Everything Is F*cked

An Open Letter to Your Thinking Brain
Hey, Thinking Brain.
How are things? How’s the family? How’d that tax situation work out?
Oh, wait. Never mind. I forgot—I don’t fucking care.
Look, I know there’s something the Feeling Brain is screwing up for you.
Maybe  it’s  an  important  relationship.  Maybe  it’s  causing  you  to  make
embarrassing phone calls at 3:00 a.m. Maybe it’s constantly medicating itself
with substances it probably shouldn’t be using. I know there’s something you
wish you could control about yourself but can’t. And I imagine, at times, this
problem causes you to lose hope.
But  listen,  Thinking  Brain,  those  things  you  hate  so  much  about  your
Feeling Brain—the cravings, the impulses, the horrible decision making? You
need to find a way to empathize with them. Because that’s the only language
the  Feeling  Brain  really  understands:  empathy.  The  Feeling  Brain  is  a
sensitive  creature;  it’s  made  out  of  your  damn  feelings,  after  all.  I  wish  it
weren’t  true.  I  wish  you  could  just  show  it  a  spreadsheet  to  make  it
understand—you know, like we understand. But you can’t.
Instead  of  bombarding  the  Feeling  Brain  with  facts  and  reason,  start  by
asking how it’s feeling. Say something like “Hey, Feeling Brain, how do you
feel  about  going  to  the  gym  today?”  or  “How  do  you  feel  about  changing

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careers?”  or  “How  do  you  feel  about  selling  everything  and  moving  to
Tahiti?”
The Feeling Brain won’t respond with words. No, the Feeling Brain is too
quick  for  words.  Instead,  it  will  respond  with  feelings.  Yeah,  I  know  that’s
obvious, but sometimes you’re kind of a dumbass, Thinking Brain.
The Feeling Brain might respond with a feeling of laziness or a feeling of
anxiety. There might even be multiple emotions, a little bit of excitement with
a  pinch  of  anger  thrown  into  the  mix.  Whatever  it  is,  you,  as  the  Thinking
Brain  (aka,  the  responsible  one  in  this  cranium),  need  to  remain
nonjudgmental  in  the  face  of  whatever  feelings  arise.  Feeling  lazy?  That’s
okay;  we  all  feel  lazy  sometimes.  Feeling  self-loathing?  Perhaps  that’s  an
invitation to take the conversation further. The gym can wait.
It’s important to let the Feeling Brain air out all its icky, twisted feelings.
Just get them out into the open where they can breathe, because the more they
breathe, the weaker their grip is on the steering wheel of your Consciousness
Car.
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Then,  once  you  feel  you’ve  reached  a  point  of  understanding  with  your
Feeling  Brain,  it’s  time  to  appeal  to  it  in  a  way  it  understands:  through
feelings.  Maybe  think  about  all  the  benefits  of  some  desired  new  behavior.
Maybe  mention  all  the  sexy,  shiny,  fun  things  at  the  desired  destination.
Maybe  remind  the  Feeling  Brain  how  good  it  feels  to  have  exercised,  how
great  it  will  feel  to  look  good  in  a  bathing  suit  this  summer,  how  much  you
respect yourself when you’ve followed through on your goals, how happy you
are when you live by your values, when you act as an example to the ones you
love.
Basically,  you  need  to  bargain  with  your  Feeling  Brain  the  way  you’d
bargain  with  a  Moroccan  rug  seller:  it  needs  to  believe  it’s  getting  a  good
deal, or else there’ll just be a lot of hand waving and shouting with no result.
Maybe you agree to do something the Feeling Brain likes, as long as it does
something it doesn’t like. Watch your favorite TV show, but only at the gym
while  you’re  on  the  treadmill.  Go  out  with  friends,  but  only  if  you’ve  paid
your bills for the month.
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Start  easy.  Remember,  the  Feeling  Brain  is  highly  sensitive,  and
completely unreasonable.
When  you  offer  something  easy  with  an  emotional  benefit  (e.g.,  feeling
good after a workout; pursuing a career that feels significant; being admired
and  respected  by  your  kids),  the  Feeling  Brain  will  respond  with  another
emotion,  either  positive  or  negative.  If  the  emotion  is  positive,  the  Feeling
Brain will be willing to drive a little bit in that direction—but only a little bit!

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Remember:  feelings  never  last.  That’s  why  you  start  small.  Just  put  on  your
gym shoes today, Feeling Brain. That’s all. Let’s just see what happens.
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If the Feeling Brain’s response is negative, you simply acknowledge that
negative  emotion  and  offer  another  compromise.  See  how  the  Feeling  Brain
responds. Then rinse and repeat.
But  whatever  you  do,  do  not  fight  the  Feeling  Brain.  That  just  makes
things  worse.  For  one,  you  won’t  win,  ever.  The  Feeling  Brain  is  always
driving.  Second,  fighting  with  the  Feeling  Brain  about  feeling  bad  will  only
cause the Feeling Brain to feel even worse. So, why would you do that? You
were supposed to be the smart one, Thinking Brain.
This  dialogue  with  your  Feeling  Brain  will  continue  back  and  forth  like
this,  on  and  off,  for  days,  weeks,  or  maybe  even  months.  Hell,  years.  This
dialogue  between  the  brains  takes  practice.  For  some,  the  practice  will  be
recognizing  what  emotion  the  Feeling  Brain  is  putting  out  there.  Some
people’s Thinking Brains have ignored their Feeling Brains for so long that it
takes them a while to learn how to listen again.
Others  will  have  the  opposite  problem:  They  will  have  to  train  their
Thinking Brain to speak up, force it to propose an independent thought (a new
direction) that’s separate from the Feeling Brain’s feelings. They will have to
ask themselves, what if my Feeling Brain is wrong to feel this way? and then
consider the alternatives. This will be difficult for them at first. But the more
this dialogue occurs, the more the two brains will begin to listen to each other.
The  Feeling  Brain  will  start  giving  off  different  emotions,  and  the  Thinking
Brain  will  have  a  better  understanding  of  how  to  help  the  Feeling  Brain
navigate the road of life.
This is what’s referred to in psychology as “emotional regulation,” and it’s
basically  learning  how  to  put  a  bunch  of  fucking  guardrails  and  One  Way
signs along your road of life to keep your Feeling Brain from careening off a
cliff.
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It’s hard work, but it’s arguably the only work.
Because  you  don’t  get  to  control  your  feelings,  Thinking  Brain.  Self-
control is an illusion. It’s an illusion that occurs when both brains are aligned
and  pursuing  the  same  course  of  action.  It’s  an  illusion  designed  to  give
people  hope.  And  when  the  Thinking  Brain  isn’t  aligned  with  the  Feeling
Brain,  people  feel  powerless,  and  the  world  around  them  begins  to  feel
hopeless.  The  only  way  you  consistently  nail  that  illusion  is  by  consistently
communicating  and  aligning  the  brains  around  the  same  values.  It’s  a  skill,
much  the  same  as  playing  water  polo  or  juggling  knives  is  a  skill.  It  takes
work.  And  there  will  be  failures  along  the  way.  You  might  slice  your  arm
open and bleed everywhere. But that’s just the cost of admission.

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But  here’s  what  you  do  have,  Thinking  Brain.  You  may  not  have  self-
control,  but  you  do  have  meaning  control.  This  is  your  superpower.  This  is
your gift. You get to control the meaning of your impulses and feelings. You
get to decipher them however you see fit. You get to draw the map. And this
is  incredibly  powerful,  because  it’s  the  meaning  that  we  ascribe  to  our
feelings that can often alter how the Feeling Brain reacts to them.
And this is how you produce hope. This is how you produce a sense that
the  future  can  be  fruitful  and  pleasant:  by  interpreting  the  shit  the  Feeling
Brain  slings  at  you  in  a  profound  and  useful  way.  Instead  of  justifying  and
enslaving yourself to the impulses, challenge them and analyze them. Change
their character and their shape.
This  is  basically  what  good  therapy  is,  of  course.  Self-acceptance  and
emotional intelligence and all that. Actually, this whole “teach your Thinking
Brain  to  decipher  and  cooperate  with  your  Feeling  Brain  instead  of  judging
him  and  thinking  he’s  an  evil  piece  of  shit”  is  the  basis  for  CBT  (cognitive
behavioral therapy) and ACT (acceptance and commitment therapy) and a lot
of other fun  acronyms that clinical  psychologists invented to  make our  lives
better.
Our  crises  of  hope  often  start  with  a  basic  sense  that  we  do  not  have
control over ourselves or our destiny. We feel victims to the world around us
or, worse, to our own minds. We fight our Feeling Brain, trying to beat it into
submission.  Or  we  do  the  opposite  and  follow  it  mindlessly.  We  ridicule
ourselves and hide from the world because of the Classic Assumption. And in
many  ways,  the  affluence  and  connectivity  of  the  modern  world  only  make
the pain of the illusion of self-control that much worse.
But this is your mission, Thinking Brain, should you choose to accept it:
Engage  the  Feeling  Brain  on  its  own  terms.  Create  an  environment  that  can
bring  about  the  Feeling  Brain’s  best  impulses  and  intuition,  rather  than  its
worst. Accept and work with, rather than against, whatever the Feeling Brain
spews at you.
Everything  else  (all  the  judgments  and  assumptions  and  self-
aggrandizement)  is  an  illusion.  It  was  always  an  illusion.  You  don’t  have
control, Thinking Brain. You never did, and you never will. Yet, you needn’t
lose hope.
Antonio Damasio ended up writing a celebrated book called Descartes’ Error
about his experiences with “Elliot,” and much of his other research. In it, he
argues that the same way the Thinking Brain produces a logical, factual form
of  knowledge,  the  Feeling  Brain  develops  its  own  type  of  value-laden
knowledge.
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The Thinking Brain makes associations among facts, data, and

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observations.  Similarly,  the  Feeling  Brain  makes  value  judgments  based  on
those  same  facts,  data,  and  observations.  The  Feeling  Brain  decides  what  is
good  and  what  is  bad;  what  is  desirable  and  what  is  undesirable;  and  most
important, what we deserve and what we don’t deserve.
The  Thinking  Brain  is  objective  and  factual.  The  Feeling  Brain  is
subjective and relative. And no matter what we do, we can never translate one
form of knowledge into the other.
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This is the real problem of hope. It’s rare
that we don’t understand intellectually how to cut back on carbs, or wake up
earlier,  or  stop  smoking.  It’s  that  somewhere  inside  our  Feeling  Brain,  we
have decided that we don’t deserve to do those things, that we are unworthy
of doing them. And that’s why we feel so bad about them.
This  feeling  of  unworthiness  is  usually  the  result  of  some  bad  shit
happening to us at some point. We suffer through some terrible stuff, and our
Feeling  Brain  decides  that  we  deserved  those  bad  experiences.  Therefore,  it
sets  out,  despite  the  Thinking  Brain’s  better  knowledge,  to  repeat  and
reexperience that suffering.
This  is  the  fundamental  problem  of  self-control.  This  is  the  fundamental
problem  of  hope—not  an  uneducated  Thinking  Brain,  but  an  uneducated
Feeling  Brain,  a  Feeling  Brain  that  has  adopted  and  accepted  poor  value
judgments  about  itself  and  the  world.  And  this  is  the  real  work  of  anything
that  even  resembles  psychological  healing:  getting  our  values  straight  with
ourselves so that we can get our values straight with the world.
Put  another  way,  the  problem  isn’t  that  we  don’t  know  how  not  to  get
punched  in  the  face.  The  problem  is  that,  at  some  point,  likely  a  long  time
ago,  we  got  punched  in  face,  and  instead  of  punching  back,  we  decided  we
deserved it.

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Chapter 3