Everything Is F*cked – Mark Manson

The one sentence summary

Our maddening urge always to find happiness
only serves to make us unhappier, and too much of a good thing (money,
entertainment and the internet) can psychologically eat us alive.

WHAT THE BOOK SAYS

• We are a culture in need of hope. The author’s
  definition of hope is a motivation towards something perceived as valuable,
  sometimes described as purpose or meaning.
• The opposite of happiness is not anger or
  sadness – it’s hopelessness, an endless grey horizon of resignation and
  indifference.
• This is the Uncomfortable
  Truth of life: one day you and everyone you love will die, and beyond a
  small group of people for a brief period of time, little of what you say or do
  will ever matter.
• Hope
  narratives give our lives a sense of purpose, implying that there is
  something better in the future. These are before/after stories.
• The
  paradox of progress is that the better things get, the more anxious and
  desperate we seem to feel.
• To build and maintain hope, we need a sense of control (the feeling that we can affect
  our fate), a belief in the value of
  something (worth striving for), and a community
  (being part of a group trying to achieve something).
• Our Feeling Brain wins over our Thinking Brain
  every time. We are moved to action only by emotion. (This is effectively the
  same as Kahneman’s System 1 and 2 theory).
• For every action there is an equal and opposite
  emotional reaction.  This is called equalization. Sadness is powerlessness to
  make up for a perceived loss. Anger is the desire to equalise through force and
  aggression. Happiness is liberation from pain. Guilt is feeling that you
  deserve some pain that never arrived. Our self-worth equals the sum of our
  emotions over time, and our identity will stay our identity until a new
  experience acts against it.

WHAT’S GOOD ABOUT
IT

• If you want to start your own religion: sell
  hope to the hopeless; choose your faith; pre-emptively invalidate all criticism
  or outside questioning; create ritual sacrifices; promise heaven, deliver hell;
  make a profit out of it.
• Human pain is like a game of Whac-A-Mole: every
  time you knock down one kind of pain, another one pops up.
• According to Kant, 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.
• We have a modern
  maturity crisis. By definition, extremists are essentially childish. The
  maturity of our culture is deteriorating.
• In the Blue
  Dot Effect, the more we look for threats, the more we find them. This is
  based on research where over time people eventually begin to see things that
  aren’t there.
• There are two ways to create value in a
  marketplace:
• Innovations:
  upgrade or replace pain with a more tolerable one.
• Diversions:
  numb or avoid pain, usually through delay.
• The internet doesn’t work because it was
  designed to spread information, but the world runs on feelings, not
  information.
• Technology has liberated much of the planet from
  poverty and tyranny, but it has created a new type of tyranny: an empty
  meaningless variety, a never-ending stream of unnecessary options.

WHAT YOU HAVE TO WATCH

• As you might
  guess from the title, a lot of the material is quite depressing, and the ending
  doesn’t really offer much by way of optimism.