Everything Is F*cked

The  Swerve:  How  the  World  Became  Modern  (New  York:  W.  W.  Norton  and  Company,  2012),  early
Christians  held  on  to  the  ideas  of  Plato  and  Aristotle  because  the  two  believed  in  a  soul  that  was
separate from the body. This idea of a separate soul gibed with Christian belief in an afterlife. It’s also
the idea that spawned the Classic Assumption.
22
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Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, pp. 4–18. The comment about chopping off someone’s
nuts is my own flourish, of course.
23
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Ibid., pp. 482–88.
24
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The oft-repeated motto of Woodstock and much of the free-love movement of the 1960s was “If it
feels  good,  do  it!”  This  sentiment  is  the  basis  for  a  lot  of  New  Age  and  countercultural  movements
today.

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25
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An excellent example of this self-indulgence in the name of spirituality is depicted in the Netflix
original documentary Wild Wild Country (2018), about the spiritual guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka
Osho) and his followers.
26
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The  best  analysis  I’ve  seen  of  this  tendency  among  twentieth-century  spiritual  movements  to
mistake  indulging  one’s  emotions  for  some  greater  spiritual  awakening  came  from  the  brilliant  author
Ken Wilber. He called it the Pre/Trans Fallacy and argued that because emotions are pre-rational, and
spiritual  awakenings  are  post-rational,  people  often  mistake  one  for  the  other—because  they’re  both
nonrational.  See  Ken  Wilber,  Eye  to  Eye:  The  Quest  for  a  New  Paradigm  (Boston,  MA:  Shambhala,
Inc., 1983), pp. 180–221.
27
.
A.  Aldao,  S.  Nolen-Hoeksema,  and  S.  Schweizer,  “Emotion-Regulation  Strategies  Across
Psychopathology: A Meta-analytic Review,” Clinical Psychology Review 30 (2010): 217–37.
28
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Olga M. Slavin-Spenny, Jay L. Cohen, Lindsay M. Oberleitner, and Mark A. Lumley, “The Effects
of  Different  Methods  of  Emotional  Disclosure:  Differentiating  Post-traumatic  Growth  from  Stress
Symptoms,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 67, no. 10 (2011): 993–1007.
29
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This technique is known as the Premack principle, after psychologist David Premack, to describe
the  use  of  preferred  behaviors  as  rewards.  See  Jon  E.  Roeckelein,  Dictionary  of  Theories,  Laws,  and
Concepts in Psychology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 384.
30
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For more about “starting small” with behavioral changes, see “The Do Something Principle,” from
my previous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good
Life (New York: HarperOne, 2016), pp. 158–63.
31
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One  way  to  think  about  “guardrails”  for  your  Consciousness  Car  is  to  develop  implementation
intentions, little if/then habits that can unconsciously direct your behavior. See P. M. Gollwitzer and V.
Brandstaetter,  “Implementation  Intentions  and  Effective  Goal  Pursuit,”  Journal  of  Personality  and
Social Psychology 73 (1997): 186–99.
32
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Damasio, Descartes’ Error, pp. 173–200.
33
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In philosophy, this is known as Hume’s guillotine: you cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” You
cannot  derive  values  from  facts.  You  cannot  derive  Feeling  Brain  knowledge  from  Thinking  Brain
knowledge. Hume’s guillotine has had philosophers and scientists spinning in circles for centuries now.
Some thinkers such as Sam Harris try to rebut it by pointing out that you can have factual knowledge
about values—e.g., if a hundred people believe suffering is wrong, then there is factual evidence of their
physical  brain  state  about  their  beliefs  about  suffering  being  wrong.  But  the  decision  to  take  that
physical  representation  as  a  serious  proxy  for  philosophical  value,  is  itself  a  value  that  cannot  be
factually proven. Thus, the circle continues.