Everything Is F*cked

Feelings Make the World Go ’Round
The world runs on one thing: feelings.
This is because people spend money on things that make them feel good.
And  where  the  money  flows,  power  flows.  So,  the  more  you’re  able  to
influence  the  emotions  of  people  in  the  world,  the  more  money  and  power
you’ll accumulate.
Money is itself a form of exchange used to equalize moral gaps between
people.  Money  is  its  own  special,  universal  mini-religion  that  we  all  bought

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into  because  it  makes  our  lives  a  little  bit  easier.  It  allows  us  to  convert  our
values  into  something  universal  when  we’re  dealing  with  one  another.  You
love seashells and oysters. I love fertilizing soil with the blood of my sworn
enemies.  You  fight  in  my  army,  and  when  we  get  home,  I’ll  make  you  rich
with seashells and oysters. Deal?
That’s how human economies emerged.
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No, really, they started because a
bunch of angry kings and emperors wanted to slaughter their sworn enemies,
but  they  needed  to  give  their  armies  something  in  return,  so  they  minted
money as a form of debt (or moral gap) for the soldiers to “spend” (equalize)
when (or if) they got back home.
Not much has changed, of course. The world ran on feelings then; it runs
on feelings now. All that’s changed is the gizmos we use to shit on each other.
Technological  progress  is  just  one  manifestation  of  the  Feelings  Economy.
For  instance,  nobody  ever  tried  to  invent  a  talking  waffle.  Why?  Because
that’d  be  fucking  creepy  and  weird,  not  to  mention  probably  not  very
nutritious.  Instead,  technologies  are  researched  and  invented  to—yep,  you
guessed  it!—make  people  feel  better  (or  prevent  them  from  feeling  worse).
The  ballpoint  pen,  a  more  comfortable  seat  heater,  a  better  gasket  for  your
house’s plumbing—fortunes are made and lost around things that help people
improve upon or avoid pain. These things make people feel good. People get
excited. They spend money. Then it’s boom times, baby.
There are two ways to create value in the marketplace:
1. Innovations (upgrade pain). The first way to create value is to replace one pain with a much
more  tolerable/desirable  pain.  The  most  drastic  and  obvious  examples  of  this  are  medical  and
pharmaceutical innovations. Polio vaccines replaced a lifetime of debilitating pain and immobility
with  a  few  seconds  of  a  needle  prick.  Heart  surgeries  replaced  .  .  .  well,  death  with  having  to
recover from surgery for a week or two.
2.  Diversions  (avoid  pain).  The  second  way  to  create  value  in  a  marketplace  is  to  help  people
numb  their  pain.  Whereas  upgrading  people’s  pain  gives  them  better  pain,  numbing  pain  just
delays that pain, and often even makes it worse. Diversions are a weekend beach trip, a night out
with friends, a movie with someone special, or snorting cocaine out of the crack of a hooker’s ass.
There’s  nothing  necessarily  wrong  with  diversions;  we  all  need  them  from  time  to  time.  The
problem  is  when  they  begin  to  dominate  our  lives  and  wrest  control  away  from  our  will.  Many
diversions trip certain circuits in our brain, making them addictive. The more you numb pain, the
worse that pain becomes, thus impelling you to numb it further. At a certain point, the icky ball of
pain  grows  to  such  great  proportions  that  your  avoidance  of  that  pain  becomes  compulsive.  You
lose control of yourself—your Feeling Brain has locked your Thinking Brain in the trunk and isn’t
letting it out until it gets its next hit of whatever. And the downward spiral ensues.
When  the  scientific  revolution  first  got  going,  most  economic  progress
was  due  to  innovation.  Back  then,  the  vast  majority  of  people  lived  in
poverty:  Everyone  was  sick,  hungry,  cold,  and  tired  most  of  the  time.  Few
could  read.  Most  had  bad  teeth.  It  was  no  fun  at  all.  Over  the  next  few
hundred years, with the invention of machines and cities and the division of

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labor and modern medicine and hygiene and representative government, a lot
of  poverty  and  hardship  was  alleviated.  Vaccines  and  medicines  have  saved
billions  of  lives.  Machines  have  reduced  backbreaking  workloads  and
starvation  around  the  world.  The  technological  innovations  that  upgraded
human suffering are undoubtedly a good thing.
But  what  happens  when  a  large  number  of  people  are  relatively  healthy
and wealthy? At that point, most economic progress switches from innovation
to diversion, from upgrading pain to avoiding pain. One of the reasons for this
is that true innovation is risky, difficult, and often unrewarding. Many of the
most important innovations in history left their inventors broke and destitute.
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If  someone  is  going  to  start  a  company  and  take  a  risk,  going  the  diversion
route  is  a  safer  bet.  As  a  result,  we’ve  built  a  culture  in  which  most
technological  “innovation”  is  merely  figuring  out  how  to  scale  diversions  in
new, more efficient (and more intrusive) ways. As the venture capitalist Peter
Thiel once said, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got Twitter.”
Once  an  economy  switches  over  primarily  to  diversions,  the  culture
begins  to  shift.  As  a  poor  country  develops  and  gains  access  to  medicine,
phones, and other innovative technologies, measurements of well-being track
upward at a steady clip, as everyone’s pain is being upgraded to better pain.
But  once  the  country  hits  First  World  level,  that  well-being  flattens  or,  in
some  cases,  drops  off.
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 Meanwhile,  mental  illness,  depression,  and  anxiety
can proliferate.
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This  happens  because  opening  up  a  society  and  giving  it  modern
innovations  makes  the  people  more  robust  and  antifragile.  They  can  survive
more  hardship,  work  more  efficiently,  communicate  and  function  better
within their communities.
But once those  innovations are integrated  and everyone has  a cell  phone
and  a  McDonald’s  Happy  Meal,  the  great  modern  diversions  enter  the
marketplace. And as soon as the diversions show up, a psychological fragility
is introduced, and everything begins to seem fucked.
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The  commercial  age  commenced  in  the  early  twentieth  century  with
Bernays’s  discovery  that  you  could  market  to  people’s  unconscious  feelings
and  desires.
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 Bernays  wasn’t  concerned  with  penicillin  or  heart  surgery.  He
was  hawking  cigarettes  and  tabloid  magazines  and  beauty  products—shit
people didn’t need. And until then, nobody had figured out how to get people
to  spend  copious  amounts  of  money  on  stuff  that  wasn’t  necessary  for  their
survival.
The  invention  of  marketing  brought  a  modern-day  gold  rush  to  satiate
people’s  pursuit  of  happiness.  Pop  culture  emerged,  and  celebrities  and

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athletes  got  stupid  rich.  For  the  first  time,  luxury  items  started  to  be  mass-
produced and advertised to the middle classes. There was explosive growth in
the  technologies  of  convenience:  microwavable  dinners,  fast  food,  La-Z-
Boys, no-stick pans, and so on. Life became so easy and fast and efficient and
effortless  that  within  the  short  span  of  a  hundred  years,  people  were  able  to
pick  up  a  telephone  and  accomplish  in  two  minutes  what  used  to  take  two
months.
Life in the commercial age, although more complex than before, was still
relatively  simple  compared  to  today.  A  large,  bustling  middle  class  existed
within a homogenous culture. We watched the same TV channels, listened to
the  same  music,  ate  the  same  food,  relaxed  on  the  same  types  of  sofas,  and
read the same newspapers and magazines. There was continuity and cohesion
to this era, which brought a sense of security with it. We were all, for a time,
both free and yet part of the same religion. And that was comforting. Despite
the  constant  threat  of  nuclear  annihilation,  at  least  in  the  West,  we  tend  to
idealize  this  period.  I  believe  that  it’s  for  this  sense  of  social  cohesion  that
many people today are so nostalgic.
Then, the internet happened.
The  internet  is  a  bona  fide  innovation.  All  else  being  equal,  it
fundamentally makes our lives better. Much better.
The problem is . . . well, the problem is us.
The internet’s intentions were good: inventors and technologists in Silicon
Valley  and  elsewhere  had  high  hopes  for  a  digital  planet.  They  worked  for
decades  toward  a  vision  of  seamlessly  networking  the  world’s  people  and
information. They believed that the internet would liberate people, removing
gatekeepers  and  hierarchies  and  giving  everyone  equal  access  to  the  same
information and the same opportunities to express themselves. They believed
that if everyone were given a voice and a simple, effective means of sharing
that voice, the world would be a better, freer place.
A  near-utopian  level  of  optimism  developed  throughout  the  1990s  and
2000s.  Technologists  envisioned  a  highly  educated  global  population  that
would  tap  into  the  infinite  wisdom  available  at  its  fingertips.  They  saw  the
opportunity  to  engender  greater  empathy  and  understanding  across  nations,
ethnicities,  and  lifestyles.  They  dreamed  of  a  unified  and  connected  global
movement with a single shared interest in peace and prosperity.
But they forgot.
They were so caught up in their religious dreams and personal hopes that
they forgot.

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They forgot that the world doesn’t run on information.
People  don’t  make  decisions  based  on  truth  or  facts.  They  don’t  spend
their  money  based  on  data.  They  don’t  connect  with  each  other  because  of
some higher philosophical truth.
The world runs on feelings.
And  when  you  give  the  average  person  an  infinite  reservoir  of  human
wisdom, they will not google for the information that contradicts their deepest
held beliefs. They will not google for what is true yet unpleasant.
Instead, most of us will google for what is pleasant but untrue.
Having  an  errant  racist  thought?  Well,  there’s  a  whole  forum  of  racists
two clicks away, with a lot of convincing-sounding arguments as to why you
shouldn’t  be  ashamed  to  have  such  leanings.  The  wife  leaves  you  and  you
start thinking women are inherently selfish and evil? Doesn’t take much of a
Google  search  to  find  justifications  for  those  misogynistic  feelings.
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 Think
Muslims are going  to stalk from  school to school,  murdering your children?
I’m  sure  there’s  a  conspiracy  theory  somewhere  out  there  that’s  already
“proving” that.
Instead of stemming the free expression of our worst feelings and darkest
inclinations, the start-ups and corporations dove right in to cash in on it. Thus,
the  greatest  innovation  of  our  lifetime  has  slowly  transformed  into  our
greatest diversion.
The  internet,  in  the  end,  was  not  designed  to  give  us  what  we  need.
Instead, it gives people what they want. And if you’ve learned anything about
human  psychology  in  this  book,  you  already  know  that  this  is  much  more
dangerous than it sounds.