Everything is fucked

If I could summarize this book, it would be this:

1. Ultimately, nothing matters
2. Since we are governed by the Feeling Brain, just let it be without feeding it. Meditate on it.
3. The highest value is to be honest with ourselves. It also means unconditional acceptance of pain and love for all. This is adulting.
4. If there is any hope in life, it means something is fucked and I’ll need to reject what’s currently not working. This is hope.

This book is dire, but it is also about hope. I hope you’d get some benefit out of this. Other notable highlights below.

the Uncomfortable Truth of life

Little of what I say or do will ever matter… We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose. We are nothing.

Being heroic is the ability to conjure hope where there is none.

What people means when they need to find their life’s purpose really means:

It’s no longer clear what matters, what is a worthy use of their limited time here on earth

Feeling Brain vs Thinking Brain

Feeling Brain is the driver, ie we are moved to action only by emotion

The elephant will go where the elephant wants to go

Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason but, rather, of emotion.

This sucks. Because emotional problems are much harder to deal with than logical ones. There are equations to help you calculate the monthly payments of my mortgage.

There are no equations to help you end a bad relationship.

Emotional problems can only have emotional solutions.

And what does the Thinking Brain do in all these?

The Thinking Brain thinks he’s the hero when he actually is the supporting character.

People are always mistaking what feels good for what is good.

Leaders need their followers to be perpetually dissatisfied; it’s good for leadership business.

hope requires everything to be fucked.

Hope depends on the rejection of what currently is.

Amor fati

The unconditional acceptance of all life and experience

The highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaningless. Love pain, embrace suffering.

It meant closing the separation between desire and reality not by striving for more desires but by simply desiring reality.

While pain is inevitable, suffering is always a choice.

Variety is not freedom. Variety is just different permutations of the same meaningless shit.

Real freedom is…

Choosing what you will give up in life.

Survival of the fittest is now Survival of the best information processing

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.

Unconditional, not transactional

The blue dot effect

Officially known as the “prevalence-induced concept change”. It says that:

The better things get, the more we perceive threats where there are none, and the more upset we become.

This is also known as the paradox of progress.