Everything Is Fucked (Kindle highlights)

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. (p. 8)
“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.” (p. 10)
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. (p. 10)
Hopelessness is the root of anxiety, mental illness, and depression. It is the source of all misery and the cause of all addiction. (p. 12)
The avoidance of hopelessness—that is, the construction of hope—then becomes our mind’s primary project. (p. 13)
And to successfully argue against nihilism, you must start at nihilism. You must start at the Uncomfortable Truth. From there, you must slowly build a convincing case for hope. (p. 15)
But reading these books is also kind of like listening to your Uncle Larry prattle on about how much worse things were when he was your age. Even though he’s right, it doesn’t necessarily make you feel any better about your problems. (p. 17)
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. (p. 18)
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. (p. 18)
To build and maintain hope, we need three things: a sense of control, a belief in the value of something, and a community. (p. 19)
The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because, ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That’s because action is emotion. (p. 33)
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. (p. 33)
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. (p. 33)
The Feeling Brain generates the emotions that cause us to move into action, and the Thinking Brain suggests where to direct that action. (p. 34)
It’s important to let the Feeling Brain air out all its icky, twisted feelings. Just get them out into the open where they can breathe, because the more they breathe, the weaker their grip is on the steering wheel of your Consciousness Car. (p. 42)
Maybe you agree to do something the Feeling Brain likes, as long as it does something it doesn’t like. Watch your favorite TV show, but only at the gym while you’re on the treadmill. Go out with friends, but only if you’ve paid your bills for the month. (p. 42)
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. (p. 52)
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. (p. 54)
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. (p. 57)
What if people’s unavailability has more to do with them than it does with you? (p. 69)
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. (p. 71)
“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. (p. 72)
Each religion is a faith-based attempt to explain reality in such a way that it gives people a steady stream of hope. In a kind of Darwinian competition, those religions that mobilize, coordinate, and inspire their believers the most are those that win out and spread throughout the world. (p. 119)
The scientific revolution changed the world more than anything before or since.10 It has reshaped the planet, lifted billions out of disease and poverty, and improved every aspect of life.11 It is not an exaggeration to suggest that science may be the only demonstrably good thing humanity has ever done for itself. (p. 120)
Science is singularly responsible for all the greatest inventions and advances in human history, from medicine and agriculture to education and commerce. (p. 120)
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. And the difference between the two is not always clear. (p. 126)
Hope is, therefore, destructive. Hope depends on the rejection of what currently is. (p. 127)
Amor fati, for Nietzsche, meant the unconditional acceptance of all life and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness. It meant loving one’s pain, embracing one’s suffering. It meant closing the separation between one’s desires and reality not by striving for more desires, but by simply desiring reality. (p. 128)
Becoming an adult is therefore developing the ability to do what is right for the simple reason that it is right. (p. 145)
Unfortunately, as they grow, religions inevitably get co-opted by transactional adolescents and narcissist children, people who pervert the religious principles for their own personal gain. Every human religion succumbs to this failure of moral frailty at some point. No matter how beautiful and pure its doctrines, it ultimately becomes a human institution, and all human institutions eventually become corrupted. (p. 152)
Kant cleverly deduced that, logically, the supreme value in the universe is the thing that conceives of value itself. The only true meaning in existence is the ability to form meaning. The only importance is the thing that decides importance. (p. 154)
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. (p. 156)
The Formula of Humanity is merely a principle. It doesn’t project some future utopia. It doesn’t lament some hellish past. No one is better or worse or more righteous than anyone else. All that matters is that conscious will is respected and protected. End of story. (p. 157)
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. (p. 158)
The values that define our identity are the templates that we apply to our interactions with others, and little progress can be made with others until we’ve made progress within ourselves. (p. 158)
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. (p. 159)
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. (p. 159)
The fundamental political schism in the twenty-first century is no longer right versus left, but the impulsive childish values of the right and left versus the compromising adolescent/adult values of both the right and left. It’s no longer a debate of communism versus capitalism or freedom versus equality but, rather, of maturity versus immaturity, of means versus ends. Chapter 7 Pain Is the Universal Constant One by one, the researchers shuttled the subjects down a hall and into a small room. (p. 161)
The fundamental political schism in the twenty-first century is no longer right versus left, but the impulsive childish values of the right and left versus the compromising adolescent/adult values of both the right and left. It’s no longer a debate of communism versus capitalism or freedom versus equality but, rather, of maturity versus immaturity, of means versus ends. (p. 161)
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. (p. 164)
He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn’t necessarily feel good about it. We’d just get equally upset about the more minor stuff. (p. 165)
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. (p. 169)
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. (p. 171)
It wasn’t until the age of science and technology that happiness became a “thing.” Once humanity invented the means to improve life, the next logical question was “So what should we improve?” Several philosophers at the time decided that the ultimate aim of humanity should be to promote happiness—that is, to reduce pain. (p. 173)
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. (p. 174)
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. (p. 176)
Most people avoid meditation the same way a kid avoids doing homework. It’s because they know what meditation really is: it’s confronting your pain, it’s observing the interiors of your mind and heart, in all their horror and glory. (p. 185)
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. (p. 189)
In fact, you could define “wealth” in terms of how desirable your pain is. (p. 190)
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. (p. 191)
It worked. Women started smoking, and ever since, we’ve had equal-opportunity lung cancer. (p. 194)
But what happens when a large number of people are relatively healthy and wealthy? At that point, most economic progress switches from innovation to diversion, from upgrading pain to avoiding pain. (p. 198)
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. (p. 201)
The second thing that happens is that we become prone to a series of low-level addictive behaviors—compulsively checking our phone, our email, our Instagram; compulsively finishing Netflix series we don’t like; sharing outrage-inducing articles we haven’t read; accepting invitations to parties and events we don’t enjoy; traveling not because we want to but because we want to be able to say we went. Compulsive behavior aimed at experiencing more stuff is not freedom—again, it’s kind of the opposite. (p. 205)
More stuff doesn’t make us freer, it imprisons us with anxiety over whether we chose or did the best thing. (p. 206)
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. (p. 206)
You can choose to wake up earlier each morning, to block your email until midafternoon each day, to delete social media apps from your phone. These limitations will free you because they will liberate your time, attention, and power of choice. They treat your consciousness as an end in itself. (p. 207)
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. (p. 210)
Read that again: a mere nine hours after learning the rules to chess, AlphaZero played the best chess-playing entity in the world and did not drop a single game out of one hundred. It was a result so unprecedented that people still don’t know what to make of it. Human grandmasters marveled at the creativity and ingenuity of AlphaZero. (p. 217)
Slowly but surely, AI will become better than we are at pretty much everything: medicine, engineering, construction, art, technological innovation. You’ll watch movies created by AI, and discuss them on websites or mobile platforms built by AI, moderated by AI, and it might even turn out that the “person” you’ll argue with will be an AI. (p. 218)
The old gods will be replaced by the new gods: the algorithms (p. 219)
If submitting to artificial algorithms sounds awful, understand this: you already do. And you like it. (p. 220)
This is the story of evolution—survival of the fittest and all that. But you could also look at it a different way. You could call it “survival of the best information processing.” (p. 222)
But in a globally networked economy of billions of people, stocked with thousands of nukes and Facebook privacy violations and holographic Michael Jackson concerts, our algorithms kind of suck. They break down and enter us into ever-escalating cycles of conflict that, by the nature of our algorithms, can produce no permanent satisfaction, no final peace. (p. 223)
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. (p. 224)
What if technology advances to such a degree that it renders individual human consciousness arbitrary? What if consciousness can be replicated, expanded, and contracted at will? What if removing all these clunky, inefficient biological prisons we call “bodies,” or all these clunky, inefficient psychological prisons we call “individual identities,” results in far more ethical and prosperous outcomes? What if the machines realize we’d be much happier being freed from our cognitive prisons and having our perception of our own identities expanded to include all perceivable reality? (p. 226)
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. (p. 227)
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. (p. 227)
Don’t hope for better. Just be better. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined. (p. 228)
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; that people will opt in to self-limitation rather than the quixotic quest of self-indulgence; that people will demand something better of themselves first before demanding something better from the world. (p. 229)
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. (p. 229)
I dare to hope that search engines and social media algorithms will be optimized for truth and social relevance rather than simply showing people what they want to see; (p. 229)
I dare to hope that one day we will have AI that will listen to all the dumb shit we write and say and will point out (just to us, maybe) our cognitive biases, uninformed assumptions, and prejudices—like a little notification that pops up on your phone letting you know that you just totally exaggerated the unemployment rate when arguing with your uncle. (p. 230)