Written by Mark Manson. Published by HarperCollins in 2019. 232 pages. Rating: 4.5/5.
Have you ever stopped to think about how weird it is to be alive? We are super advanced big-brained apes who Forrest Gumpped our way into taming fire, building cities, and conquered most of the natural world. We have become apex predators; we dominate the planet.
If we take any moment in history and compare it to today, we tend to get a feeling us humans are always getting better. There is a sense of progress when we bring clean water to all or we eradicate diseases through vaccines. Life today seems as good as ever.
I recently read another boom by Mark Manson titled Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope, a sequel to a book I reviewed last month, The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck. Everything is F*cked approaches the idea of life being as good as ever and takes a contrarian view.
Manson calls bullshit on the idea that life is a box of chocolate. Sure, us living in developed countries have it great. We have plenty of food and live in relative safety.
But here’s the thing, suicide rates are up! Rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness are through the crystal chandelier. Many people in “the most prosperous country in the world” must work two or three jobs to get by. Trip and break your back? Good luck not going bankrupt from your medical bills.
Manson suggests that we westerners are suffering from a crisis of hope. There are a lot of problems in our world and they don’t seem to be going anywhere. You could cite past statistics and show how hunger and violence are down, but that’s not going to help us in the future (Manson 18). Hope is for the future; we need something to help us.
What’s Everything is F*cked About:
Manson wrote Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope in an informal style. It is like if you asked a friend what they think of hope. Your friend might go off on a tangent about Starwars: A New Hope or their stoic approach to life.
The back of the book contains comprehensive endnotes I found useful. They clarify the different points Manson makes throughout the book. Some of the endnotes mentioned Frederick Nietzsche and other philosophers. I’m a philosophy nut, so I love hearing about different ideas from philosophers.
The book has two parts, “Hope” and “Everything is Fucked.” Part I is about three things that come together to give us a feeling of hope. We first must have control over our lives and feel like we impact the world in some way. Then we must have clear and reliables we can construct our identity around. Lastly, we need to have a community we can rely on to support us to get through tough times.
However, by the end of Part I, hope is not discarded but put on the backburner. In a Nietzschean tone, we must become something beyond hope. We have to free ourselves from our dependence on hope and act despite whether we have hope or not.
Part II is about how a life without hope would look like. It touches upon subjects brought up in Part I but provides better ways of dealing with problems without depending on hope. Manson also outlines some of the problems modern people face and how we can realign our values, so we don’t get crazy.
The book was fantastic, it’s the best self-help book I’ve read this year so far. I’ve always thought myself to be a hopeful guy, but after reading Everything is F*cked I feel less like relying on hope and more on something definite. It made me want to take more responsibility in my own life. Instead of hoping things will get better, make things better.
The book has many interesting nuggets of wisdom, but here are two ideas that stood out to me:
“Self-Control is an illusion”
The ability to direct your mind towards a goal seems to be straight forward. Don’t have that extra slice of pizza, I’ll go out and only have one beer, I’ll watch one more episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” But as we all know, we tend to slip up from time to time. We’ll eat that pizza or binge-watch our favorite shows for a few hours.
Manson puts forth an idea he calls “the classic assumption.” We assume that if we can control our emotions, we can better use our rational mind to achieve what is logically good for us. It’s an assumption made throughout history.
It’s completely wrong!
Emotions are an integral part of our minds, we can’t shut them off and if we did, it would lead to bad consequences. We’d lack empathy towards others and become apathetic in our own lives.
Manson gives a great analogy in the book dividing the brain in two: a thinking and a feeling brain. The feeling brain is what motivates us and is in control of our bodies. The thinking brain can inform the feeling brain and guide it to better actions.
He goes into greater detail on self-control in his book that is more digestible than his source material, such as David Hume or Nietsche.
“The Blue Dot Effect”
Prevalence induced concept change, or the “blue dot effect,” is a psychological phenomenon Manson introduces in the second part of Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope. It describes a study done by David Levari, a professor at Harvard, how concepts change over time. His study gives examples such as aggression.
Aggression was once physical, but in recent years expanded to encompass, “making insufficient eye contact or asking people where they are from” (Levari 1). His paper is interesting and can be found here. If you don’t want to read his paper, here is a gist of his experiment:
Levari asked participants to look for blue dots in a collage of dots ranging from varied shades of purple to blue. He had the participants do this repeatedly and as the study went on, Levari decreased the number of blue dots in the collage so that there would be more purple than blue. Participants still recorded a similar number of blue dots to the numbers before he tinkered with the collages. He hypothesizes that as the experiment went on people’s conception of what is blue changed. This happened even after the participants were told about the removal of blue dots.
Manson connects this study to real life. No matter how good things get, we humans will always find something to complain about. We progress forward with new technology and innovations, but by doing so we fix old problems and create new ones.
Conclusion:
Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope is a great read and I recommend it one hundred percent. If you pay attention to the politics or the news, you probably feel overwhelmed by all the bad news. I know I often feel that way and I hope for the best.
Hope can only do so much though. Manson provides an alternative to relying on hope, using psychology and philosophy to reinforce the points he makes. We do need hope to live, but we can’t rely solely on hope, we must approach problems rationally and take responsibility. We should lean into problems rather than constantly jump out of the way.
Have you read either The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck or Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope? If you did, what did you think of the book? I’d like to hear your thoughts!
The Retrospective Reader 