Everything Is F*cked

Newton’s Laws of Emotion
The first time Isaac Newton got hit in the face, he was standing in a field. His
uncle  had  been  explaining  to  him  why  wheat  should  be  planted  in  diagonal
rows, but Isaac wasn’t listening. He was gazing into the sun, wondering what
the light was made of.
He was seven years old.
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His uncle backhanded him so hard across his left cheek that Isaac’s sense
of self temporarily broke upon the ground on which his body fell. He lost any
feeling  of  personal  cohesion.  And  as  the  parts  of  his  psyche  put  themselves
back together, some secret piece of himself remained in the dirt, left behind in
a place from which it would never be recovered.
Isaac’s  father  had  died  before  he  was  born,  and  his  mother  soon  abandoned
her  son  to  marry  some  old  rich  guy  the  next  village  over.  As  a  result,  Isaac
spent  his  formative  years  being  shuffled  among  uncles,  cousins,  and
grandparents.  No  one  particularly  wanted  him.  Few  knew  what  to  do  with
him. He was a burden. Love came difficultly, and usually not at all.
Isaac’s  uncle  was  an  uneducated  drunk,  but  he  did  know  how  to  count
hedges and rows in fields. It was his one intellectual skill, and because of this,
he did it probably more often than he needed to. Isaac often tagged along to
these row-counting sessions because it was the only time his uncle ever paid
attention  to  him.  And  like  water  in  a  desert,  any  attention  the  boy  got  he
desperately soaked in.
As  it  turned  out,  the  boy  was  a  kind  of  prodigy.  By  age  eight,  he  could
project  the  amount  of  feed  required  to  sustain  the  sheep  and  pigs  for  the
following season. By nine, he could rattle off the top of his head calculations
for hectares of wheat, barley, and potatoes.
By age ten, Isaac had decided that farming was stupid and instead turned
his  attention  to  calculating  the  exact  trajectory  of  the  sun  throughout  the
seasons. His uncle didn’t care about the exact trajectory of the sun because it
wouldn’t put food on the table—at least not directly—so, again, he hit Isaac.
School  didn’t  make  things  any  better.  Isaac  was  pale  and  scrawny  and

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absentminded.  He  lacked  social  skills.  He  was  into  nerdy  shit  like  sundials,
Cartesian  planes,  and  determining  whether  the  moon  was  actually  a  sphere.
While the other kids played cricket or chased one another through the woods,
Isaac  stood  staring  for  hours  into  local  streams,  wondering  how  the  eyeball
was capable of seeing light.
Isaac Newton’s early life was one hit after another. And with each blow,
his  Feeling  Brain  learned  to  feel  an  immutable  truth:  that  there  must  be
something  inherently  wrong  with  him.  Why  else  would  his  parents  have
abandoned  him?  Why  else  would  his  peers  ridicule  him?  What  other
explanation for his near-constant solitude? While his Thinking Brain occupied
itself  drawing  fanciful  graphs  and  charting  the  lunar  eclipses,  his  Feeling
Brain  silently  internalized  the  knowledge  that  there  was  something
fundamentally broken about this small English boy from Lincolnshire.
One day, he wrote in his school notebook, “I am a little fellow. Pale and
weak.  There  is  no  room  for  me.  Not  in  the  house  or  in  the  bottom  of  hell.
What can I do? What am I good for? I cannot but weep.”
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Up  until  this  point,  everything  you’ve  read  about  Newton  is  true—or  at
least  highly  plausible.  But  let’s  pretend  for  a  moment  that  there’s  a  parallel
universe.  And  let’s  say  that  in  this  parallel  universe  there  is  another  Isaac
Newton,  much  like  our  own.  He  still  comes  from  a  broken  and  abusive
family. He still lives a life of angry isolation. He still prodigiously measures
and calculates everything he encounters.
But  let’s  say  that  instead  of  obsessively  measuring  and  calculating  the
external, natural world, this Parallel Universe Newton decides to obsessively
measure  and  calculate  the  internal,  psychological  world,  the  world  of  the
human mind and heart.
This isn’t a huge leap of the imagination, as the victims of abuse are often
the keenest observers of human nature. For you and me, people-watching may
be something fun to do on a random Sunday in the park. But for the abused,
it’s a survival skill. For them, violence might erupt at any moment, therefore,
they  develop  a  keen  Spidey  sense  to  protect  themselves.  A  lilt  in  someone’s
voice, the rise of an eyebrow, the depth of a sigh—anything can set off their
internal alarm.
So,  let’s  imagine  this  Parallel  Universe  Newton,  this  “Emo  Newton,”
turned  his  obsession  toward  the  people  around  him.  He  kept  notebooks,
cataloging all the observable behaviors of his peers and family. He scribbled
relentlessly,  documenting  every  action,  every  word.  He  filled  hundreds  of
pages  with  inane  observations  of  the  kind  of  stuff  people  don’t  even  realize
they do. Emo Newton hoped that if measurement could be used to predict and

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control the natural world, the shapes and configurations of the sun and moon
and  stars,  then  it  should  also  be  able  to  predict  and  control  the  internal,
emotional world.
And  through  his  observations,  Emo  Newton  realized  something  painful
that we all kind of know, but that few of us ever want to admit: that people are
liars,  all  of  us.  We  lie  constantly  and  habitually.
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 We  lie  about  important
things and trifling things. And we usually don’t lie out of malice—rather, we
lie to others because we’re in such a habit of lying to ourselves.
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Isaac  noted  that  light  refracted  through  people’s  hearts  in  ways  that  they
themselves did not seem to see; that people said they loved those whom they
appeared  to  hate;  professed  to  believe  one  thing  while  doing  another;
imagined  themselves  righteous  while  committing  acts  of  the  grandest
dishonesty and cruelty. Yet, in their own minds, they somehow believed their
actions to be consistent and true.
Isaac  decided  that  no  one  could  be  trusted.  Ever.  He  calculated  that  his
pain  was  inversely  proportional  to  the  distance  squared  he  put  between
himself and the world. Therefore, he kept to himself, staying in no one’s orbit,
spinning  out  and  away  from  the  gravitational  tug  of  any  other  human  heart.
He  had  no  friends;  nor,  he  decided,  did  he  want  any.  He  concluded  that  the
world was a bleak, wretched place and that the only value to his pathetic life
was his ability to document and calculate that wretchedness.
For  all  his  surliness,  Isaac  certainly  didn’t  lack  ambition.  He  wanted  to
know the trajectory of men’s hearts, the velocity of their pain. He wished to
know  the  force  of  their  values  and  the  mass  of  their  hopes.  And  most
important,  he  wanted  to  understand  the  relationships  among  all  these
elements.
He decided to write Newton’s Three Laws of Emotion.
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