Everything Is F*cked

is  emotion  itself.  Sadness  is  a  feeling  of  powerlessness  to  make  up  for  a
perceived loss. Anger is the desire to equalize through force and aggression.
Happiness  is  feeling  liberated  from  pain,  while  guilt  is  the  feeling  that  you
deserve some pain that never arrived.
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This  desire  for  equalization  underlies  our  sense  of  justice.  It’s  been
codified throughout the ages into rules and laws, such as the Babylonian king
Hammurabi’s  classic  “an  eye  for  an  eye,  and  a  tooth  for  a  tooth,”  or  the
biblical Golden Rule, “Do unto others what you would have done unto you.”
In  evolutionary  biology,  it’s  known  as  “reciprocal  altruism,”
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 and  in  game
theory, it’s called a “tit for tat” strategy.
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Newton’s  First  Law  generates  our  sense  of  morality.  It  underlies  our
perceptions of fairness. It is the bedrock of every human culture. And . . .
It is the operating system of the Feeling Brain.
While  our  Thinking  Brain  creates  factual  knowledge  around  observation
and  logic,  the  Feeling  Brain  creates  our  values  around  our  experiences  of
pain. Experiences that cause us pain create a moral gap within our minds, and
our  Feeling  Brain  deems  those  experiences  inferior  and  undesirable.
Experiences that relieve pain create a moral gap in the opposite direction, and
our Feeling Brain deems those experiences superior and desirable.
One  way  to  think  about  it  is  that  the  Thinking  Brain  makes  lateral
connections between events (sameness, contrasts, cause/effect, etc.), while the

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Feeling  Brain  makes  hierarchical  connections  (better/worse,  more
desirable/less  desirable,  morally  superior/morally  inferior).
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 Our  Thinking
Brain  thinks  horizontally  (how  are  these  things  related?),  while  our  Feeling
Brain thinks vertically (which of these things is better/worse?). Our Thinking
Brain  decides  how  things  are,  and  our  Feeling  Brain  decides  how  things
ought to be.
When  we  have  experiences,  our  Feeling  Brain  creates  a  sort  of  value
hierarchy  for  them.
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 It’s  as  though  we  have  a  massive  bookshelf  in  our
subconscious  where  the  best  and  most  important  experiences  in  life  (with
family,  friends,  burritos)  are  on  the  top  shelf  and  the  least  desirable
experiences  (death,  taxes,  indigestion)  are  on  the  bottom.  Our  Feeling  Brain
then makes its decisions by simply pursuing experiences on the highest shelf
possible.
Both  brains  have  access  to  the  value  hierarchy.  While  the  Feeling  Brain
determines what shelf something is on, the Thinking Brain is able to point out
how certain experiences are connected and to suggest how the value hierarchy
should  be  reorganized.  This  is  essentially  what  “growth”  is:  reprioritizing
one’s value hierarchy in an optimal way.
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For example, I once had a friend who was probably the hardest partier I’d
ever known. She would stay out all night and then go straight to work from
the  party  in  the  morning,  with  zero  hours  of  sleep.  She  thought  it  lame  to
wake  up  early  or  stay  home  on  a  Friday  night.  Her  value  hierarchy  went
something like this:
Really awesome DJs
Really good drugs
Work
Sleep
One  could  predict  her  behavior  solely  from  this  hierarchy.  She’d  rather
work  than  sleep.  She’d  rather  party  and  get  fucked  up  than  work.  And
everything was about the music.
Then  she  did  one  of  those  volunteer  abroad  things,  where  young  people
spend a couple of months working with orphans in a Third World country and
—well, that changed everything. The experience was so emotionally powerful
that  it  completely  rearranged  her  value  hierarchy.  Her  hierarchy  now  looked
something like this:
Saving children from unnecessary suffering
Work

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Sleep
Parties
And  suddenly,  as  if  by  magic,  the  parties  stopped  being  fun.  Why?
Because  they  interfered  with  her  new  top  value:  helping  suffering  kids.  She
switched careers and was all about work now. She stayed in most nights. She
didn’t drink or do drugs. She slept well—after all, she needed tons of energy
to save the world.
Her  party  friends  looked  at  her  and  pitied  her;  they  judged  her  by  their
values, which were her old values. Poor party girl has to go to bed and get up
for  work  every  morning.  Poor  party  girl  can’t  stay  out  doing  MDMA  every
weekend.
But here’s the funny thing about value hierarchies: when they change, you
don’t actually lose anything. It’s not that my friend decided to start giving up
the  parties  for  her  career,  it’s  that  the  parties  stopped  being  fun.  That’s
because “fun” is the product of our value hierarchies. When we stop valuing
something, it ceases to be fun or interesting to us. Therefore, there is no sense
of loss, no sense of missing out when we stop doing it. On the contrary, we
look back and wonder how we ever spent so much time caring about such a
silly, trivial thing, why we wasted so much energy on issues and causes that
didn’t matter. These pangs of regret or embarrassment are good; they signify
growth. They are the product of our achieving our hopes.

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