How's everyone doing, here's Mark Manson. A few months ago, I did an author's summary of my book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. And everyone seemed to like that. So I thought, why not do another author's summary of the follow-up book, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope? Man, what a f*cked up book it is a beast. It's thicker. It's denser. It's more intellectual. It's a bit more challenging. While Subtle Art focused a lot on me individually, on my life. This book kind of applies many of the same concepts to the world. When I was doing media and promotion for the book, many people asked me, is this a sequel, is it a continuation of Subtle Art? And I told them all, I said, I don't really see it as a sequel, I see it as, like, the algebra calculation of Subtle Art. Both describe similar ideas, it's just that this one has more depth and more, it's like a higher resolution of the same ideas. But it's also a more challenging read. So I know there are many readers who were a bit confused by that or frustrated by it. I've received tons of emails over the years from people telling me, what the hell are you doing in chapter four? I don't understand why this is relevant at all. So I

And help everyone understand a little about what I was getting at here and why I wrote some of the messed up things I did. But before starting with chapter one, I want to talk a bit about the overall goal of the book. Look, it's always difficult to follow up a big bestseller because, as an artist, you have competing tensions within yourself; on one hand, there's a part of you that says, damn, that did really well, let's keep doing that again. Maybe it's okay to do it once or twice, but I don't want to be writing the same book for the rest of my career. And then there's another part of you that says, screw that, let's do something completely different, let's keep challenging ourselves, let's keep pushing ourselves. On top of that, you're getting all this pressure from the outside world, suddenly the editor is breathing down your neck, you have the pressure from the media, the press, and the fans and all that. So actually writing this book was a much more difficult process than writing the first one, quite strange. Anyway, there was a lot more external pressure that exacerbated all the insecurity and anxiety you deal with as an author. So Everything is Messed Up, is titled Everything is Messed Up for a reason. Because I was like, wow, everything is messed up, as if I didn't know what I was doing. But as the book progressed, I came

than his predecessor. This could be an insecurity on my part, but one of the most common criticisms of Subtle Art and any self-help book is like, oh, it's just the guy who's making this shit up. It really isn't. Like, I have been studying psychology and philosophy for over 10 years. Like, I'm not just pulling this stuff out of my ass. So I really wanted to write a book that stretched the muscles of my own brain as much as possible. The other thing I really wanted to achieve with the book is that for a long time I felt that, as a literary genre, self-help books are generally short and cheesy, and not, well-written, let's be honest. Most self-help books are not the best reads I've ever had. And that's why I really enjoy literary fiction. I really enjoy many of the classics like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and James Joyce and Hemingway and all these people. And I've always wondered, it's like, how would a literary self-help book be like? Obviously, it would be a bit obtuse and hard to understand, but that's part of the art. So, after working on the book for a few months and feeling all this pressure and tension, I said, you know what, screw it. The only thing I can really control is whether I'm writing a book that I'm proud of and I'm writing a book that challenges

And the world and sales and all that shit later. For me, the big push was to take many of the similar ideas presented in Subtle Art, apply them to a broader philosophical spectrum, and then also present them in a somewhat literary way. And I understood when I did this that I was going to lose some readers. For example, there will be many people who really like Subtle Art who simply won't follow the thread through this second book, and I had to be okay with that. But, on the other hand, what I find is that the people who love Everything is Fucked, love it much more than Subtle Art. It's a very polarizing book in my career. It's one of the most polarizing things I've done. People say, yeah, I really didn't get it, it's not for me. Or they say, well, Subtle Art was great, but, like, this is the real shit. So hopefully, in this breakdown, we will help transfer anyone from that first field of, I really didn't get it, to, this is the real shit. Like, I hope you understand a little of what I was doing, where I was going with things, why I made the decisions I made. Alright, first of all, the book is divided into two parts. The first part is called Hope, it includes the first five chapters, and then the second part is called 

This chapter consists of three sections, and all the sections are completely different from each other. Most self-help books are very formulaic. For example, you have, let's say, 10 chapters, each chapter is a specific idea, and then within that chapter, you have five or six sections, and each section presents a story or something based on that idea. What I wanted to do from the beginning is to present three completely different sections with the same idea of hope and, like, three completely different angles. So the first section is the story of Witold Pilecki. He is a hero of World War II, the only person who ever volunteered to go to a Nazi concentration camp, and one of the one hundred people who successfully escaped from a Nazi concentration camp. Just a complete tough guy. This is someone I've wanted to write about for four or five years. I've been looking for a place where I could write about him and never had it. So I loved the idea of literally opening the book with the most heroic story I could think of, more or less the most heroic story I've heard in my life. The point I wanted to make is that heroism is born from hope. What makes someone a hero is that no matter how bad things get, they never lose hope and never stop inspiring hope. So Pilecki was like the ultimate example of this. I also felt that much of the book is about how fragmented and polarized current society is,

Almost everyone can agree that it is evil. Like, there is no debate about the Holocaust of whether it was something bad or not. And so I wanted everyone to be on the same page, no pun intended, to get the ball rolling. And so, after you are exposed to this incredibly heroic story, and I have this whole section about Starbucks' coffee cup, about how I would write that we are all insignificant dust and that everyone is going to die one day and nothing you do ever means anything. And by the way, this is called The Uncomfortable Truth of Life. Basically, what the uncomfortable truth section talks about is how we all have this existential fear within us. Like, there is always a quiet voice in our head that none of this matters, no one will remember us when we're gone, and what's the point. And I think everyone has that thought from time to time, some people have it much more than others. If you have ever experienced depression, you have probably had it quite a bit. But it's something we all have to struggle with at some point. And in this section, I build this psychological construct of hope, which is that hope is having some kind of tangible vision of the future worth living for. Something worth persevering through our struggles. Without that vision of a better future, everything loses meaning. Without hope, there is no reason to do anything. And finally, the last section is more like a sociological analysis of how

Whether you're looking at wars, violence, education, equality, or technology. According to almost all metrics, living today is better than at any time in the past. That doesn't mean today is great, obviously we still have many significant problems, but everything has improved a lot in the last 100 to 200 years. It's freaking crazy. But at the same time, mental health statistics, things like suicides, happiness, depression, all these things, are becoming more difficult. And overall, if you map how safe, comfortable, and wealthy a society is, the more of these mental health problems there are. I call it the paradox of progress, which is basically the higher the quality of life in society, the more we struggle to find hope. To have hope, you need things to be messed up. If everything is going well, then you don't know what to expect. If everyone is comfortable and happy, if you can get what you want when you want, it's very hard to think of something to aspire to. But if you're dealing with war, famine, starvation, disease, death, violence, then it's very easy to know what to expect, as if it's very clear what to expect. And although these are like three completely disparate writing styles, I suppose, one, the first section is very history-based, the second section is a bit philosophical, and then the third section is very data-driven, they all lead to the same point which is

That the better things get, the more we do not know what to expect; and the more we do not know what to expect, the more we desire a hero, the more we struggle with an existential crisis, not knowing what to do with ourselves, things like anxiety and depression. When you intertwine the three elements together, you get this larger thesis of what is happening in today's society. So, to conclude chapter one, I present it as a framework of hope. Now, this framework is actually, basically, I am copying something called self-determination theory in psychology. You can refer to the footnotes if you want more information about it. Basically, three elements are needed. The first is that you need to have enough control over your life. You need to have enough autonomy and freedom to pursue something. If you are not able to pursue anything, if you are trapped in your life, waiting does not help at all. You cannot achieve anything in the future, so why expect something in the future? The second is that you need to have something you value more than yourself, something you believe in, something that you can really think will improve your life. In general terms, I just call this values. As if you need to have something you value greatly and that is worth pursuing in the future. And then three, you need to have a community or some kind of social support from people who share those values, who share that vision of hope with which you can also experience

Chapters two, three, and four. Now, chapters two, three, and four derail with some damn crazy metaphors, so you have to have your literary brain open. But I think they provide a much deeper analysis than, I suppose, most people expect about those three concepts. So let's jump to chapter two. So, in chapter two, I introduce this idea of the car of consciousness. Really, the car of consciousness is just a very funny metaphor I created to describe the research of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. And basically, the car of consciousness simply discovers that we are just damn irrational animals and all the reasons, logic, and things we create for our decisions are usually created after the fact to justify the crap we feel. And so, chapter two is really a funny metaphor to help people realize that all these issues like procrastination, self-discipline, developing the right habits, breaking habits, these are emotional problems. We tend to tackle them as if they were logical problems. We create spreadsheets and lists and programs and sign up for training. Fundamentally, they are emotional problems. For example, the reason you struggle to create a habit around exercise is not that you don't know how to exercise or don't know where the gym is, the reason you don't create the habit is because you don't feel like damn exercising.

So you have to look at what makes you feel bad about exercising. What do you resist? What keeps you on that couch? For some people, it's fear, for others, it's sadness or grief, for others, it's low self-esteem. But whatever it is, it's an emotional issue. Any fundamental issue related to behavior, lack of action, failure to achieve goals, are emotional failures. These are bad news for most of us because emotional problems are really hard to handle. I wish it were as simple as reading a book and then stopping drinking on a Thursday night. I wish it were as simple as creating a spreadsheet and tracking all my writing time so I could sit down and write every morning. It doesn't work. In the end, what prevents me from doing these things is what I call the emotional brain. So, the basic metaphor in the chapter is that we have a thinking brain and an emotional brain. And they are together in a car, and everyone assumes that the thinking brain is driving, and the emotional brain is like this unpleasant child in the passenger seat, and you have to continually tell it to be quiet, I'm driving here, stop distracting me, the adults are talking, and actually, it doesn't work that way. And it's funny because there are versions of this metaphor throughout history from Plato, to Thomas Aquinas and the Enlightenment, so it has always been the assumption of how the human brain works. It's so ubiquitous that in

The classic assumption. But what psychologists have discovered in the last 30 or 40 years is that it's actually the other way around. The bratty kid is the one driving the car of consciousness, and the thinking brain is in the passenger seat with the map navigating. Sure, you can say you're telling the brain where you want to go, but it doesn't mean it will go there. As your thinking brain, you need to develop a way to communicate with your emotions and create incentives for your emotions to actually get things done. So, the chapter talks a bit about that, about these emotion-based strategies. Of all the chapters in the book, chapter two is probably the one people find most practical and useful. Honestly, I mean, there are probably four or five chapters in this book that could have been books themselves, and chapter two is one of, I mean, chapter two has been. There's a famous book called Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It's basically chapter two. It's a lot of dense theory and advice to assimilate, but I think it's an incredibly powerful concept. This idea that any problem of action is fundamentally a problem of emotion. And your ability to act towards your goals, to pursue your goals, will always be proportional to your ability to manage your own emotions. For me, that has been absolutely profound to understand, and I think it's profound for many other people as well. And just to remind you

It is because we need to feel that we have control of our lives, to have hope. So, if you feel like you can't control your life, if you're stuck on the couch, don't know how to get up, you're just scrolling through Instagram 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, these are emotional problems. There is no formula for you. You have to deal with your shit. And speaking of dealing with your shit, that brings us to chapter three, Newton's Three Laws of Emotion. It's a sort of play on Newton's three laws of motion, obviously. So, Newton's Three Laws of Emotion are: The first law is for every action, there is an equal and opposite emotional reaction. The second law is that our self-esteem is equal to the sum of our emotions over time. And the third law is that your identity will remain your identity until a new experience acts against it. And then I round off the chapter with something I call emotional gravity, which is a kind of idea that the mass of our emotion or how the accumulation of our emotion within us will attract people with similar emotions and identities to us in proportion to the amount we have accumulated. So, if you have accumulated many traumas throughout your life, you will attract people who have also accumulated many traumas in their lives. If you have accumulated a lot of gratitude and joy, you will attract into your life people who have accumulated a lot of gratitude and

When I was writing Subtle Art, I loved it. The way I originally wrote it was like a two or three-page section. It was very nice and concise, but people needed a lot of time to understand it. So I said, okay, if you're going to do this Newton's law thing, you have to put in maximum effort. And at that moment, I just wasn't ready for that. I wrote Subtle Art in 2015, I wasn't such a good writer back then, I didn't have as much confidence, and it just didn't fit well in the book. It was kind of a big detour. So I just set it aside. And then, when I was writing Everything is F*cked, I came back to this and thought, why not not only write about Newton's three laws of emotion but also create a historical fiction about Newton's life? to exemplify these three laws of emotion. Because Newton lived a traumatic and messed up childhood. He was bullied and abandoned by his family and was just a grumpy loner who turned out to be a genius. And then I really got into it. I probably spent more time writing this chapter than any other chapter. What the three laws of emotion describe is really how our values are formed. We have certain experiences throughout our lives, especially in our early lives, that were emotionally rewarded or emotionally punished, and then we develop associations with those experiences. The meaning

It is proportional to the intensity of the emotion. So, if I experience a horrible trauma on a fishing trip with my dad, I will have irrationally negative responses to the idea of fishing. If I have an incredibly positive experience in my adolescence on a trip to Mexico, I will always have this really positive association with Mexico and trips and things like that. These are the pillars of our identity. For example, when you take these associations and start stacking them on top of each other, both positive and negative, this is what creates Mark Manson, this is what creates whoever you are. And then, when we meet other people in the world, we resonate with the emotional associations of other people or not. Our emotional associations clash or attract each other. And that largely determines the quality of our relationships or why people with similar values and identities are drawn to each other and people with opposing values and identities drift far apart. The third law is also incredibly important. It's something I talk about in Subtle Art, which is that your identity will remain your identity until a new experience acts against it. This is one of the most common questions people had after Subtle Art, which is how do I change my values? People would say, I know I have a really messed up association with money, and I've read your book and understand why it's unhealthy, but I just can't stop. And that's the thing, it's like knowing is not enough.

Your thinking brain is not driving your car. You have to live new values to adopt new values. Let's say I have this wonderful association with Mexico and I love Mexico and I go all the time, and then one day I get robbed at gunpoint. Suddenly, a new experience acts against my emotional association and fundamentally changes my values. This happens to us all the time. In fact, many of what we consider the most significant moments of our lives are generally when a contrary experience occurs and completely changes our value system, literally changing who we are. So, you can't change your values until you live differently. It's about behavior. You can't have the brain of feelings drive to a different place until you live differently, until you really experience what it's like not to have money as one of your highest values. So that's chapter three. It merges with chapter two in a tangential way. It's very powerful to understand how these concepts interrelate. That leads us to chapter four, emotional gravity is what determines how human groups come together under shared identities and shared value systems. And once we come together under shared value systems, that is the third key to generating hope in our lives, which is feeling that we have a community, feeling that we are part of a tribe of people who believe similarly to us. Now, chapter four is where I lost a lot of people. - You were the chosen one! - So it's funny. Readers have asked me for years

I should write about what I think about religion. And it's one of those, like, be careful what you wish for to write things. Chapter four is, in many ways, my favorite chapter. But when I wrote it, I understood that many people would hate it. I showed the draft of this book to about 8 or 10 of my friends, and roughly half of them absolutely hated the chapter, and the other half loved it. And I loved it, so I kept it. But I understand it's too much for people. But basically, chapter four is a kind of funny step-by-step guide to building your own cult. And it's a bit simple or messing with the self-help industry. I deeply realized several years ago that, in many ways, by marketing and building a brand, you are building a religion, as if you were essentially convincing people to believe in and have faith in the value of something even though I have no way of knowing if it is truly valuable. You are convincing people to buy Coca-Cola products, or support a certain sports team, or be proud of their country when there really isn't an objective reason to feel any kind of emotional connection to these things. It's fascinating to me that essentially where very, very good marketing and sales practices are exactly the same practices that build religions and cults. There is a reason why people describe things like CrossFit as a cult, or Flat Earthers as a cult, or even certain political beliefs

They are often described as cults. There is this religious fervor that arises when you bring together a group of people and are able to build their mutual appreciation of certain things or certain ideas and concepts. So I wanted to create a step-by-step process of how you do it with people. For example, how do you get people to value something so much that it is at the core of their identity and that their need to belong to a group that shares their belief is so strong and powerful that it can lead to something really dark and messed up places? I wanted to create that step by step, but I wanted to do it in a way that mocked many self-help seminars, infomercials, and direct marketing. It's like, oh, I make $300 in underwear working for Google. Like those ads we used to see. Because they are all the same things. Unfortunately, I think these trends are deeply rooted in human psychology. That's why I use the word religion very, very loosely in the book. What we traditionally consider religion, I describe as supernatural religion, that is, beliefs and things that are not demonstrable or verifiable in the physical universe. So believing in God or Jesus or whatever. But you also have ideological religions. Veganism is, in many ways, an ideological religion, or libertarianism or Marxism, since all of these are belief systems in which people take on faith based on their value system and then organize their lives and communities around it.

It is a very nihilistic perspective on human belief systems, but I also believe it is an objective perspective on human belief systems. It's a very deep and uncomfortable chapter. And I also found it interesting, like the coffee cup thing in chapter one, which is a deeply nihilistic statement and people loved it. That thing has been shared on social media so many damn times. For example, there was a café in the UK that actually printed that on their coffee cups. It was a huge success. But the thing is, if you believe that part of nihilism, like chapter four, is the logical conclusion, that humans organize themselves into systems based on arbitrary beliefs of what is valuable and what is not, and part of that is conventional religion, part of that is political ideology, part of that is our fundamental relationships and family systems, friendships, and so on. My belief that my best friend is valuable is arbitrary. That is purely emotional. There is no objective truth that my friendship is valuable in the universe. So it's a very uncomfortable chapter. I think it lost a lot of people because it is a philosophical depth that many people may not have reached before or feel comfortable with. And it's also a bit, I'm not going to lie, it was a bit complicated. It was a bit too much. (Laughs) I admit it. It was a bit too much. But I also thought it was important because, as I explained at the end of the chapter,

Every human belief system is fundamentally flawed. There is no correct answer. Because the human mind is flawed, every human belief system is fundamentally flawed. Therefore, anything we base our hope on will be wrong. And this brings us back to that paradox of hope in chapter one, which is that just as hope needs things to be messed up to exist, you need there to be problems in the world because those problems will give you hope of not having them. The problems, anything you hope for, anything you believe in or pursue will also mess things up in some new way. There is no utopia. Any vision of the future that we think is better will simply create and drive more problems for humanity. And so the circle is complete. You need everything to be messed up for there to be hope, and you need there to be hope because that's what makes everything messed up. And that brings us to chapter five, which is actually just a tribute to Nietzsche. Nietzsche was the first philosopher I read when I was a teenager. I have always loved him and identified with him. So that chapter is a kind of accurate reflection of the end of his life. And also, everything he says in that chapter is something he actually wrote in one of his books. I just love the guy. Like, he has been very influential in my life. And everything I say about hope and things being messed up and how every human belief system is fundamentally flawed,

It's basically what Nietzsche said. Like everything comes directly from his philosophy. He was something like the first modern nihilist. People call him the first postmodernist, which is like postmodernism, I don't know, it's like a modern nihilism, I guess. I think postmodernism is a kind of idea that realizes that everything is a bit relative and that humans are fundamentally limited in our understanding of what is good and bad and what is worth pursuing and not pursuing. So, chapter five is just a very good summary and a kind of tribute to him by sharing his story and some of his brilliant lines. He was also a crazy bastard. So Nietzsche had several incredibly brilliant female friends who were some of the first feminists in the world. The funny thing was that Nietzsche was so sexist. He had all these brilliant women around who took care of him because he was very sick and had a lot of health problems, so they would come and take care of him and talk to him and basically be his intellectual companions, and then he just wrote horrible, horrible stuff about women. So I guess it's some kind of little revenge. I decided to write the chapter about his friend, Meta von Salis. I wrote it from her perspective. And that chapter concludes the first part, if you want to move on to a second part, it starts with the paradox of progress, it starts with the paradox of hope, which is that hope seems to need things to be messed up

The constitutive parts of hope, the fact that self-control is somewhat an illusion, we are emotionally based creatures, that values are highly proportional to the emotional valence of our experiences, and that we tend to organize ourselves into groups and communities based on our values, and that we are inevitably very tribal and destructive towards each other, which, in chapter five, we discover that hope is also what makes us dangerous, what causes these problems, what causes things to mess up. And so, we set in motion this complete cycle of hope that messes everything up, but that messing everything up gives us hope to heal and promote a better future. And so, despite being called hope, the first part of the book is profoundly pessimistic, extremely dark. I have received many emails from readers over the years, like, my friend, I'm in chapter five, this is depressing me. Like, this is so dark. Should I continue? I'm like, yes, please keep going. It gets better. That's the point. If you imagine the book as a sort of arc, I wanted people to start in this place like, oh, hope is great, hope makes heroes, hope is what we all need, and gradually lead them to the depths of pure nihilism and darkness. And then, in the second part, where we talk about how everything was messed up, we slowly bring them to light. And so it kind of reverses expectations. It's like the hope that

But in reality, it is deeply unsettling. And then, the second part of the book where we talk about how, why everything is messed up, and how it's messed up is what really lifts you out of those depths of despair. So, the second part begins with a chapter called The Humanity Formula. And this chapter is basically the synthesis of two very popular blog posts that I wrote in 2017, 2018. The first one is heavily based on the work of a developmental psychologist named Robert Kegan, who devised these five levels of human development or five levels of human maturity. Basically, if the fundamental challenge of being human is to handle our own emotions and find hope for ourselves, then Kegan's framework shows how there are five distinct levels, and at each level, you become a little better than the previous one at doing that. That blog post was called How to Grow. It was very popular. I simplified it a bit into three levels, so I called it child, teenager, and adult. The child is purely narcissistic. Me, me, me, everything I want, I want what I want. I want it now. The teenager is in a phase that I call the negotiation phase. So, the teenager has learned childhood strategies to meet their needs, they are not good strategies. Like throwing a tantrum and yelling at people all the time, it doesn't actually work. You have to negotiate with other people's needs and understand that other

and things like that. And so the teenager learns that bargaining is possible. You can learn to say things to people in a certain way to get what you want. You can give things to people to help you get what you want. You may like to create alliances and manipulate people and do all these things. And then you can become very, very good at teenage negotiation. You can become an excellent salesperson. You can become extremely persuasive. You can become charismatic and attract people to you and make them feel like you are giving them a lot of value. But ultimately, I would say that much of what is considered success in the world of self-help or, let's say, in the world of business consultants, is excellent teenage negotiation. But there is a level beyond that. And that level is what I call adult virtue, which is essentially reaching a point where you understand that the most valuable things in life cannot be negotiated. If you try to bargain for love, you completely undermine love. If you try to convince people to respect you, you only reinforce the fact that they do not respect you. If you try to make people trust you, then you prove to yourself that you are probably not trustworthy. There are these fundamental concepts in human relationships and simply in life that you cannot negotiate for them. The only way you can have them, I call it acting unconditionally, which is if you want to be respected, you have to respect; if you want them to trust you, you

If you want to be loved, you have to love. You cannot let any intermediary force come between those things. For me, this was an extremely powerful idea. I was initially introduced to it in the work of Robert Kegan. And then, just as Subtle Art came out, I really got into Immanuel Kant's ethical philosophy. I just became a big nerd about it. I read most of his books. And Kant's ethical philosophy is a bit silly. I think I have a footnote where I talk about it. People have recognized that he was a bit harsh, as if he had gone too far. But he has this principle that blew my mind when I found it. It's called the formula of humanity. And basically, it says, never treat a person as a means to an end, but always as an end in themselves. For me, that simple principle sums up everything about adult virtue and acting unconditionally and loving unconditionally and not using people as a bargaining chip to get what you want. Not only does that seem to me to be one of the fundamental foundations of human ethics, but it also seems to me to be one of the fundamental foundations for being emotionally healthy and having healthy relationships and essentially having a good life. Now, why is this chapter in this book? Why am I opening the second part with this chapter? Chapters four and five of the first part leave us a little groundless. The first part of the book is essentially meant to

About what is good and what is valuable, and what to expect. The first part leaves you in a very nihilistic place. It leaves you in a place where it's like, wow, everything I thought was valuable probably isn't, maybe, like maybe it messed with some people a bit. You were a bit left scratching in the void of, okay, what is solid ground we can stand on? And for me, personally, Kant's humanity formula or this idea of virtue as acting unconditionally in the world that the most valuable things cannot be negotiated for it. Like, this is the fundamental basis of value in my opinion. Things like love, respect, trust, integrity, courage, which were often considered the cardinal virtues in the ancient world, are unconditional. It's somewhat evident that they are good for the simple reason that they seem to optimize human well-being and human happiness. And for me, that is practically the only solid ground we have to stand on. That is the introductory concept of the second part. Look, there will always be problems in life. We will always struggle. We will always deal with nonsense. But there is a way to move through the world in a better or worse way. And that better way should be the root of what we consider valuable and what we expect. Because the beauty of something like love or respect is that you can always expect it. It is never completely attainable.

It's like I expect, like a big house and a lot of money, let's say one day I achieve a big house and a lot of money, well, damn, now I don't know what to expect, now I get into an existential crisis because I achieved my dreams and I don't know what to expect, and that's what I talk about in chapter four. But if I expect love, respect, courage, these are things that I can always expect because they always need to be renewed. You need to practice them over and over and over again. There is never a situation where you don't practice them. So, chapter six is like the remedy for the nihilism and existential discomfort of chapters four and five. And then we move on to chapter seven. Chapter seven is something that I am intellectually very proud of. I'm nerding out to a certain extent. Chapter seven is called Pain is the universal constant of life. There have been some profound experiments that have found that people's perception of what is uncomfortable is relative. It adjusts to the amount of pain they have experienced in other parts of their life. If they always feel comfortable, always pampered, protected, and have never experienced difficulties before, someone like leaving a cruel comment on the Internet will really bother them to the same extent as someone who has been hardened by battle and has gone through all kinds of trauma. and shit, like something really horrible happened to them. Basically, there is a fixed

Our perceptions of what is painful or not are adjusted to maintain a constant perception of pain. And this is very similar to Einstein's realization about relativity in space-time and things like that. So I use it as a metaphor for that. This chapter has many incredible stories. One about a Vietnamese monk who set himself on fire, like an incredible story. There are some stories about Buddha in it. But basically, the main idea is that not only pain and suffering never disappear in life, but our perceptions will alter our experiences so that we perceive pain and struggle in our lives. And for me, this explains a lot about what is happening in the world. There is a famous quote that I think I use in Subtle Art by José Martí, who says that a mind without problems will quickly start creating new ones. And it's true. As if it were supported. From research, philosophers have been saying this for hundreds of years. The easier and more comfortable life becomes, the more nonsense traumatic and horrendous episodes will seem to us. And my fear is that this is creating a culture of fragility. I talk about Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility and how adult virtue produces antifragile adults, practicing courage, practicing respect, practicing resilience, tolerance, as these things demand antifragility. While we are rapidly developing a culture of fragility.

Our perceptions are lying to us and telling us that all these insignificant things are extremely painful, but they are not, yet we are believing them. Going back to the Pilecki part at the beginning of the book, again, another reason I use that story is because that is how the real struggle looks, that is how real problems look. Whatever we are experiencing today, whatever we perceive as injustice, hate, or violence, it is nothing. It is nothing compared to what happened three generations ago. Much of this is about perspective. And the goal of the chapter is to help educate people on how pain is perceived, how discomfort is perceived, and how it is constant. So you cannot fully trust your perceptions. It's like you're spoiled, protected, the perceptions of the first world of the 21st century will try to tell you, yes, that the Starbucks barista being rude to you is an absolute disgrace and a representation of everything that is wrong in the world, and then you will post on Twitter and everyone will like it. But you are full of crap. It's nothing. Literally, it's nothing. It's all in your head. So I love chapter seven. That chapter was really a labor of love. Intellectually, I am very, very proud of it. Like, chapter seven and three are two that, as a writer, I am extremely proud of. Alright, then there's chapter eight, The Economy of Feelings.

I previously mentioned about chapter four that there is no differentiation between the practices for building religious communities among humans and good marketing and sales practices. So, chapter eight brings that back. I wouldn't say it's a criticism of consumerism or capitalism. It's simply a description of some of the side effects of consumerism and capitalism. And essentially, it argues that if the emotional brain is driving the car, if what we value is largely based on our emotional experience, not on our objective experience, and we organize into groups based on our emotionally driven identities, then it makes sense that the value traded in the economy, like things perceived as valuable and important, has a strong emotional drive. It's an economy based on feelings. Therefore, if you study sales and marketing, the first thing you are taught is to find what will scare them and then to find what will make them happy. Like, sales and marketing are about feelings. It's not about benefits. It's not about facts. It's about feelings. So, chapter eight is a look at how we perceive value and if that is really helpful for us or not. The argument I make in chapter eight is that because the economy is mainly based on feelings, it is vulnerable to many of the psychological traps that humans fall into. And the main one I talk about is what is called the paradox of choice, which is the idea that more choices equal more value.

The fact that I can choose from 30 cereals is better than having to choose between two, or the fact that I can shop at a hundred stores is better than being able to shop at like 20. The truth is that actually the more options we have, the more we suffer and experience anxiety and doubt that we did not choose the right one. There is a kind of hidden opportunity cost in greater optionality. And then, in the chapter, I talk about how, in Western culture, we began to confuse optionality with freedom. If you look at how freedom and liberty are described in the ancient world and in the Enlightenment, they are described in terms of what you commit to. Like, I am free because out of all the options, I chose this one. Whereas, nowadays, we tend to define freedom or assume that freedom is not having to commit to anything. I can have all the options and I don't have to give up anything. The main idea of the chapter is that ultimately, freedom and having a prosperous society require a degree of sacrifice. And if people are losing the ability to sacrifice, as I described in chapter seven, because they are more childish or adolescent, as I described in chapter six, then we are screwed. One of the arguments in chapter one is that we are victims of our own material success. For example, humanity has thrived so much materially in the last hundred years that I believe it is presenting a variety of psychological and sociological problems

And much of what the second part of the book tries to do is to explain what those psychological blind spots are that we have as a culture and do not understand about ourselves. Because if we cannot recognize them, there is no way we can adapt or fix them. So ultimately, it's as if chapter eight brings you back to the starting point to explain why we are losing hope. We are losing hope because the easier things become, the harder we struggle to find things worth sacrificing for, and the more irrational or subjective our perceptions of pain become, we don't know what hope is. We expect increasingly worse things to happen. We expect a new jet ski instead of a healthy relationship or start perceiving success in many unhealthy ways. So, chapter eight extrapolates the principles of chapters six and seven and diagnoses what we are experiencing as a culture. And finally, we get to chapter nine called The Final Religion. So, chapter nine is like chapter four. I received many emails from people saying, What the hell, Mark? You had me until chapter nine, why the hell did you end this book like this? First of all, it's a bit ironic. It's a bit exaggerated and silly on purpose. Again, as I want to remind you. This book was intentionally written to be a bit literary. Like, it's not literal. This is not a scientific book. I'm not writing this to verify the facts.

Or to publish it in an academic journal or as a reference in an academic journal, as if it were a literary twist in the self-help genre and to find philosophical and psychological concepts to diagnose a lot of things that we feel or that we can perceive but that we do not fully know. So, the last chapter, The Final Religion, deals with artificial intelligence and technology only in general. Part of this reflects that, personally, I believe that the only way out of this is technology. Technology generally causes our problems and then also solves them. I think I even say in chapter four that science is probably the only good thing humans have done for themselves, which I know is an exaggeration, but I think the scientific method is probably the best thing humans have invented. And like the health and wealth and prosperity that have resulted from it are undeniable. So chapter nine is like an awkward celebration. I wrote an article many, many years ago. There was a kind of this phase on the Internet. I think it was when Elon Musk was spreading all the pessimism about AI, and there was a book by Nick Bostrom that had just come out called Superintelligence, which warned that an AI would like to change the planet and pick up sticks in an accident or something, like just destroy humanity because a line of code was incorrect. And I wrote this article, I called it For my part, I welcome our AI overlords.

Basically, it was like, look, humans are so messed up and flawed, and we are already so horrible to each other and so irrational and flawed in our reasoning that even a bad AI would probably be an improvement. And then, chapter nine of the book amplifies those fears a bit, but then points out that, as if we were already worshipping algorithms, we are already obsessed with them and already determine value based on algorithms. And if you take a very broad philosophical definition of religion, like the one I do in chapter four, you could argue that our complete submission to algorithms is the new religion. It is what is replacing conventional religion. Not only is it replacing it, but we are happy to replace it. Are you going to give up Amazon in the short term? Are you going to quit Uber? Are you going to quit social media? For example, to give up all algorithms, to give up Google, basically you have to go back to living in a proverbial cave. I don't think any of us is ready to do that. As much as we complain and grumble about technology and these companies, they have improved our lives and we are happy to have them, and that will continue to happen. And so, the last chapter ends by saying something like, don't worry too much because soon it will be out of our hands. And don't worry, AI will probably keep us happy just because it's more convenient for them to keep us happy.

that we kill each other or whatever. And then, the final section of the book is something like, I just spent 250 pages being skeptical of hope and explaining the dangers of hope, but the last section of the book I clumsily appropriated Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech and created something like a speech of I Dare to Hope. And it's basically all the ways in which I hope that technology will fill the gaps in our cognition or compensate for our psychological defects. All these things that I described in chapters seven and eight and three and four, I believe that technology has the potential to compensate for those things and correct those things throughout society, so I dare to hope for those things. That closes the book. One thing I will say is, like, if someone is watching this, who read it once and is going to come back and read it again, read the footnotes. There is a lot of explanation in the endnotes, and there are also many jokes and humor in the endnotes, including a five-page endnote from chapter eight about war and why war happens that I put there. It didn't really fit in the chapter, but I liked it a lot, so I put it as a five-page endnote. Sometimes it bothers me that few people read the endnotes. I hope this summary has helped you understand the book if you are one of those who are a little confused or don't see how it all fits together. I totally admit

But I needed to write something like that at that moment. Where I was in my head, coming out of Subtle Art and all the success and everything, as if I really wanted to push the boundaries of what was considered an acceptable format for the genre. And I really wanted to challenge myself as a writer and as a thinker, and I think I did it successfully. It's not a perfect book, but in the end, I am very proud of it. I hope you like it. And if you come back and read it, I hope you get more out of it by seeing this. So until next time. I'll see you later. (upbeat pop music)

Author Summary: Everything is F*cked a Book About Hope

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Author Summary: Everything is F*cked a Book About Hope

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