other people’s God Value is another person. This is often called “codependence.”22 These people derive all hope from their connection with another individual and sacrifice themselves and their own interests for that individual.

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.

Spiritual religions. 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. 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. Interpersonal religions draw hope from other people in our lives. Examples of interpersonal religions include romantic love, children, sports heroes, political leaders, and celebrities.

Ideological religions generate hope by constructing networks of beliefs that certain actions will produce better outcomes in this life only if they are adopted by the population at large.

This is our human narcissism at work—our need to invent our self-importance, our Feeling Brain run amok. So, even though ideologies are subject to evidence and verification, we’re not exactly good at verifying them

Rituals connect us with the past. They connect us to our values. And they affirm who we are.

Most religious practices are developed for the alleviation of guilt. You could even say that that’s really all prayer is: miniature episodes of guilt alleviation.

the message is always the same: the more you do it, the more you’re told you need to do it to finally experience the satisfaction you’ve been promised. Yet that satisfaction never comes.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Nietzsche argued that the cultures of the ancient world (Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Indian, and so on) were master morality cultures.

Nietzsche also argued that the Judeo-Christian ethic of charity, pity, and compassion ushered slave morality to prominence, and continued to dominate Western civilization up through his own time.

Each religion is a faith-based attempt to explain reality in such a way that it gives people a steady stream of hope.

Science is arguably the most effective religion because it is the first religion that is able to evolve and improve upon itself.

But science did something else even more spectacular: it introduced to the world the concept of growth.

The scientific revolution eroded the dominance of spiritual religions and made way for the dominance of ideological religions.

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.

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

Nietzsche, understanding that existence is inherently chaotic and unknowable, believed that we were not psychologically equipped to handle the task of explaining our cosmic significance.

Nietzsche believed that any worldly attachment—to gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or history—was a mirage, a make-believe faith-based construct designed to suspend us high over the chasm of the Uncomfortable Truth by a thin rope of meaning.

But here’s another, less popular interpretation of the Pandora’s box myth: What if hope is not the antidote to evil? What if hope is just another form of evil? What if hope just got left in the box?

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.

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.

These conflicts must exist because they maintain the meaning and purpose for people within the group.

we’ve got it backward: everything being fucked doesn’t require hope; hope requires everything being fucked.

Hope is, therefore, destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what currently is.

This paints an unbelievably bleak picture of the human condition. It means that our psychological makeup is such that our only choices in life are either perpetual conflict or nihilism—tribalism or isolation, religious war or the Uncomfortable Truth.

Amor fati, for Nietzsche, meant the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness.

It basically meant: hope for nothing. Hope for what already is—because hope is ultimately empty.

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.

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.]”

“I love those who do not know how to live,” he said. “For they are the ones who cross over.”

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,

the exploratory phase wraps up because as we become older, we begin to recognize that there’s too much world to explore.

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.

A child thinks only about his own pleasure, whereas an adolescent learns to navigate rules and principles to achieve her goals.

maturity in action: developing higher-level and more abstract values to enhance decision making in a wider range of contexts

The problem with adolescent values is that if you hold them, you never actually stand for something outside yourself.

You can’t live your entire life this way, otherwise you’re never actually living your own life. You’re merely living out an aggregation of the desires of the people around 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.

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.

Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right.

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.

The principled values of adulthood are unconditional—that is, they cannot be reached through any other means. They are ends in and of themselves.

children who are abused and children who are coddled often end up with the same issues when they become adults: they remain stuck in their childhood value system

Ultimately, graduating to adolescence requires trust. A child must trust that her behavior will produce predictable outcomes.

Without trust, there are no reliable principles to dictate decisions, therefore everything devolves back into childish selfishness.

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.

When parents and teachers fail, it’s usually because they themselves are stuck at an adolescent level of values.

In their purest forms, the world’s great religions leverage our human instinct for hope to try to pull people upward toward adult virtues.

in Chapter 6: The Formula of Humanity

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

Consciousness is able to take a problem, a system of a certain amount of complexity, and conceive and generate greater complexity.

Kant argued that the most fundamental moral duty is the preservation and growth of consciousness, both in ourselves and in others.

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.”

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.

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.

Kant’s Formula of Humanity doesn’t only describe our moral intuition into what’s wrong; it also explains the adult virtues, 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.

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.

Because there is no heaven or hell in the future. There are only the choices you make in each and every moment.

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

self-improvement is not the cultivation of greater happiness but, rather, a cultivation of greater self-respect.

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.

This is how you change the world—not through some all-encompassing ideology or mass religious conversion or misplaced dreams of the future, but by achieving the maturation and dignity of each individual in the present, here and now.

Politics is a transactional and selfish game, and democracy is the best system of government thus far for the sole reason that it’s the only system that openly admits that.

A right-wing extremist will claim she desires “freedom” above all else and that she’s willing to make sacrifices for that freedom. But what she really means is that she wants freedom from having to deal with any values that do not map onto her own.

A leftie extremist will say that he wants “equality” for all, but what he really means is that he never wants anyone to feel pain, to feel harmed, or to feel inferior. He doesn’t want anyone to have to face moral gaps, ever. And he’s willing to cause pain and adversity to others in the name of eliminating those moral gaps.

Throughout the rich and developed world, we are not living through a crisis of wealth or material, but a crisis of character, a crisis of virtue, a crisis of means and ends.

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.

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 researchers collected thousands of ratings from hundreds of people from all walks of life, and what they discovered was both surprising and incredibly boring: pretty much everybody wrote “7” all the time.

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\

Life is apparently nothing

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.

Everything adapts and shapes itself to our slight dissatisfaction.\

And that is the problem with the pursuit of happiness.

Trying to eliminate pain only increases your sensitivity to suffering, rather than alleviating your suffering.

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 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.

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.

in Chapter 7: Pain Is the Universal Constant

Start-ups are antifragile businesses: they look for ways to fail quickly and gain from those failures.

A healthy love relationship is antifragile: misfortune and pain make the relationship stronger rather than weaker

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 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?

Everything you do, everything you are, everything you care about is a reflection of this choice: your relationships, your health, your results at work, your emotional stability, your integrity, your engagement with your community, the breadth of your life experiences, the depth of your self-confidence and courage, your ability to respect and trust and forgive and appreciate and listen and learn and have compassion.

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.

People always lament that they’re “not good” at meditation. There is no getting good. That’s the whole point.

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.

That length of sustained contemplation is a strange experience: a mix of agonizing boredom dotted with the horrifying realization that any control you thought you had over your own mind was merely a useful illusion.

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.

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.

For the child, a failure to avoid pain is a failure to find meaning or purpose.

This will cause the adolescent, like the child, to fall into a crisis of hope: I sacrificed so much and got so little back!

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.

Psychological growth is an escape from nihilism, a process of building more and more sophisticated and abstract value hierarchies in order to stomach whatever life throws our way.

Truly adult values are antifragile: they benefit from the unexpected. The more fucked up a relationship gets, the more useful honesty becomes. The more terrifying the world is, the more important it is to summon up the courage to face it. The more confusing life becomes, the more valuable it is to adopt humility.

you remove death, you remove any scarcity from life. And if you remove scarcity, you remove the ability to determine value

Death is psychologically necessary because it creates stakes in life.

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.

Antifragility is therefore synonymous with growth and maturity.

The pursuit of happiness is, then, an avoidance of growth, an avoidance of maturity, an avoidance of virtue.

The ancient virtues of bravery, honesty, and humility are all different forms of practicing antifragility: they are principles that gain from chaos and adversity.

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.

What the Enlightenment did get right is the idea that, on average, some pain is better than others.

you could define “wealth” in terms of how desirable your pain is.

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.

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.

Freud believed that people’s insecurities and shame drove them to make bad decisions, to overindulge or to compensate for what they felt they lacked.

Freud was the one who realized that we have cohesive identities, stories in our minds that we tell about ourselves, and that we are emotionally attached to those stories and will fight to maintain them.

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

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.

Money is itself a form of exchange used to equalize moral gaps between people.

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.

The more you numb pain, the worse that pain becomes, thus impelling you to numb it further. At a certain point, the icky ball of pain grows to such great proportions that your avoidance of that pain becomes compulsive.

Many of the most important innovations in history left their inventors broke and destitute.5 If someone is going to start a company and take a risk, going the diversion route is a safer bet. As a result, we’ve built a culture in which most technological “innovation” is merely figuring out how to scale diversions in new, more efficient (and more intrusive) ways.

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got Twitter.”

once the country hits First World level, that well-being flattens or, in some cases, drops off.6 Meanwhile, mental illness, depression, and anxiety can proliferate

Life in the commercial age, although more complex than before, was still relatively simple compared to today. A large, bustling middle class existed within a homogenous culture. We watched the same TV channels, listened to the same music, ate the same food, relaxed on the same types of sofas, and read the same newspapers and magazines.

I believe that it’s for this sense of social cohesion that many people today are so nostalgic.

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.

The internet, in the end, was not designed to give us what we need. Instead, it gives people what they want.

And while we all love to dogpile on the corporate overlords for their ethical faceplants, we forget that they’re merely fulfilling the market’s desires.

And if we got rid of Facebook or BP or whatever-giant-corporation-is-considered-evil-when-you-read-this, another would pop up to take its place.

You are the prisoner of your own indulgences, enslaved by your own intolerance, crippled by your own emotional weakness.

The more options we’re given (i.e., the more “freedom” we have), the less satisfied we are with whatever option we go with.

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.

The willingness to engage in conflict with others will free you to talk to anyone, to see if they share your values and beliefs, to discover what they can add to your life and what you can add to theirs.

Ultimately, the most meaningful freedom in your life comes from your commitments, the things in life for which you have chosen to sacrifice.

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 requires the world to conform to your will. Real freedom requires nothing of the world. It is only your will.

The more options we have, the more variety before us, the more difficult it becomes to choose, sacrifice, and focus.

Pleasure is beside the point—their lack of pleasure is a mere side effect of their real oppression: their enforced pain.

Today’s tyranny is achieved by flooding people with so much diversion, so much bullshit information and frivolous distraction, that they are unable to make smart commitments.

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.

AI will reach a point where its intelligence outstrips ours by so much that we will no longer comprehend what it’s doing.

how do you prepare for something that is vastly more intelligent than you are

the machines’ understanding of good and evil will likely surpass our own.

the idea that they will exterminate us for the simple fact that we aren’t as productive as we used to be, or that sometimes we can be a nuisance, I think, is just projecting the worst aspects of our own psychology onto something we don’t understand and never will

It is these value systems that fail us and hurt us and keep us down in the emotional holes of our own creation. The emotional algorithms that exalt life and make it soar in blistering joy are the same forces that unravel us and destroy us, from the inside out.

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.

I dare to hope for a post-hope world, where people are never treated merely as means but always as ends,

that people will become aware of the pitfalls of their own desires, of the seduction of their comforts, of the destruction behind their whims, and will instead seek out the discomfort that will force them to grow.

I dare to hope that the fake freedom of variety will be rejected by people in favor of the deeper, more meaningful freedom of commitment;

in an infinite sea of possible beliefs, evidence is the only life preserver we’ve got

humanity always needs factious groups of opposing religions, for this is the only way for us to prove our own significance

the ultimate innovation will be the day we can manufacture significance without strife or conflict, find importance without the necessity of death.

the only way really to improve your life is not by feeling good but, rather, by getting better at feeling bad

One way to think about “guardrails” for your Consciousness Car is to develop implementation intentions, little if/then habits that can unconsciously direct your behavior.

This is why passive aggression is unhealthy for relationships: It doesn’t explicitly state where a person perceives a moral gap. Instead, it simply opens up another gap

the root of interpersonal conflict comes from differing perceptions of moral gaps

unless we openly state our values and what we each perceived, we will never be able to equalize or restore hope to the relationship.

You could say that negative emotions are rooted in a sense of losing control, while positive emotions are rooted in a sense of having control.

you can refuse to recognize the existence of a moral gap at all. But this is incredibly difficult to do and requires a high degree of self-awareness, not to mention willingness to forgive others.

narcissists will even justify their pain with claims of their superiority. Ever hear the phrase “They hate me because they’re envious

the more pain we experience, the larger the moral gap. And the larger the moral gap, the more we dehumanize ourselves and/or others. And the more we dehumanize ourselves and/or others, the more easily we justify causing suffering to ourselves or others.

A 2016 computer model study found that there are six types of stories: rise (rags to riches), fall (riches to rags), rise and then fall (Icarus), fall and then rise (man in a hole), rise and then fall and then rise (Cinderella), fall and then rise and then fall (Oedipus). These are all essentially permutations of the same good/bad experience, plus good/bad deserving

it turns out that remembering past traumas doesn’t provide much benefit. Indeed, the most effective therapies today focus not so much on the past as on learning to manage future emotions.

the more we value something, the more unwilling we are to question or change that value, and therefore the more painful it is when that value fails us

Popper argued that the only empirical truth we can ever know is not via experimentation but, rather, falsifiability. Nothing can ever be proven. Things can only be disproven.

Pair bonding and reciprocal altruism are two evolutionary strategies that emerge in consciousness as emotional attachment.

Research shows that the more well informed and educated someone is, the more politically polarized his opinions.

This is the paradoxical tyranny of any extremist left-wing belief system. When equality becomes one’s God Value, differences in belief cannot be abided. And the only way to destroy difference in belief is through totalitarianism.

in the same way that science, and its belief in putting one’s faith in what has the most evidence, produces the best belief systems, Kant stumbled upon the best basis for creating value systems—that is, one should value that which perceives value above all else: consciousness.

Theory of mind is said to be present when someone is able to understand that other people have conscious thoughts and behaviors independent of them. Theory of mind is necessary for empathy and most social interactions—it’s how you understand someone else’s perspective and thinking process.

“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of.”

if we get the pain just right, then we learn that (a) our current values are failing us, and (b) we have the power and ability to transcend those values and create newer, higher-level, more-encompassing values

we learned that abuse and trauma generate low self-esteem, narcissism, and a self-loathing identity. These inhibit our ability to develop higher-level, abstract values because the pain of failure is constant and too intense—the child must spend all her time and energy escaping it.

the popular concept of “tough love.” You allow the child to experience pain because it is by recognizing what still matters in the face of the pain that she achieves higher values and grows.

Kant admits that it’s impossible never to use anyone as a means. If you treated everyone unconditionally, you would be forced to treat yourself conditionally, and vice versa.

Not to seek explicit consent, either from the other person or from yourself, is to treat one or both of you merely as a means in the pursuit of pleasure. Explicit consent means actively treating the other person as an end and the sex as a means.

people who treat themselves as means will treat others as means. People who don’t respect themselves won’t respect others.

This is actually an excellent litmus test for figuring out if you should be with someone: Do external stressors bring you closer together or not? If not, then you have a problem.

Political revolution is a privilege. When you’re starving and destitute, you’re focused on surviving.

No, in war, everything is about gaining an advantage. And to gain an advantage, you must invest in innovations. Military research has driven most of the greatest innovation in human history.

War is the natural fallout from our erroneous hopes. It’s where our religions get tested for their solidarity and usefulness. It’s what promotes innovation and motivates us to work and evolve.

A fake-freedom perspective would say that women should be liberated not to wear a hijab—i.e., they should be given more opportunity for pleasure. This is treating the women as a means to some ideological end. It is saying that they don’t have the right to choose their own sacrifices and commitments, that they must subsume their beliefs and decisions to some broader ideological religion about freedom.

low-trust societies rely more on “family values” than do other cultures.

Because hope relies on the perception of future value, the better things become in the present, the more difficult it can be to envision that future and the easier to envision greater losses in the future.