Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope
Updated: Aug 8
Last year I read Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living the Good Life. It was uneven and full of stuff I didn’t personally need, but it fit in with a number of other books I read during 2018 about living a better, more intentional life. I didn’t love it, but I liked it enough to pick up this year’s follow up, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck challenged our relentless pursuit of happiness, suggested that that pursuit actually serves to make us unhappier, and proposed we could get off the anxiety treadmill by examining our values, recognizing the difference between unhealthy and healthy ones, and letting go of superficial, self-serving ones and replacing them with simple, immediate, controllable, unselfish ones. In the process, we might find true peace and happiness, and a life full of purpose and meaning. Everything is F*cked continues to confront the sources of our anxiety—herein given a slight upgrade to “existential dread” (or as Manson dubs it “the Uncomfortable Truth”)—this time by challenging our notion of “hope.”
See, the thing about hope is that it’s not the purely good thing we think it is. Hope is a double-edged sword. Hope, like values, can be healthy or unhealthy. It can give us purpose and meaning, be sustainable and benevolent, robust and powerful, bring us together rather than tear us apart, and carry us to the end of our days with a sense of gratitude and satisfaction. But, because hope also requires us to be unsatisfied with what is, it can also wreak all kinds of havoc. Here Manson gets philosophical, and by that I mean he makes his case through the genius of Nietzsche, Kant, and Plato. He read the great thinkers of the world so we didn’t have to—and Philosophy 101 aside, I haven’t — and distilled their theories into something both immediate and immediately accessible.
Manson finds his stride with this book, balancing filler, asides, and detours with astute, straightforward observations. He also finds his voice, clunky in his last outing, now a smooth blend of blogger, shock jock, and academia. But for me, Everything is F*cked lives and dies with the closing chapter (Chapter 5) of the first section, entitled “Hope is F*cked.” Here we finally get to the crux of the matter, the “why I’ve gathered you here today” moment. This is Nietzsche’s show, and it’s easy to see everything written before and after as simply in service of his theory of amor fati, or “love of one’s fate.”
Spoiler alert: Here’s Manson’s (and Nietzsche’s) point: hope for nothing. Hope for what already is, because ultimately hope is empty. Anything your mind can conceptualize is fundamentally flawed and limited and therefore damaging if worshipped unconditionally. Don’t hope for more happiness or less suffering, to improve your character or eliminate your flaws. Hope for this. Hope for the infinite opportunity and oppression present in every single moment. Hope for the suffering that comes with freedom, the pain that comes from happiness, the wisdom that comes from ignorance, for the power that comes from surrender. And then act—despite it. Act without hope. Don’t hope for better. Be better. In this moment and the next. And the next. And the next. If we can accept this reality and liberate ourselves to responsibility rather than away from it, we’d realize there’s no reason not to love ourselves and one another, to treat ourselves and our planet with respect, to stretch beyond our conception of good and evil—to love what is.
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