Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope Quotes
"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."
"Hope is the fuel for our mental engine. It’s the butter on our biscuit. It’s a lot of really cheesy metaphors."
"The avoidance of hopelessness—that is, the construction of hope—then becomes our mind’s primary project."
"Being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none. To strike a match to light up the void."
"To take a situation where everything seems to be absolutely fucked and still somehow make it good."
"Self-control is an illusion. It’s an illusion that occurs when both brains are aligned and pursuing the same course of action."
"For Every Action, There Is an Equal and Opposite Emotional Reaction."
"Our crises of hope often start with a basic sense that we do not have control over ourselves or our destiny."
"You don’t get to control your feelings, Thinking Brain. You never did, and you never will."
"The Feeling Brain is always driving. And I don’t care how scientific you think you are or how many letters you have after your name, you’re one of us, bucko."
"The experience was so emotionally powerful that it completely rearranged her value hierarchy."
"Fun is the product of our value hierarchies."
"Our Self-Worth Equals the Sum of Our Emotions Over Time."
"High and low self-worth appear different on the surface, but they are two sides of the same counterfeit coin."
"Your Identity Will Stay Your Identity Until a New Experience Acts Against It."
"Our narratives are sticky, clinging to our minds and hanging onto our identities like tight, wet clothes."
"The only way to change our values is to have experiences contrary to our values."
"This surrender to and acceptance of ourselves as inherently inferior is often referred to as shame or low self-worth."
"Without a little bit of that narcissistic delusion, without that perpetual lie we tell ourselves about our specialness, we’d likely give up hope."
"Every institution will decay and corrupt itself."
"Religions are the basis for that communal hope."
"The more insecure you are about something, the more you’ll fly back and forth between delusional feelings of superiority and delusional feelings of inferiority."
"We all overestimate our skills and intentions and underestimate the skills and intentions of others."
"Persistent low-level narcissism is natural, but it’s also likely at the root of many of our sociopolitical problems."
"But the more they fail to live up to that promise, the more they’ll blame themselves and feel guilty."
"The people with natural advantages will accumulate more resources than others. This leads to a social hierarchy with a small number of elites at the top and a large number of people getting completely hosed at the bottom."
"Nietzsche argued that the masters of society would come to see their privilege as well deserved, crafting value narratives to justify their elite status."
"Master morality is the moral belief that people get what they deserve. It's the moral belief that 'might makes right.'"
"Slave morality believes that people who have suffered the most deserve the best treatment because of that suffering."
"Both master and slave moralities are fundamental components of our Feeling Brain’s operating system, generating strong emotions and giving us hope."
"Science is the first religion able to evolve and improve upon itself, free to mutate, grow, and shift as evidence dictates."
"The scientific revolution reshaped the planet, lifting billions out of disease and poverty, improving every aspect of life."
"Ideological religions lack something spiritual religions do not: infallibility."
"Nietzsche saw ideological religions as postponing the inevitable existential crisis of mankind."
"Each religion is a faith-based attempt to explain reality, giving people a steady stream of hope."
"We never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted."
"The pursuit of happiness is not only self-defeating but also impossible."
"Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons."
"Money is itself a form of exchange used to equalize moral gaps between people."
"The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation."
"Democracy can exist only when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own."
"The freer a society becomes, the more each person will be forced to reckon and compromise with views and lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own."
"Technology has worked to make us less resilient and more addicted to frivolous diversions and pleasures."
"I dare to hope that one day the online advertising business model will die in a fucking dumpster fire."
"That technology will seek not to exploit our psychological fragility but, rather, to counterbalance it."
"That search engines and social media algorithms will be optimized for truth and social relevance."
"That AI hurries along and develops some new virtual reality religion that is so enticing that none of us can tear ourselves away from it."
"We need our lives to mean something, and while the startling advance of technology has made finding that meaning more difficult."
"We will have evolved into a great unknowable entity."
"Perhaps then, we will not only realize but finally embrace the Uncomfortable Truth: that we imagined our own importance, we invented our purpose."
"And maybe then, only then, will the eternal cycle of hope and destruction come to an end."
"When life becomes comfortable, people’s tolerance of discomfort and inconvenience lessens to the point where they see even the slightest of slights as unforgivable travesties."
"Political revolution is a privilege. When you’re starving and destitute, you’re focused on surviving."
"World War I started because a rich Austrian dude got shot in Serbia."
"Revolutionary wars...sprung up not because people were oppressed or starving, but because their economies were growing."
"When there’s not enough pain in a society, people start getting more and more upset by tinier and tinier infractions."
"Prosperity makes meaning more difficult. It makes pain more acute. And ultimately, we need meaning way more than we need prosperity."
"Financial markets expand as more economic value is produced, but eventually contract when investments outrun actual output."
"In times of prosperity, people indulge in diversions, demand fake freedoms, and become more fragile."
"Hope is reset throughout society. And a period of peace and prosperity resumes. (Sort of.)"
"Inequality feeds the 'revolution of rising expectations.' Everyone feels that their life is supposed to be better, yet it’s not what they expected."
"War not only restores balance to people’s hope and fragility, but it’s also the only thing that resets wealth inequality."
"War is the natural fallout from our erroneous hopes. It’s where our religions get tested for their solidarity and usefulness."