Everything Is F*cked

the meaning and purpose for people within the group.
Therefore, it is the conflict that maintains the hope.
So, we’ve got it backward: everything being fucked doesn’t require hope;
hope requires everything being fucked.
The sources of hope that give our lives a sense of meaning are the same
sources of division and hate. The hope that brings the most joy to our lives is
the  same  hope  that  brings  the  greatest  danger.  The  hope  that  brings  people
closest together is often the same hope that tears them apart.
Hope  is,  therefore,  destructive.  Hope  depends  on  the  rejection  of  what
currently is.
Because  hope  requires  that  something  be  broken.  Hope  requires  that  we
renounce  a  part  of  ourselves  and/or  a  part  of  the  world.  It  requires  us  to  be
anti-something.
This  paints  an  unbelievably  bleak  picture  of  the  human  condition.  It
means that our psychological makeup is such that our only choices in life are
either  perpetual  conflict  or  nihilism—tribalism  or  isolation,  religious  war  or
the Uncomfortable Truth.
Nietzsche  believed  that  none  of  the  ideologies  generated  by  the  scientific
revolution would hold up in the long run. He believed that, one by one, they
would  slowly  kill  each  other  off  and/or  collapse  from  within.  Then,  after  a
couple  of  centuries,  the  real  existential  crisis  would  begin.  Master  morality
would have been corrupted. Slave morality would have imploded. We would
have failed ourselves. For human frailties are such that everything we produce
must be impermanent and unreliable.
Nietzsche instead believed that we must look beyond hope. We must look
beyond values. We must evolve into something “beyond good and evil.” For
him,  this  morality  of  the  future  had  to  begin  with  something  he  called  amor
fati, or “love of one’s fate”: “My formula for greatness in a human being,” he
wrote, “is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not
backward,  not  in  all  eternity.  Not  merely  bear  what  is  necessary,  still  less

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conceal  it—all  idealism  is  mendacity  in  the  face  of  what  is  necessary—but
love it.”
20
Amor  fati,  for  Nietzsche,  meant  the  unconditional  acceptance  of  all  life
and experience: the highs and the lows, the meaning and the meaninglessness.
It  meant  loving  one’s  pain,  embracing  one’s  suffering.  It  meant  closing  the
separation between one’s desires and reality not by striving for more desires,
but by simply desiring reality.
It basically meant: hope for nothing. Hope for what already  is—because
hope  is  ultimately  empty.  Anything  your  mind  can  conceptualize  is
fundamentally  flawed  and  limited  and  therefore  damaging  if  worshipped
unconditionally.  Don’t  hope  for  more  happiness.  Don’t  hope  for  less
suffering. Don’t hope to improve your character. Don’t hope to eliminate your
flaws.
Hope for this. Hope for the infinite opportunity and oppression present in
every single moment. Hope for the suffering that comes with freedom. For the
pain that comes from happiness. For the wisdom that comes from ignorance.
For the power that comes from surrender.
And then act despite it.
This  is  our  challenge,  our  calling:  To  act  without  hope.  To  not  hope  for
better. To be better. In this moment and the next. And the next. And the next.
Everything  is  fucked.  And  hope  is  both  the  cause  and  the  effect  of  that
fuckedness.
This is hard to swallow, because weaning ourselves off the sweet nectar of
hope is like pulling a bottle away from a drunk. Without it, we believe we’ll
fall  back  into  the  void  and  be  swallowed  by  the  abyss.  The  Uncomfortable
Truth frightens us, and so we spin stories and values and narratives and myths
and legends about ourselves and the world to keep that truth at bay.
But the only thing that frees us is that truth: You and I and everyone we
know  will  die,  and  little  to  nothing  that  we  do  will  ever  matter  on  a  cosmic
scale.  And  while  some  people  fear  that  this  truth  will  liberate  them  from  all
responsibility, that they’ll go snort an eight ball of cocaine and play in traffic,
the  reality  is  that  this  truth  scares  them  because  it  liberates  them  to
responsibility.  It  means  that  there’s  no  reason  to  not  love  ourselves  and  one
another.  That  there’s  no  reason  to  not  treat  ourselves  and  our  planet  with
respect.  That  there’s  no  reason  to  not  live  every  moment  of  our  lives  as
though it were to be lived in eternal recurrence.
21
The second half of this book is an attempt to understand what a life without
hope  might  look  like.  The  first  thing  I’ll  say  is  that  it’s  not  as  bad  as  you

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think. In fact, I believe it is better than the alternative.
The second half of this book is also an honest look at the modern  world
and everything that is fucked with it. It’s an evaluation done in the hope not of
fixing it, but of coming to love it.
Because  we  must  break  out  of  our  cycle  of  religious  conflict.  We  must
emerge from our ideological cocoons. We must let the Feeling Brain feel, but
deny it the stories of meaning and value that it so desperately craves. We must
stretch beyond our conception of good and evil. We must learn to love what
is.