Everything Is F*cked

Everything Is F*cked explains what’s wrong with our approach towards happiness and gives philosophical suggestions that help us make our lives worth living.

When a man named Elliot had a tumor removed from his frontal lobe, he lost his capability to process feelings. You may think that he became a more efficient person as he no longer had to deal with emotional resistance as we do.

The result, however, was quite the opposite. Elliot stopped giving a f*ck about anything. Instead of going to an important meeting, he went to buy a better stapler. Instead of watching his kid’s baseball game, he watched TV. So it seems, some emotions are good for us, like feeling inspired by our kids or driven to succeed.

When doctors analyzed Elliot’s brain, they found that he wasn’t having an emotional response to anything, even horrifying pictures of dead children. And while it’s terrible to completely lose your capacity to make choices based on your feelings, like Elliot did, this also has benefits. If you rely only on your emotions to make decisions, you’ll end up making impulsive choices.

For example, if you want to stop eating junk food, your Thinking Brain would tell you that it’s bad for you and you should stop eating it. But the Feeling Brain often decides whether something is “good” or “bad” in the moment. You need to appeal to both the Thinking Brain and the Feeling Brain to make better decisions in the present.

Every religion has one thing in common – it gives a sense of hope and faith to its followers. People love to adopt such views because of their unhappy lives. But the problem with such hope-related beliefs, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche identified, is that hope divides people’s perception into “good” and “bad.” It creates more unhappiness and conflict than meaning in life. Nietzsche asked us to look beyond good and evil to accept the uncomfortable truths about life, such as insignificance and death. He called this embrace-the-void approach “Amor Fati,” which means “love one’s fate.” Meditation is an excellent way to embrace life’s uncomfortable truths. It gives you space to acknowledge, accept, and let go of dark thoughts that cloud your perception. Mindfulness will make you comfortable with the fact that everything is, in fact, f*cked. Another philosopher, Immanuel Kant, suggested that we stop behaving in transactional ways. For example, you shouldn’t act kindly to get something from another person. Instead, be kind because doing so is a reward in itself. In the same way, don’t steal from others in hope to reach heaven. Avoid theft because it is the right thing to do. To adopt Kant’s philosophy, develop strong principles to…