Everything Is F*cked(54)

It wasn’t until the Enlightenment, the age of science and technology and the promise of never-ending economic growth, that thinkers and philosophers conceived of the idea summed up by Thomas Jefferson as “the pursuit of happiness.” As the Enlightenment thinkers saw science and wealth alleviate poverty, starvation, and disease from the population, they mistook this improvement of pain to be the elimination of pain. Many public intellectuals and pundits continue to make this mistake today: they believe that growth has liberated us from suffering, rather than merely transmuting that suffering from a physical form to a psychological form.28

What the Enlightenment did get right is the idea that, on average, some pain is better than others. All else being equal, it is better to die at ninety than at twenty. It’s better to be healthy than it is to be sick. It’s better to be free to pursue your own goals than to be forced into servitude by others. In fact, you could define “wealth” in terms of how desirable your pain is.29

But we seem to have forgotten what the ancients knew: that no matter how much wealth is generated in the world, the quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our character, and the quality of our character is determined by our relationship to our pain.

The pursuit of happiness plunges us head-first toward nihilism and frivolity. It leads us toward childishness, an incessant and intolerant desire for something more, a hole that can never be filled, a thirst that can never be quenched. It is at the root of corruption and addiction, of self-pity and self-destruction.

When we pursue pain, we are able to choose what pain we bring into our lives. And this choice makes the pain meaningful—and therefore, it is what makes life feel meaningful.

Because pain is the universal constant of life, the opportunities to grow from that pain are constant in life. All that is required is that we don’t numb it, that we don’t look away. All that is required is that we engage it and find the value and meaning in it.

Pain is the source of all value. To numb ourselves to our pain is to numb ourselves to anything that matters in the world.30 Pain opens up the moral gaps that eventually become our most deeply held values and beliefs.

When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.





Chapter 8


The Feelings Economy


In the 1920s, women didn’t smoke—or, if they did, they were severely judged for it. It was taboo. Like graduating from college or getting elected to Congress, smoking, people believed back then, should be left to the men. “Honey, you might hurt yourself. Or worse, you might burn your beautiful hair.”

This posed a problem for the tobacco industry. Here you had 50 percent of the population not smoking their cigarettes for no other reason than it was unfashionable or seen as impolite. This wouldn’t do. As George Washington Hill, president of the American Tobacco Company, said at the time, “It’s a gold mine right in our front yard.” The industry tried multiple times to market cigarettes to women, but nothing ever seemed to work. The cultural prejudice against it was simply too ingrained, too deep.

Then, in 1928, the American Tobacco Company hired Edward Bernays, a young hotshot marketer with wild ideas and even wilder marketing campaigns.1 Bernays’s marketing tactics at the time were unlike anybody else’s in the advertising industry.

Back in the early nineteenth century, marketing was seen simply as a means of communicating the tangible, real benefits of a product in the simplest and most concise form possible. It was believed at the time that people bought products based on facts and information. If someone wanted to buy cheese, then you had to communicate to them the facts of why your cheese was supe rior (“Freshest French goat milk, cured twelve days, shipped refrigerated!”). People were seen as rational actors making rational purchasing decisions for themselves. It was the Classic Assumption: the Thinking Brain was in charge.

But Bernays was unconventional. He didn’t believe that people made rational decisions most of the time. He believed the opposite. He believed that people were emotional and impulsive and just hid it really well. He believed the Feeling Brain was in charge and nobody had quite realized it.

Whereas the tobacco industry had been focused on persuading individual women to buy and smoke cigarettes through logical arguments, Bernays saw it as an emotional and cultural issue. If he wanted women to smoke, then he had to appeal not to their thoughts but to their values. He needed to appeal to women’s identities.

To accomplish this, Bernays hired a group of women and got them into the Easter Sunday Parade in New York City. Today, big holiday parades are cheesy things you let drone on over the television while you fall asleep on the couch. But back in those days, parades were big social events, kind of like the Super Bowl or something.

As Bernays planned it, at the appropriate moment, these women would all stop and light up cigarettes at the same time. He hired photographers to take flattering photos of the smoking women, which he then passed out to all the major national newspapers. He told the reporters that these ladies were not just lighting cigarettes, they were lighting “torches of freedom,” demonstrating their ability to assert their independence and be their own women.

It was all #FakeNews, of course, but Bernays staged it as a political protest. He knew this would trigger the appropriate emotions in women across the country. Feminists had won women the right to vote only nine years earlier. Women were now working outside the home and becoming more integral to the country’s economic life. They were asserting themselves by cutting their hair short and wearing racier clothing. This generation of women saw themselves as the first generation that could behave independently of a man. And many of them felt very strongly about this. If Bernays could just hitch his “smoking equals freedom” message onto the women’s liberation movement . . . well, tobacco sales would double and he’d be a rich man.