Everything is F*cked

       Everything is F*cked is a wonderful book written by Mark Manson. This is his second book. His first book was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Both the books are on my reading list. I should have read his first book first.

The book starts with the story of Witold Pilacki, a war hero from Poland, who fought to see a better world. He lived and died to see a better world or his country a better place to live. He goes on from Paradoxes of the world progress to our internal conflicts between Thinking brain and Feeling brain. He compares these two brains to two passengers of a Clown  Car where both are in conflict with each other and one thinking brain being the driver being continuously heckled by feeling brain . He derives three laws of emotion based on Newton’s three laws of motion.

A particular chapter that I found very fascinating is how to create your own religion. Six steps are:- 1. Sell hope to the hopeless; 2. Chose your religion out of Spiritual, Ideological and Interpersonal religions; 3. Promptly invalidate all criticism or outside questioning; 4. Create ritual sacrifice for dummies; 5. Promise heaven , deliver hell; 6. Prophet for profit. This kind of model fits well for all kinds of religions , sects and neo-sects here in India and elsewhere.  He goes on describing growth of humans from child to adolescents and to adults and their priorities on pleasure and principles. All along various chapter he discusses the theories of various philosophers like Nietzsche, Kant and others. He goes on discuss how we all suffer varied degrees of pain and on the scale of ten a happy person generally hovers around at seven. Pain is inevitable but suffering is choice. Our quality of life is determined by the quality of our character which is in relation with our pain. To deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose is deny purpose in our life at all. Real freedom is living with less which requires less energy to achieve joy and victory over desires. 

In the end he dares to hope to see the world , where people are seen always as ends, where people see pitfalls of their desires, where people will demand something better for themselves first before  demanding from the world, where information will be worth something, where catastrophes of climate change is mitigated if not outright prevented. 

He sees hope in Artificial Intelligence which he hopes will, manufacture significant things without conflict, truly of help to mankind and who knows one day we will become integrated with machines themselves. Maybe One-Day we will cross the evolutionary bridge into “Something greater” and cease to be human any longer. 

Overall an interesting book. Worth a read. 230 pages which I read and mulled over in few sittings over two days.