By Mark Manson

Have learnt and been reminded of important matters, meanings of life by this book. And hope to remember the convictions from the below excerpt:

“I have tried to live my life such that in the hour of my death I would feel joy rather than fear.” Pilecki

The Feeling Brain drives our Consciousness Car because ultimately, we are moved to action only be emotion.

Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason, but, rather, of emotion. Self-control is an emotional problem; laziness is an emotional problem; procrastination is an emotional problem; underachievement is an emotional problem; impulsiveness is an emotional problem.

Speaking to both brains, integrating our brains into a cooperative, coordinated, unified whole. Because if self-control is an illusion of the Thinking Brain’s overflow self-regard, then it’s self-acceptance that will see us- accepting our emotions and working with them rather than against them.

True freedom doesn’t really exist because we all must sacrifice some autonomy for stability.

Nietzsche called the elite the “masters” of society, as they have almost complete control over wealth, production, and political power. He called the working masses the “slaves” of society, because he saw little difference between a labourer working his whole life for a small sum and slavery itself.
Master morality is the moral belief that people get what they deserve. It’s the moral belief that “might makes right”, that if you earned something through hard work or ingenuity, you deserve it. No one can take that from you, nor should they. You are the best, and because you’ve demonstrated superiority, you should be rewarded for it. Conversely, Nietzsche argued, the “slaves” of society would generate a moral code of their own. Whereas the masters believed they were righteous and virtuous because of their strength, the slaves of society came to believe that they were righteous and virtuous because of their weakness. Slave morality believes that people who have suffered the most, those who are the most disadvantaged and exploited, deserve the best treatment because of that suffering. Slave morality believes that it’s the poorest and most unfortunate who deserve the most sympathy and the most respect.

These conflicts must exist because they maintain 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. […] 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.

Nietzsche – Formula for greatness

Nietzsche instead believe that we must look beyond hope. We must look beyond values. We must evolve into something “beyond good and evil”. […] “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 conceal it – all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary – but love it.”

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. […] Hope for what already is – because hope is ultimately empty. […] 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 second. 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. […] To not hope for better. To be better. In this moment and the next.

(Nietzsche) I love those who do not know how to live, for they are the ones who cross over.

Immanuel Kant – Formula of Humanity

Kant argued that the most fundamental moral duty is the preservation and growth of consciousness, both in ourselves and in others. He called this principle of always putting consciousness first “the Formula of Humanity”. It explains our basic moral intuitions. It explains the classic concept of virtue.

The formula of Humanity states, “Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.”

To transcend the transactional realm of hope, one must act unconditionally. You must love someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise it’s not truly love. You must respect someone without expecting anything in return; otherwise you don’t truly respect him.

He decided that the only logical way to improve the world is through improving ourselves – by growing up and becoming more virtuous – by making the simple decision, in each moment, to treat ourselves and others as ends, and never merely as means. […] There are only the choices that you make in each and every moment.

When we pursue a life full of pleasure and simple satisfaction, we are treating ourselves as a means to our pleasurable ends. Therefore, self-improvement is not the cultivation of greater happiness but, rather, a cultivation of greater self-respect.

The maturity of our culture is deteriorating. Throughout the rich and developed world, we are not living through a crisis of wealth or material, but a crisis of character, a crisis of virtue, a crisis of means and ends. The fundamental schism in the twenty-first century is no longer right versus left, but […] of maturity versus immaturity, of means versus ends.

Pain
Blue dot effect, the paradox of progress

The more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. […] We’d just get equally upset about the more minor stuff.

Protecting people from problems or adversity doesn’t make them happier or more secure, it makes them more easily insecure. […] Material progress and security do not necessarily relax us or make it easier to hope for the future. On the contrary, it appears that perhaps by removing healthy adversity and challenge, people struggle even more. They become more selfish and more childish. They fail to develop and mature out of adolescence. They remain further removed from any virtue.

Pain is the universal constant of the human condition. […]Trying to eliminate pain only increases your sensitivity to suffering, rather than alleviating your suffering.

This is because pain is the experience of life itself. Positive emotions are the temporary removal of pain; negative emotions the temporary augmentation of it. To numb one’s pain is to numb all feeling, all emotion. It is to quietly remove oneself from living.

The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading. Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reason.

Antifragility

The human mind can be fragile or anti fragile depending on how you use it. When struck by chaos and disorder, our minds set to work making sense of it all, deducing principles and constructing mental models, predicting future events and evaluating the past. This is called “learning” and it makes us better, it allows us to gain from failure and disorder. But when we avoid pain, when we avoid stress and chaos and tragedy and disorder, we become fragile. Our tolerance for day-to-day setbacks diminishes, and our life must shrink accordingly for us to engage only in the little bit of the world we can handle at one time.

Meditation is, at its core, a practice of antifragility: training your mind to observe and sustain the never-ending ebb and flow of pain and not to let the “self” get sucked away by its riptide. […] Most people avoid meditation […] because they know what meditation really is: it’s confronting your pain, it’s observing the interiors of your mind and heart, in all their horror and glory. […] The length of sustained contemplation is a strange experience: a mix of agonising boredom dotted with the horrifying realisation that any control you thought you had over your grown mind was merely a useful illusion.

While pain is inevitable, suffering is always a choice. That there is always a separation between what we experience and how we interpret that experience.

Th adult has an incredible high threshold for pain because the adult understands that life, in order to be meaningful, requires pain, that nothing can or necessarily should be controlled or bargained for, that you can simply do the best you can do, regardless of the consequences.

Pain is the currency of our values. Without the pain of loss, it becomes impossible to determine the value of anything at all. Pain is at the heart of all emotion. […] The more anti fragile we become, the more graceful our emotional responses are, the more control we exercise over ourselves, and the more principles our values. Antifragility is therefore synonymous with growth and maturity. Life is one never-ending stream of pain, and to grow is not to find a way to avoid that stream, but, rather, to dive into it and successfully navigate its depths.

The pursuit of happiness is, then an avoidance of growth, an avoidance of maturity, an avoidance of virtue.

Freedom
Variety is not freedom. Variety is just different permutations of the same meaninglessness shit.

When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.

The only true form of freedom, […] is through self-limitation. It is not the privilege of choosing everything you want in your life, but rather, choosing what you will give up in your life.

The most meaningful freedom in your life comes from your commitments, the things in life for which you have chosen to sacrifice. […] Greater commitment allows for greater depth. A lack of commitment requires superficiality.

Hope
Don’t hope for better. Just be better. Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined.