Everything is F*****

 

Everything is F***** - A book about Hope

 

What’s opposite of Happiness?

It’s not sadness or anger. It’s hopelessness. 

Even when we are angry or sad there is a hope. Hopelessness is a belief that everything is screwed up, so why do anything at all?

These hopes narratives give our lives a sense of purpose. “Agar marna hi hai, to paida hi kyun hue?” What lies in between life and death is “Purpose”

 The paradox of progress

In 1908, when the researchers asked the survey participants how many people they had discussed important personal matters with over the previous six months, the most common answer was “Three!” By 2006 the most common answer was “Zero!” The more people you have around you, with whom you discuss your personal matters, the happier you are. We humans are the safest and the most prosperous amongst all the living beings yet we’re feeling more hopeless than ever before. The uncomfortable truth is that the wealthier and the safer place you live, the more likely you are to commit suicide.

 To build and maintain hope, we need three things:

·         a sense of control,

·         a belief in the value of something and

·         a community.

 

A real story of self-control….

A man named “Elliot” was a successful man. He was an executive in a good organization. He was well liked by his friends, co-workers and neighbors. He was charming and jovial. All was well, except the frequent headaches he had. After trying all home remedies he decided to consult a doctor. The doctor took all possible medical tests and shared a bad news with Elliot. It was a brain tumor.

 The surgeon cut the Tumor out, and Elliot got back home. He started his daily works soon. Everything seemed fine and normal for few days and then things went horribly wrong. His work performance suffered. He started looking idiot in friends. Neighbors found him boring.  Family members were noticing the conspicuous change in his behavior. His behavior was unacceptable  when he skipped the investors meeting to buy a new stapler for office. Co-workers in office found his behavior insane. His mistakes kept increasing and he got fired by the boss. He skipped Parents teacher meeting to watch a James bond TV serial. With many of the observations like these people around him realized that Elliot had lost something else besides the Tumor. And that something was his goddamn heart. His wife gave up on her patience and divorced him and took the kids.  Elliot was alone.

 Dejected and confused Elliot began looking forward to restart his career. Here as well, a scammed artist conned him out of much of his savings. A predatory woman seduced him, convinced him to elope and then divorced him a year later. Elliot was now homeless. Finally his brother took him and supported him.

Friends, relatives, neighbors started counseling him but all in vain. It was undeniable that something in Elliot had changed. The question was, what had changed?

 Elliots brother chaperoned him from one doctor to the other. All the doctors did the doctor things and said that the reports were all okay. His CAT scan looked fine, IQ was still high. He could discuss the repercussions and consequences of his poor choices. But nothing more than that. The mystery was still troubling his brother. There was no clue as to what was being missed by so many Doctors?

 Finally in desperation Elliot was referred to a famous neuro-scientist Antonio Dasmasio. Even here Elliot passed in all the conventional tests. This doctor was also perplexed and decided to sit with Elliot and understand why he made those day to day mistakes and looked like an idiot. Elliot could explain, at length what decisions he’d made, but could not explain the ‘why’ of those decisions. Moreover he was not even upset about having no answers. The doctor showed him bunch of grotesque and disturbing pictures. There were burnt victims, murder scenes. Elliot was completely indifferent to these things. That’s when Dasmasio had a brilliant realization:

The psychological tests Elliot had undergone were designed to measure his ability to think, but none of the test was designed to measure his ability to feel.

 In the process of removing the tumor there was a damage done to the sensors of his brain and the damage had debilitated his ability to empathize and feel. Elliot had lost his self-control.

The above story basically highlights the importance of self-control.

 

The two brains: The two brains that we have are bad at talking to each other:

Imagine a hypothetical situation where a car is driven by friends called, ‘Thinking brain’ and ‘Feeling brain’. The ‘Feeling’ brain is driving our consciousness car, because ultimately we are moved to our action only by emotion (or feeling), where emotion is the biological hydraulic system that pushes our bodies into movement. Emotional problems are irrational, so difficult to control. We know what habits are bad, still we struggle to control those habits. We know that eating a samosa can spoils 30 mins jogging work out, still we succumb to the temptation, simply because the feeling brain feels better.

 While our feeling brain drives the car, the ‘Thinking brain’ is sitting at the back seat imagining itself to be totally in control of the situation. So if the feeling brain is our driver, the thinking brain is our navigator. The thinking brain knows the shortcuts and is aware of the bad turns and poor road conditions. Daniel Kahneman in his book rightly said that the Thinking brain is in the supporting role, but thinks herself to be the main character. Although the two brains can’t stand each other, they need each other. The problem is that the Thinking brain navigates the driver, but the steering is finally in the hands of the Feeling brain. Our thinking brain thinks vertically i.e. better/ worse, desirable/avoidable etc. The thinking brain thinks horizontally i.e. sameness, contrast, cause, effect etc.

 But here’s a funny thing about value hierarchy: When they change we don’t actually lose anything. It’s not that I decided to start giving up parties for my career, it’s that the parties stopped being fun. Fun is a product of our value hierarchies. When we stop valuing something it ceases to be fun.  So there is no sense of loss for missing out something.

 The people with better self-control have an obedient Feeling brain and a commanding Thinking brain.

 Newton’s Laws of emotions:

Isaac newton had pessimistic views when it came to community relationship. He found pain to be inversely proportional to the distance squared he put between himself and the community.

 Newton’s first law of Emotion:

For every action, there is equal and opposite emotional reaction.  If a dog bites you, your instinct is to punish the dog. If you stub your toe on a coffee table, what do you do? You yell at the damn coffee table. These are moral gaps. When confronted with moral gaps, we develop overwhelming emotions towards equalization or a return to moral equality.

As with the negative moral gap, with the positive moral gap we feel indebted to someone, that we owe the person something, that someone deserve something good to ‘make it up’. We’ll have intense feelings of gratitude and appreciation. We might even shed a tear of joy.

So the law states: When someone or something causes pain, a moral gap opens up and our feeling brain summons up icky emotions to motivate us to equalize.

 Newton’s second law of Emotion:

Our self-worth equals the sum of our emotions over time.

It’s our natural psychological inclination to equalize across moral gaps, to reciprocate actions: positive for positive and negative for negative. The forces that impel us to fill those gaps are our emotions. But what if that equalization never comes? What if we feel powerless to do to do anything to equalize or make things right?

When moral gap persists for long enough time, they normalize. They become our default expectation. They lodge themselves into our value hierarchy. If someone hits us and we’re never able to hit him back, eventually our feeling brain will come to a startling conclusion: We deserve to be hit.

The reverse moral gap must be equally true. If we’re given trophies and false certificates without we deserving those we falsely believe ourselves inherently superior to what we actually are.

The surrender to persisting moral gap is the fundamental part of our Feeling Brain’s nature. And it is the Newton’s second law of emotion.

 But our inherent narcissism comes at a cost. When you believe you’re the best or worst, one thing is also true: you are separate from the world. And it’s this separateness that ultimately perpetuates unnecessary sufferings.

Self-worth is contextual. If we’re bullied for our geeky glasses and funny nose as a child, our feeling brain will ‘Know” that we’re dweeb, even if we grow up to be a flaming sexpot of hotness.

 Newton’s third law of emotion:

Your identity will stay your identity until a new experience acts against it.

 Emotional gravity:

People are pulled towards others with similar experiences.

We trade narratives with others. People who have similar likings, like one another and the people who hate the same things, also like one another. And people who love or hate different things hate one another. The only way to change our values is to have experience contrary to our narratives.

 Moralities that are root of all political evil in our world:

There are two types of Moralities.

Master Morality: Imagine you are a school student and you study hard to get a top rank. You sacrifice everything for your studies. Slog day in and day out. With perseverance and consistency you top the class. You expect song and dance for your performance. This is Master Morality.

 lave Morality: Now imagine you have a classmate, who has eighteen siblings all being raised by a single mother. This classmate works multiple part-time jobs and is never able to study because she is literally putting food on the table for her siblings. She fails the same exam that you cleared as a topper. Is this fair? No it’s not!

One would feel that she deserves some special exception, like allowing her to retake the exam or impose a lower cut off. This thinking is Slave Morality.

With these two moralities all around us in all applications, we have conflicts. Therefore it is the conflict that maintains the hope.

 Pain is inevitable:

Blue dot effect: In an experiment participants were asked to stare at the screen. If a blue dot appears press the Blue button and if a purple dot appears, press the button, “Not Blue” were the instructions.

The researchers discovered that when they showed mostly blue dots, everybody was pretty accurate but as soon as the researchers started limiting the blue dots and started showing more of purple dots, the participants began to mistake Purple dots for Blue.

The Blue dots weren’t the point; they were merely a way to measure how humans wrap their perceptions to fit their expectations. We expect bad things when there are none.

 The feelings economy

Money is the form of exchange that is used to the moral gaps between people. There are two ways of creating value in the feelings economy.

1.       Innovations (upgrade pain): Innovations replace pain with more tolerable pain.

2.       Diversions (Avoid pain): It helps to numb the pain. Eg. a weekend outing with friends with the use of drugs

 

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

 

The final religion:

AI is the final religion.

AI will reach a point where its intelligence outstrips ours by so much that we will no longer comprehend what it’s doing. Cars will pick us up for reasons we don’t understand and take us to the locations we didn’t know existed. We’ll unexpectedly receive medicines for the health issues we didn’t know we suffered from. AI will recognize society and all our places within it in ways we can’t imagine. The old Gods will be replaced by the new Gods: the algorithms. It will be the survival of the best information processing.

 

Till then let’s hope, the hope prevails.

 

Disclaimer.

The summary of this wonderful book written by Mark Manson is just an attempt to preserve good points. In the process I have used my experiences, observations, discretions and foresights to land on a point.

 

Vinay Wagh, Bulls Eye