Everything Is F*cked(79)

14. See J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, 2nd ed. (1863; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Classics, 2001).

15. P. Brickman, D. Coates, and R. Janoff-Bulman, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 8 (1978): 917–27.

16. A. Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Classics, 1970), p. 41.

17. In case you ask me anyway, they did it because splitting the country in two is what produced a resolution to the Korean War the previous decade. The communists got the north. The capitalists got the south. And everyone could go home and be happy. They figured they could just skip the fighting part in Vietnam and go straight to the resolution. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work.

18. Shout out to Boston University’s International Relations department. That one’s for you.

19. David Halberstam, The Making of a Quagmire (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 211.

20. Zi Jun Toong, “Overthrown by the Press: The US Media’s Role in the Fall of Diem,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 27 (July 2008): 56–72.

21. Malcolm Browne, the photographer who took the photo, later said, “I just kept shooting and shooting and shooting and that protected me from the horror of the thing.”

22. In chapter 2, we talked about the Classic Assumption, and how it fails because it tries to suppress the Feeling Brain rather than trying to align with it. Another way to think of the practice of antifragility is like the practice of aligning your Thinking Brain with your Feeling Brain. By engaging with your pain, you can harness the Feeling Brain’s impulses and channel them into some productive action or behavior. It’s no wonder that meditation has been scientifically shown to increase attention span and self-awareness and reduce addiction, anxiety, and stress. Meditation is essentially a practice for managing the pain of life. See Matthew Thorpe, “12 Science-Based Benefits of Meditation.” Healthline, July 15, 2017, https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/12-benefits-of-meditation.

23. N. N. Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2011).

24. This is actually an excellent litmus test for figuring out if you should be with someone: Do external stressors bring you closer together or not? If not, then you have a problem.

25. While I’m ripping on meditation apps here, I do want to say that they’re good introductions to the practice. They’re just . . . introductory.

26. I am the world’s biggest proponent of meditation who seemingly can never actually get himself to sit down and fucking meditate. One good technique a friend of mine, who teaches meditation, taught me: when you’re struggling to get yourself to meditate, simply find the number of minutes that’s not intimidating for you. Most people try to do ten or fifteen minutes. If that seems daunting, agree with yourself to do five. If that seems daunting, lower it to three. If that seems daunting, lower it to one. (Everyone can do one minute!) Basically, keep lowering the number of minutes in your “agreement” with your Feeling Brain until it doesn’t feel scary anymore. Once again, this is simply your Thinking Brain negotiating with your Feeling Brain until you’re able to align them and do something productive. This technique works wonders with other activities, by the way. Working out, reading a book, cleaning the house, writing a book (cough)—in every case, just lower the expectation until it stops feeling scary.

27. See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

28. Pinker makes the argument that the gains in physical health and safety more than compensate for any increases in anxiety and stress. He also makes the argument that adulthood requires greater degrees of anxiety and stress due to increased responsibilities. That’s probably true, but that doesn’t mean our anxiety and stress aren’t serious problems. See Pinker, Enlightenment Now, pp. 288–89.

29. In my previous book, this is how I define a “good life.” Problems are inevitable. A good life is a life with good problems. See M. Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, pp. 26–36.

30. This is why addiction produces a downward spiral: numbing ourselves to pain numbs us to meaning and an ability to find value in anything, thus generating greater pain, and thus inducing greater numbing. This continues until one reaches “rock bottom,” a place of such immense pain that you can’t numb it anymore. The only way to relieve it is by engaging it and growing.





Chapter 8: The Feelings Economy


1. The story of Edward Bernays in this chapter comes from Adam Curtis’s wonderful documentary The Century of Self, BBC Four, United Kingdom, 2002.

2. This is actually what the ego is, in the Freudian sense: our conscious stories about ourselves and our never-ending battle to maintain and protect those stories. Having a strong ego is actually psychologically healthy. It makes you resilient and confident. The term ego has since been butchered in self-help literature to essentially mean narcissism.

3. In the 1930s, I guess Bernays started to feel bad because he was actually the one who made Freud a global phenomenon. Freud was broke, living in Switzerland, worried about the Nazis, and Bernays not only got Freud’s ideas published in the US, but popularized them by having major magazines write articles about them. The fact that he is a household name today is largely due to Bernays’s marketing tactics, which coincidentally, were based on his theories.