Everything Is F*cked(68)
31. Each of these is true, by the way.
32. My three-part definition of hope is a merging of theories on motivation, value, and meaning. As a result, I’ve kind of combined a few different academic models to suit my purposes.
The first is self-determination theory, which states that we require three things to feel motivated and satisfied in our lives: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. I’ve merged autonomy and competence under the umbrella of “self-control” and, for reasons that will become clear in chapter 4, restyled relatedness as “community.” What I believe is missing in self-determination theory—or, rather, what is implied but never stated—is that there is something worth being motivated for, that there is something valuable in the world that exists and deserves to be pursued. That’s where the third component of hope comes in: values.
For a sense of value or purpose, I’ve pulled from Roy Baumeister’s model of “meaningfulness.” In this model, we need four things to feel that our life is meaningful: purpose, values, efficacy, and self-worth. Again, I’ve lumped “efficacy” under the “self-control” umbrella. The other three, I’ve put under the umbrella of “values,” things we believe to be worthwhile and important and that make us feel good about ourselves. Chapter 3 will dissect at length my understanding of values. To learn more about self-determination theory, see R. M. Ryan and E. L. Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-being,” American Psychologist 55 (2000): 68–78. For Baumeister’s model, see Roy Baumeister, Meanings of Life (New York: Guilford Press, 1991), pp. 29–56.
Chapter 2: Self-Control Is an Illusion
1. Elliot’s case is adapted from Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Books, 2005), pp. 34–51. Elliot is the pseudonym given to the patient by Damasio.
2. This and many of the examples from his family life (Little League games, Family Feud, etc.) are fictionalized simply to illustrate the point. They are not from Damasio’s account and probably didn’t happen.
3. Ibid., p. 38. Damasio uses the term free will, whereas I use the term self-control. Both can be thought of in self-determination theory as the need for autonomy (see Damasio, Descartes’ Error, chap. 1, note 32).
4. Waits muttered the joke on Norman Lear’s television show Fernwood 2 Night in 1977, but he didn’t come up with it. Nobody knows where the joke originated, and if you try to find out online, you’ll lose yourself down a rabbit hole of theories. Some have credited the joke to the writer Dorothy Parker, others to comedian Steve Allen. Waits himself claimed he didn’t remember where he first heard it. He also admitted that the joke wasn’t his.
5. Some early frontal lobotomies actually used icepicks. Walter Freeman, the biggest proponent of the procedure in the United States, used icepicks exclusively before moving away from them because too many were breaking off and getting stuck inside patients’ heads. See Hernish J. Acharya, “The Rise and Fall of Frontal Leucotomy,” in W. A. Whitelaw, ed., The Proceedings of the 13th Annual History of Medicine Days (Calgary: University of Calgary, Faculty of Medicine, 2004), pp. 32–41.
6. Yes, every neuroscientist in this book is named Antonio.
7. Gretchen Diefenbach, Donald Diefenbach, Alan Baumeister, and Mark West, “Portrayal of Lobotomy in the Popular Press: 1935–1960,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 8, no. 1 (1999): 60–69.
8. There was an odd conspiracy theory among music journalists in the 1970s that Tom Waits faked his alcoholism. Articles and even entire books were written about this. While it’s highly likely Waits exaggerated his “hobo poet” persona for performance value, he has openly commented on his alcoholism for years now. A recent example was in a 2006 interview with the Guardian, where he said, “I had a problem—an alcohol problem, which a lot of people consider an occupational hazard. My wife saved my life.” See Sean O’Hagan, “Off Beat,” Guardian, October 28, 2006, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2006/oct/29/popandrock1.
9. Xenophon, Memorabilia, trans. Amy L. Bonnette (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), book 3, chap. 9, p. 5.
10. René Descartes, The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (1637; repr. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1:101.
11. Kant actually argued that reason was the root of morality and that the passions were more or less irrelevant. To Kant, it didn’t matter how you felt, as long as you did the right thing. But we’ll get to Kant in chapter 6. See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (1785; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993).
12. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (1930; repr. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2010).
13. I know this because I’m unfortunately part of this industry. I often joke that I’m a “self-hating self-help guru.” The fact is, I think most of the industry is bullshit and that the only way really to improve your life is not by feeling good but, rather, by getting better at feeling bad.
14. Great thinkers have cut the human mind into two or three pieces since forever. My “two brains” construct is just a summary of the concepts of these earlier thinkers. Plato said that the soul has three parts: reason (Thinking Brain), appetites, and spirit (Feeling Brain). David Hume said that all experiences are either impressions (Feeling Brain) or ideas (Thinking Brain). Freud had the ego (Thinking Brain) and the id (Feeling Brain). Most recently, Daniel Kahneman and Amon Tversky had their two systems, System 1 (Feeling Brain) and System 2 (Thinking Brain), or, as Kahneman calls them in his book Thinking: Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), the “fast” brain and the “slow” brain.