Everything Is F*cked(17)
One could predict her behavior solely from this hierarchy. She’d rather work than sleep. She’d rather party and get fucked up than work. And everything was about the music.
Then she did one of those volunteer abroad things, where young people spend a couple of months working with orphans in a Third World country and—well, that changed everything. The experience was so emotionally powerful that it completely rearranged her value hierarchy. Her hierarchy now looked something like this:
Saving children from unnecessary suffering
Work
Sleep
Parties
And suddenly, as if by magic, the parties stopped being fun. Why? Because they interfered with her new top value: helping suffering kids. She switched careers and was all about work now. She stayed in most nights. She didn’t drink or do drugs. She slept well—after all, she needed tons of energy to save the world.
Her party friends looked at her and pitied her; they judged her by their values, which were her old values. Poor party girl has to go to bed and get up for work every morning. Poor party girl can’t stay out doing MDMA every weekend.
But here’s the funny thing about value hierarchies: when they change, you don’t actually lose anything. It’s not that my friend decided to start giving up the parties for her career, it’s that the parties stopped being fun. That’s because “fun” is the product of our value hierarchies. When we stop valuing something, it ceases to be fun or interesting to us. Therefore, there is no sense of loss, no sense of missing out when we stop doing it. On the contrary, we look back and wonder how we ever spent so much time caring about such a silly, trivial thing, why we wasted so much energy on issues and causes that didn’t matter. These pangs of regret or embarrassment are good; they signify growth. They are the product of our achieving our hopes.
NEWTON’S SECOND LAW OF EMOTION
Our Self-Worth Equals the Sum of Our Emotions Over Time
Let’s return to the punching example, except this time, let’s pretend I exist within this magical force field that prevents any consequences from ever befalling me. You can’t punch me back. You can’t say anything to me. You can’t even say anything to anyone else about me. I am impervious—an all-seeing, all-powerful, evil ass-face.
Newton’s First Law of Emotion states that when someone (or something) causes us pain, a moral gap opens up and our Feeling Brain summons up icky emotions to motivate us to equalize.
But what if that equalization never comes? What if someone (or something) makes us feel awful, yet we are incapable of ever retaliating or reconciling? What if we feel powerless to do anything to equalize or “make things right?” What if my force field is just too powerful for you?
When moral gaps persist for a long enough time, they normalize.16 They become our default expectation. They lodge themselves into our value hierarchy. If someone hits us and we’re never able to hit him back, eventually our Feeling Brain will come to a startling conclusion:
We deserve to be hit.
After all, if we didn’t deserve it, we would have been able to equalize, right? The fact that we could not equalize means that there must be something inherently inferior about us, and/or something inherently superior about the person who hit us.
This, too, is part of our hope response. Because if equalization seems impossible, our Feeling Brain comes up with the next best thing: giving in, accepting defeat, judging itself to be inferior and of low value. When someone harms us, our immediate reaction is usually “He is shit, and I am righteous.” But if we’re not able to equalize and act on that righteousness, our Feeling Brain will believe the only alternative explanation: “I am shit, and he is righteous.”17
This surrender to persisting moral gaps is a fundamental part of our Feeling Brain’s nature. And it is Newton’s Second Law of Emotion: How we come to value everything in life relative to ourselves is the sum of our emotions over time.
This surrender to and acceptance of ourselves as inherently inferior is often referred to as shame or low self-worth. Call it what you want, the result is the same: Life kicks you around a little bit, and you feel powerless to stop it. Therefore, your Feeling Brain concludes that you must deserve it.
Of course, the reverse moral gap must be true as well. If we’re given a bunch of stuff without earning it (participation trophies and grade inflation and gold medals for coming in ninth place), we (falsely) come to believe ourselves inherently superior to what we actually are. We therefore develop a deluded version of high self-worth, or, as it’s more commonly known, being an asshole.
Self-worth is contextual. If you were bullied for your geeky glasses and funny nose as a child, your Feeling Brain will “know” that you’re a dweeb, even if you grow up to be a flaming sexpot of hotness. People who are raised in strict religious environments and are punished harshly for their sexual impulses often grow up with their Feeling Brain “knowing” that sex is wrong, even though their Thinking Brain has long worked out that sex is natural and totally awesome.
High and low self-worth appear different on the surface, but they are two sides of the same counterfeit coin. Because whether you feel as though you’re better than the rest of the world or worse than the rest of the world, the same thing is true: you’re imagining yourself as something special, something separate from the world.
A person who believes he deserves special treatment because of how great he is isn’t so different from someone who believes she deserves special treatment because of how shitty she is. Both are narcissistic. Both think they’re special. Both think the world should make exceptions and cater to their values and feelings over others’.