Everything is F*****d

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As humans we aim for Happiness. The opposite of happiness is not anger or sadness, its hopelessness and meaninglessness. So humans need hope and meaning. We need 3 things for this: (a) A sense of control, (b) a belief in the value of something, and (c) a community. A healthy sense of control means understanding that our feeling brain drives our actions, and instead learning to see our emotions more objectively through our thinking brain, instead of controlling them. A belief in the value of something comes from the narratives we tell ourselves about past and future experiences. And a community comes from sharing values with others and having them support our ideals. The modern world has begun to deprive us of these three things, hence why “everything is fucked”. In theory people should mature from pleasure based values to transactional values to abstract values. Yet many get stuck holding transactional values because they value nothing above themselves. This can be solved through Kant’s formula for humanity, which says we should treat all humans (including ourselves) as an end, and not merely a means. Finally, modern society has got so good at improving the pain people feel that we are now at a stage where we are eliminating it. As a result we have become addicted to comfort and pleasure, losing sight of better values in the process.

Hope

The Uncomfortable Truth

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.

To maintain and build hope, we need 3 things

  1. A sense of control
  2. A belief in the value of something
  3. A community

1. A Sense of Control

  • The two brains

    1. Thinking brain
    2. Feeling brain

  • The classic assumption is that our thinking brain is in control of our actions

  • In reality our feelings control our actions, and our thinking brain rationalises narratives for the way we feel (and hence act)

  • “The thinking brain makes shit up that the feeling brain wants to hear”

  • Deny feeling brain –> numbed to the world, struggling to form meaningful relationships

  • Deny thinking brain –> impulsive and selfish

  • Self control is an illusion: Self control –> Self acceptance

  • Thinking brain should simply check in on how the feeling brain is doing

  • Recognising that your feeling brain could be wrong, and acting accordingly is the key to emotional regulation

  • The feeling brain controls feelings and impulses, but the thinking brain controls the meaning of those feelings

2. A Belief in the Value of Something

  • Newtons 3 laws of emotion

    1. Every action has an equal and opposite emotional reaction

      • Moral gaps

        • Difference between what happened and what is deserved

        • Call for equalisation (punishment, reaction, pain, debt)

        • Moral gaps require us to determine some things as better than others

        • Hence our value hierarchies determine the moral gaps we seek to equalise

      • “The more insecure you are about something the more you flap back and forth between delisuional feelings of superiority (I’m the best) and delusional feelings of inferiority (I suck)”

    2. Our self worth equals the sum of our emotions over time

      • Our identity is emotionally created not logically created

      • Our values are stories we tell ourselves about experiences we have had in the past

        • Feeling brain feels something –> Thinking brain constructs a narrative to explain it –> We build up a network of these narratives –> This becomes our identity

    3. Your identity will remain your identity until an external force acts against it

      • Hence the only way to change our values is
        1. Re-examine past experiences and re-write the narratives around them
        2. Write narratives you want to live by then go out and follow them (ie. Have experiences contrary to your current values)

3. A Community

Having others around us who share our values and support our ideals

  • This chapter is set out in the theme of “how to start your own religion”. Which doesn’t make it very easy to follow to be honest

  • Pain is common

  • God value

    • The value at the top of the hierarchy is the lens through which you see all other values

Nietzsche’s Moralities

  1. Master morality – Believes in virtue of strength and dominance
  2. Slave morality– Believes in virtue of sacrifice and submission

Everything is Fucked

Maturity

  • Kohlberg’s stages of moral development

    1. Children: Avoid pain and pursue pleasure
    2. Adolescents: Transactional values, I’ll suffer pain if you give me pleasure
    3. Adults: Do things because they are right, not expecting anything in return

Kant’s Formula for Humanity

“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”

  • Things we treat as means are interacted with conditionally

  • Unconditional action comes from treating things as an end (being an adult)

Pain as the Constant

  • Blue Dot Effect / rule of 7

    • In the experiment, participants expected to see blue dots about half the time, so they projected that onto the experiment

    • Same happens with stress/happiness/feelings

    • We expect life to have a certain level of happiness and in the long term we always revert to this (rule of7)

    • We also amplify/dampen our emotional reactions to stress so that it meets our expectations

  • Trying to eliminate pain just backfires, we see the little things in our lives as so much bigger because theres nothing else to cause us pain (and we expect a certain amount)

  • Pain is the universal constant. It will always be there. Key is choosing the pain

  • Avoiding pain –> Fragile

  • Choosing pain and accepting it –> Anti-fragile

  • Pain = Value

    • The amount we are willing to suffer for something defines how much we value it

Marketing to Feelings

  • Edward Bernays

    • Edward Bernays literally invented marketing to the emotions

    • He started in 1920s america, marketing cigarettes to women as a symbol of protest and independence

    • The whole of marketing is based around:

      1. Highlight, heighten and needle at peoples shame and insecurity
      2. Tell them your product will rid them of that shame and insecurity

  • Modern western economy –> Developed –> Instead of choosing different pain we can afford to avoid pain –> We get addicted to comfort and pleasure –> Our values diminish accordingly, now we care about instagram filters and makeup as opposed to life experience and connection

  • Fake vs real freedom

    • Fake freedom puts us on the hedonic treadmill

    • Real freedom involves limitation (“what am I willing to give up”). The best things in life come from commitment

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