Until the advent of the Scientific Revolution and the pronounced growth of technology and tools of human innovation, the vast majority of humans lived in squalid conditions of abject poverty. Picture your modern neighbor with three garages filled with late-model cars, his-and-her jet-skis, and a really impressive angle grinder. In 1437 this same middle-class citizen would be just another expendable, filth-ridden pawn serving some narcissistic warlord. He likely lived with his family in fetid conditions, in very poor health, with a narrow range of skills necessary to provide life or keep from being brutally executed in front of blood-thirsty neighbors hungry for a good-ole’-fashioned Saturday rip-about. Life was extremely difficult for the vast majority of humanity until very recently. Emotional fragility was not a useful trait.
Life, without question, sucked.
Today, developed societies have everything. We squabble over macronutrient ratios and the pros and cons of carbs while failing to appreciate that our ancestors would have dropped dead of a heart attack if they stepped into a Costco or the produce section at Whole Foods. We have vacuum cleaners and lawn mowers that vacuum and mow without us even being present! The internet provides endless information and the ability to make (in theory) well-informed choices and decisions to better our lives.
Life is unquestionably better and easier in modern times. Yet for so many of us…life still sucks. We aren’t happy, and we’re getting less happy every year.
Why are we so unhappy when life is so much easier? Are we becoming an emotionally fragile society?
…The better our lives are, the pettier our grievances become.
Mark Manson
Humans are becoming emotionally fragile.
I’ve just finished reading Mark Manson’s second book, lovingly titled, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope. Manson is also the author of the best-selling book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Right off the bat, I think it’s fair to say that Manson finds profanity to be a core element of proving his over-arching point:
Humans are becoming emotionally fragile.
The title of his books alone will instantly offend a hefty chunk of the public. Why? We are uniquely emotion-driven creatures. Perhaps if you are willing to at least read a few pages, I’d suggest that we have something extremely important and urgent to learn within both of these works.
(Related Post: Welcome to Your Emotions, Your Guide Today)
Emotional Fragility: A Response to Profanity
Take profanity, for example. You see, Manson reminds us about a key component of the human decision making process. Humans make decisions based on what Manson terms our Thinking Brain—logic, reason, etc.,—and our impulsive Feeling Brain—emotions, pleasure, pain, etc. Most of human behavior is rooted in our desire to appease our relentlessly needy Feeling Brain.
Fortunes have been made and lost on building, marketing, and selling ideas and products to limit pain, increase pleasure, or as Manson aptly notes, avoid us from facing the Uncomfortable Truth.
The Uncomfortable Truth
What’s the Uncomfortable Truth? Well, that’s everything you don’t want to hear or know. For some, it might be that you’ve devoted your life to a politician who cares little of your best interest. Or for me, it might be that I don’t show love very well but demand it in return. For you, it might be that your job isn’t that bad and you quit because you have no grit or mental fortitude for that boss who simply held you to standards that were challenging. Or perhaps we are all nothing but little insignificant grains of sand in the universe and nothing we care about matters. It’s the real and Uncomfortable Truth, and it’s our deepest, darkest hole of pain.
So, what’s the deal with profanity? Well, our entire lives we’ve been led to believe that the combination of certain innocent letters forms wretched and horrible words. We are led to feel guilt and shame about those words, even though we carry the same emotions they represent. That leads us to say really awkward and ridiculous phrases like, “Oh fudge! I burned the dang cookies!,” as we hurl the 300-degree sheet pan against drywall*. These are feeble attempts to suppress the wild stallion that is our Feeling Brain.
And suppressing the Feeling Brain leads to bad things.
*Do you guys remember that Mitch Hedberg stand-up album called Do You Believe in Gosh? Yeah, Mitch got the idea.
Diversions and Emotional Fragility
Diversions are prolific in developed societies. We all have internet-ready smart phones and Wi-Fi enabled smart devices that allow us to be distracted, further enabling us to avoid our own Uncomfortable Truths. While diversions in moderation are acceptable and necessary, the prolific availability of diversions creates emotional fragility.
Diversions are built and marketed to appease our impulses (the Feeling Brain). Likes on Instagram, compulsive checking of email, etc., all divert our attention away from our problems temporarily. Unfortunately, if enough junk builds on the forest floor, the next fire will be a big one! Unfettered self-indulgence of our impulses leads to emotional fragility when we continually side-step our Uncomfortable Truth.
What keeps impulses—and therefore emotional fragility—at bay? Self-denial.
Extreme freedom can’t be expected to lead to anything but a change to extreme slavery.
Plato
Self-Denial to Limit Emotional Fragility
Limiting screen time (especially social media), eating at home instead of buying every meal out for convenience, learning a new skill instead of hiring it out, learning to accept criticism of certain uncomfortable truths, meeting people if that is hard, being alone if that is hard, and the acceptance that a fruitless chase for “wellness” or “the dream” is indeed an often-costly fairy tale.
Self-denial is not eliminating pain. It’s choosing the pain we bring into our lives.
(Related Post: Chasing Your Dreams Is Probably a Bad Idea)
Happiness = 7
Manson notes a very fascinating conclusion from a series of studies in the 80s and 90s. This was an era where researchers were first beginning to really dig in on the idea of happiness and its drivers.
Participants of these studies were assigned a pager. When it randomly buzzed, as it often did, participants were asked to catalog the following.
- On a scale of 1-10, how am I feeling?
- What am I doing, or what’s going on in my life?
The vast majority of the time, across a broad demographic, people reported remarkably similar results. Everyone always felt about “7” most of the time. Particularly hard or good times might pull that figure down or up for a short while, but the equilibrium of “7” always seemed to return. Poor people, rich people, X race, Y race, Happiness = 7.
Certainly, some folks live better lives on paper, depending on their existence on the socioeconomic ladder. However, the important conclusion is that climbing or falling down the ladder doesn’t ultimately make us feel any happier or less happy over the long-term. That’s psychological creep, and it can go both ways.
It used to be that being the victim of violence meant somebody had physically harmed you. Today, many people have begun to use the word violence to describe words that made them feel uncomfortable, or even just the presence of a person they disliked. Trauma used to mean specifically an experience so severe that the victim could not continue to function. Today, an unpleasant social encounter or a few offensive words are considered “trauma” and necessitate “safe spaces.” Genocide used to mean the physical mass murder of a certain ethnic or religious group. Today, the term white genocide is employed by some to lament the fact that the local diner now lists some of its menu items in Spanish.
Mark Manson
The problem with Happiness = 7, as Manson notes, is that we all feel like we could be happier. All the time. So, we keep trying to feel better, working hard to appease the monster that is our Feeling Brain, all the while strictly avoiding the Uncomfortable Truth.
(Related Post: Do Tough Times Make Tough People?)
Going for “10” as a Climber
We’ve heard the same classic climber dilemma repeated hundreds of times in podcasts, magazines, or while sitting in the dirt. How many of us have obsessed over a project of some sort, dreaming of eventual glory? We imagine how good we will feel, and we envision the gods blessing us with great fertility and riches upon clipping the chains (pun definitely intended).
And when we do send the route or boulder problem, we do feel like a “10,” but only for a short while. In short order, we’re back to worrying about where to take our new success. Or we soon begin to wonder if that win of our recent past is the pinnacle of our existence. We’re soon back to “7,” and maybe even lower.
Then we start to obsess over details. Maybe if we spend $50/ month on BCAAs, the perfect whey protein, or maybe a wooden hangboard, then we can be better climbers!
And for what?
What part of our Feeling Brain are we trying to appease in this endless carrot chase that started as an innocent recreational pursuit all those years ago? We’ve all seen that great climber having zero fun at the crag.
It’s simple: we are emotional creatures and our Feeling Brain runs the show. Trying to deny the importance of the Feeling Brain is dismissing the Uncomfortable Truth. This is a recipe for cyclical discontent, and as Manson puts it, the negative feedback loop from hell. This is why we can progress greatly at an endeavor and never feel long-term satisfaction with our performance—psychological creep.
We want a “10” when we should be accepting the feeling of “7.” That doesn’t mean we don’t push ourselves to be better, but we accept that we’ll always be in search of an emotional pot of gold. We must recognize the Feeling Brain, allowing some (but not complete) leeway.
I spent five years putting performance climber on the front burners. I became a better climber, but I can’t say it made me any happier. I’ve been chipping away at my version of contentment through a balance of diverse hobbies, deep and meaningful work, and a slower pursuit of mastery.
…Pain is the universal constant of the human condition. Therefore, the attempt to move away from pain, to protect oneself from all harm, can only backfire. Trying to eliminate pain only increases your sensitivity to suffering, rather than alleviating your suffering. It causes you to see dangerous ghosts in every nook, to see tyranny and oppression in every authority, to see hate and deceit behind every embrace.
Mark Manson
The Paradox of Progress and the Creation of Emotional Fragility
Despite all the relentless progress of man and the undeniable improvements of the human condition—for pretty much everyone—this doesn’t make us feel better about our problems.
The explosive growth of diversions in the last century has us increasingly in search of new problems. If growing potatoes, grinding grains, or tanning hides for a long winter is no longer a pull on our attention, then hey, let’s see what’s up on Facebook! Oh, goodie! My high school bully is raging about the latest snow storm as proof that global warming isn’t real! Doesn’t he even understand the abundant data and nuances of climate change?!
What a fool!
So, in response I put up a heated comment with all the latest progressive talking points, fit with capital letters and exclamation points. I then turn up the coal- or gas-fired heating, return to researching flights, and crank the engine on my 15-mpg truck to drive a mile to the grocery store.
What a fool!
We’ve both avoided our Uncomfortable Truth, we’re now both perceived as fools by the other, and we’ve sown new seeds of discontent and polarization into society. These are the beginnings of emotional fragility and the caustic negative feedback loop from hell.
Hope and Limiting Emotional Fragility
So, what makes us feel happy, or at least content? What can keep us from tearing each other apart in a world where nearly all aspects of the human condition are getting better and better despite all the injustices we perceive?
Hope. Hope is any sense that things can and will get better; that we have something to look forward to. Once hope is gone, we conversely have nothing to live for. As the world gets better around us, our diversions lead us to believe that hope is diminishing. News organizations prey on our Feeling Brain, spoon-feeding us cherry-picked emotional content to pull at our heart strings and make us believe that the world is garbage. Those emotions are bottled up, cut with our childhood, and spit back out on social media. A cycle of diminishing hope is born.
Violence and suicide are the ultimate crises of hope.
Our pursuit of happiness is causing our crisis of hope.
What Provides Hope?
According to Manson (and I obviously agree) there are three core elements of providing hope and stemming emotional fragility:
Sense of Control:
How much do we dictate the course of our lives? How well do we balance the left and right hemispheres of our brain (Thinking Brain vs Feeling Brain)?
Do we suppress our feelings in a “shelf of anger in [our] chest,” as comic Bill Burr* says? That’s the Thinking Brain’s futile attempt to harness the Feeling Brain. I’m guilty of this one.
Or do we let our Feeling Brain run free, living whimsical and directionless lives where every impulse runs rampant like an overly caffeinated high school class with a substitute teacher?
*This stand-up clip is a worthy and hilarious example of Burr’s suppression of the Feeling Brain. He uses a lot of profanity. Don’t watch it if you can’t handle that.
Values:
What about our backgrounds provides a rich future? What are we looking forward to? Have we instilled values through our community or institutions that make it harder or easier to balance logic and emotion?
Community:
Simple. Do we have people with which to share our experiences, good and bad?
It Ain’t All Good All the Time
Finally, cultivating hope requires us to simply recognize that, well, everything is f*cked. There will always be elements of society or our brains that leave us desiring more. That will never go away.
Ever.
The more we try to mop clean the spilled milk of discontent, the worse it gets. It’s like trying to mop a walk-in freezer, a classic newbie kitchen worker prank. You keep trying, but the damn mop is frozen stuck!
This is why the wellness industry doesn’t really work. It’s a for-profit machine built on the hope that we can escape our problems through a range of diversion tactics, supplements, and faux-spiritual nonsense. I’d argue much of the FIRE movement is guilty as well. Save, invest, and run from what’s really making you hate your job*.
*This is a big part of why I de-emphasize the “early retirement” part of the FIRE acronym (Financial Independence/Retire Early). Not to say there aren’t ways to do this right, but I fear we are only kicking the can on some aspects of our psychology by romanticizing the end-game of early retirement.
Summary: Pain Trumps Emotional Fragility
This is not necessarily a book review or glowing endorsement of Everything is F*cked. Some parts were even kind of weird – for instance the interesting final chapter on Manson’s warm-hearted embrace of our future robot overlords. The book is occasionally laden with over-the-top vulgar and cringe-worthy rants. Finally, much of the material and ideas will be familiar to those who have read much Nietzsche, Stoic philosophy, or even Aldous Huxley. But Manson is able to use “the parlance of our times,” if you will, to address some major issues facing our society.
I find the lessons within these pages to be incredibly timely and necessary. We need not fixate on the things we can’t control, because we can’t control them. We need not fixate on perfecting ourselves, because we can’t. It’s essential that we understand that pain is a formative part of the human experience.
So, instead of trying to rid ourselves of pain, we should mold, shape, and eventually embrace our reactions to pain. By doing so, we paradoxically begin to reintroduce hope. With hope we can do the right things because they are the right things, not just because it looks good on social media. With hope, we can love our neighbors and love ourselves.
After all, 7 out of 10 ain’t bad.
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That’s a good point about happiness being a 7, regardless of you’re rich, poor, etc… I’d say for the most part I’m around a 6-7, even dealing with depression, I’m still happy, just depressed. 😆
Maybe I should say content. I’m content but depressed. When I look back on the last year, I think, “well hell yeah you should be depressed, you’ve been through a rough year…”
Then I take stock of everything, I look around and totally get the argument about the richer you get the more petty your concerns become.
I have nothing to complain about really. Oh, waahhh,my career got derailed at peak earnings. Boohoo I got and am still experiencing free time in my 40’s and am set up well enough financially to do it. Of course I should be depressed. 🤦🏻♂️🙄
I struggle with the depression occasionally, regardless of circumstances and I just have to accept that. Sometimes it feels like a fail and others I think, look man. You’re not discontent with life universe, everything, it’s literally just brain chemistry making you feel down or listless.
It’s weird looking at it like that but it is freeing accepting it may be something that I don’t have control over, in the sense that I can’t get it to go away by changing diet, adding exercise, more exercise, therapy, discipline, schedules, routines. None of that makes it increase or decrease, so I have to accept that.
Maybe we get more emotionally fragile bc we also have a lot of info at our fingertips and thru boredom and searching for any answer as to what this internal uncomfortableness with life is, we find more and more things to label it. And then for every label, there’s a fix or improvement, or way to make it better.
And even a way to turn it into normalizing whatever you’re feeling. And then groups to talk with other people about what you’re feeling. While it’s really empowering to have that access at our fingertips, as I type this from my phone on my couch, watching a basketball game being played live 4 states over, I wonder if the old adage, ignorance is bliss, really is true.
The more you know, the more you have to compare yourself against, good and bad, and maybe that plays into it as well. Not just material things, but also “happiness” that EVERYONE’S life exudes on the curated pages of Instagram, FB, and more.
Whereas back in the day, you didn’t know much of anything outside of a full days ride away, so you just had your immediate people to compare with and they were in the same state, class, position, as you. Just my thoughts on it.
Sorry for the rambling novella length comment. 😆🤦🏻♂️
“Maybe we get more emotionally fragile bc we also have a lot of info at our fingertips and thru boredom and searching for any answer as to what this internal uncomfortableness with life is, we find more and more things to label it. And then for every label, there’s a fix or improvement, or way to make it better.”
This!
Thanks so much for your comment and the courage to share. Obviously I agree with your sentiment. The more we can see (and the more folks can portray a curated image to the world), the more discontent we feel. Clearly, a real trauma will always be something leaving us with deep emotional scars, but much of our modern discontent can simply be explained by exactly what you’ve explained.
This is seriously the best fucking post I’ve read in awhile. FIRE blogs in general tend to get really redundant after you’ve sunk your teeth into it. –A refreshing read to say the least.
Care to dive a little deeper into any one of the rabbit holes this post opens up? Particularly as it relates to the FI community?
Wow…thank you. I agree that FIRE material can get redundant, and often just flirts with some of these underlying causes of why we do what we do. Hence my focus on emotions, happiness, and the pursuit of contentment in life. It’s a modern problem. I’ll tell ya what, check back on next week’s post and I’ll expand from there.
So I love the idea of reducing emotional fragility and have done tons of research and self improvement in this area, but I am not wild about this author’s perspective on it. It just strikes me as squarely in the white guy camp without consideration for other perspectives. For example, I am not sure that everyone would agree we are better off now than in the middle ages, especially if you asked some Native Americans. There is also a fair amount of brain science that support the idea that trauma and violence are processed the same way in the brain regardless of whether its acute or chronic, physical or emotional. I would highly recommend, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism by Dr. Chris Neibauer if you want a great way to reduce your emotional fragility.
Oohhh, I appreciate this a lot and I value the perspective. Thanks so much.
While you are certainly not the first to claim that Manson’s take is white-guy centric, I’d still agree with the assertion that almost all humans have to work less to simply survive, regardless of demographics. Few of us hunt or grow food out of necessity, for example. Certainly some groups have undeniably suffered from a socioeconomic standpoint due to imperialism, manifest destiny, etc, but providing life is easier than it was in past centuries, even for those in poverty. The biggest dilemmas facing societies today, at least in America, are societal issues (racism, sexism, partisan bickering). Basic elements of survival (food, water, shelter) are in place for almost anyone, which is a historically very new concept. Take a look at data on malnutrition, starvation, or even macro death rates. Almost all have declined significantly, particularly since the Industrial Revolution.
Speaking for Manson, I think he’d argue that if we fixed racism (certainly a worthy ambition), we’d find a new grievance. For instance, there are plenty of examples of intraracial discrimination based on other physical and societal characteristics. Or when we fix starvation, we gain obesity.
To your second point about brain science, I think we are talking the same language. The issue in modern times is where and how we are getting chronic and emotional trauma. As basic necessities of life no longer fill our time, we introduce more and more maladaptive ways to fill the day to fend off boredom, etc. The more maladaptive strategies we implement, the more magnified our petty grievances become.
Either way, this all fascinates me and I’ll be adding your book recommendation to my queue!
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Mr. CC! Love this convo.
Yes, I 100% agree that when you’re comfortable and all your physical needs are met it’s much easier to focus on all that is lacking emotionally / mentally / spiritually. That’s why I go backpacking. Its an emotional relief to be physically uncomfortable and even a little on the edge of survival danger. I also agree that you don’t have to go backpacking to break this cycle, you can train your mind to think positively and maximize positive forces in your life aka home, community, values, etc. I guess what I don’t agree with is that somehow its better now that our physical needs are met at the expense of the other needs. Indigenous cultures were/are not always comfortable but had/have a greater degree of balance between the universe and their physical/ emotional / mental / spiritual needs. Many feel they were better off before they were “gifted” modern comforts and all the diseases, forced assimilation, systematic racism, and genocide that came with it. One of my native colleagues once told me, “your work will be better if you can admit America was better off when we were in charge.” I didn’t understand it fully at the time but I do now. No doubt if you compare people of European descent now and in the middle ages, there is astronomical improvement in all areas. I am just saying it’s not that way for everyone. Yes, as white people, this is a useful perspective, but I am worried that if we try to apply this perspective to the grievances of other cultures and judge them for giving too many fucks, we belittle their very real lived experience.
I guess we’re getting hung up on the “life is better now” concept, which may be an issue of semantics. Assessing the degree to which any ancient peoples had better balance between the universe and their physical and emotional needs seems difficult to quantify. What is coarsely quantifiable are the factors I discussed in my last comment: lower overall mortality due to disease, starvation, or even conflict, which is not limited to people of European descent — i.e. the vast majority of humans don’t have to spend the day simply trying to stay alive. Speaking of Europe, we can list pages of horrible times of conflict, marked by ruthless and barbaric conquests to steal land, territory, and dignity from other groups of people. I’m no historian, but humans conquering humans seems to be a historical constant and not necessarily relevant to the topic of this book: the sharp rise in mental health issues in the last decade or so.
Again, I’m not a mental health professional either, but the data seems convincing to my untrained eye: a prevalence of online culture and easy access to diversions is associated with a sharp rise in anxiety and other mental health issues in very recent history. While you’ll hear no argument from me that certain ethnic groups or cultures have a higher share of mental health issues stemming from some of the issues you’ve discussed, my reading of the book suggests that technologically modern humans have experienced a concerning “bulk shift” as we’ve taken more time to frankly stare at screens. Pre-existing causes for emotional trauma — those you’ve discussed — are being amplified by our modern diversions.
I really didn’t read this book as anything that minimizes or judges the struggles of others, but as a guide to offer hope in the face of quick access to a (usually depressing) 24-hour news cycle and faux-highlight reels on social media. These are problems for anyone with an internet signal and a phone.