📖Everything is Fucked

q

One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing. Enjoy your fucking coffee.

Thinking Brain vs Feeling Brain

• Your Feeling Brain is actually in charge of everything. He’s at the wheel. The Thinking Brain is only drawing maps and suggesting on how to do things.

• When your Feeling Brain wants something, your Thinking Brain might be prone to construct a reason to do that (Reasoning is self-biased)

Laws of § Emotion

• For Every Action, There Is an Equal and Opposite Emotional Reaction

  • when I do something to you, a moral gap is created

  • you try to cover it by compensating me for what I did

• Our Self-Worth Equals the Sum of Our Emotions Over Time

  • when we can’t cover the moral gap, we start to think bad of ourselves (e.g., I deserve this to happen to me)

• Your Identity will Stay Your Identity Until a New Experience Acts Against It

  • We build self-image and beliefs as a coping mechanism (e.g., to explain why things happen to us), then we act accordingly.

Self-worth is an illusion (Self-worth does not exist)

Whether you think you are best or worst, you are narcissistic and separate yourself from the world

p.88 (see also Science is Religion)

The religion built around the worship of evidence is more commonly known as ”§ Science,” and it’s arguably the best thing we’ve ever done as species.

If a bunch of people to start civilization from scratch, some will have natural advantages and get more resources. They will use these resources to get even more resources. (Rich get richer.) If you repeat over generations, you’ll get elites and masses

• Elites (masters of society) will believe they somehow deserve this richness and power. They will justify it. That’s “master morality” (according to Friedrich Nietzsche)

• Slave morality believes that weakest people, those who suffer the most, deserve to be treated better

• Master morality believes in hierarchy, slave morality — in equality

• Master/slave moralities are somewhat similar to express/sacrifice self in § Spiral Dynamics.

p.121

The average human from two thousand years ago experienced about as much economic growth in his lifetime as we experience in 6 months today.

Hope prerequisites

1. Have something to look forward to

2. Believe ourselves in control of our fate enough to achieve that something

3. Find a community to achieve it with us

Blue Dot Effect - we see what we expect to see

Hedonic Treadmill - we think that we need a little more to achieve 10/10 happiness; that never happens.

Suffering is universal and constant. Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons. (#insight)

Thich Quang Duc self-immolation—monk burned himself alive in protest against Buddhism suppression (p.180)

Antifragile (idea from Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

• You can be either fragile or antifragile (and that depends on you)

  • If you actively seek out pain and challenge, you become antifragile (think exercises)

  • If you seek comfort and try avoiding stress, you’ll become weak and fragile

• § Meditation is an antifragile practice for your mind

Real freedom is self-limitation (p.206)