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Evolution rewards the most powerful creatures, and power is determined by the ability to access, harness, and manipulate information effectively.

It's like that brutal advice you sometimes hear, that the only thing all your fucked-up relationships have in common is you.

Our Feeling Brains are antiquated, outdated software. And while our Thinking Brains are decent, they're too slow and clunky to be of much use anymore.

We are a self-hating, self-destructive species. That is not a moral statement; it's simply a fact.

What if the machines realize we'd be much happier being freed from our cognitive prisons and having our perception of our own identities expanded to include all perceivable reality?

Nietzsche said that man was a transition, suspended precariously on a rope between two ledges, with beasts behind us and something greater in front of us.

Nietzsche envisioned a humanity that transcended religious hopes, that extended itself "beyond good and evil," and rose above the petty quarrels of contradictory value systems.

It is the Final Religion, the religion that lies beyond good and evil, the religion that will finally unite and bind us all, for better or worse.

To enshrine the virtues of autonomy, liberty, privacy, and dignity not just in our legal documents but also in our business models and our social lives.

To encourage antifragility and self-imposed limitation in each of us, rather than protecting everyone's feelings.

Don't hope. Don't despair, either. In fact, don't deign to believe you know anything.

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

I dare to hope that people will stop suppressing either their Thinking Brain or their Feeling Brain and marry the two in a holy matrimony of emotional stability and psychological maturity;

I dare to hope that one day the online advertising business model will die in a fucking dumpster fire;

We will have evolved into a great unknowable entity. We will transcend the limitations of our own value-laden minds.

Perhaps then, we will not only realize but finally embrace the Uncomfortable Truth: that we imagined our own importance, we invented our purpose, and we were, and still are, nothing.

Each of these is true, by the way.

My three-part definition of hope is a merging of theories on motivation, value, and meaning.

As a result, I've kind of combined a few different academic models to suit my purposes.

The first is self-determination theory, which states that we require three things to feel motivated and satisfied in our lives: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

I've merged autonomy and competence under the umbrella of "self-control" and, for reasons that will become clear in chapter 4, restyled relatedness as "community."

What I believe is missing in self-determination theory—or, rather, what is implied but never stated—is that there is something worth being motivated for, that there is something valuable in the world that exists and deserves to be pursued.

That's where the third component of hope comes in: values.

For a sense of value or purpose, I've pulled from Roy Baumeister's model of "meaningfulness."

In this model, we need four things to feel that our life is meaningful: purpose, values, efficacy, and self-worth.

Again, I've put "efficacy" under the "self-control" umbrella.

The other three, I've put under the umbrella of "values," things we believe to be worthwhile and important and that make us feel good about ourselves.

Kant actually argued that reason was the root of morality and that the passions were more or less irrelevant.

To Kant, it didn't matter how you felt, as long as you did the right thing.

But we'll get to Kant in chapter 6.

See Immanuel Kant, Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington (1785; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993).

One study found that the WHO's global vaccination campaign in the 1980s likely prevented more than twenty million cases of dangerous diseases worldwide and saved $1.53 trillion in health care costs.

The only diseases ever eradicated entirely were eradicated due to vaccines.

This is part of why the antivaccination movement is so infuriating.

See Walter A. Orenstein and Rafi Ahmed, "Simply Put: Vaccinations Save Lives," PNAS 114, no. 16 (2017): 4031–33.

Some scholars believe that Plato wrote The Republic as a response to the political turbulence and violence that had recently erupted in Athens.

See The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968), p. xi.

Christendom borrowed a lot of its moral philosophy from Plato and, unlike many ancient philosophers such as Epicurus and Lucretius, preserved his works.

According to Stephen Greenblatt, in The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2012), early Christians held on to the ideas of Plato and Aristotle because the two believed in a soul that was separate from the body.

This idea of a separate soul gibed with Christian belief in an afterlife.

It's also the idea that spawned the Classic Assumption.

Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, pp. 4–18.

The comment about chopping off someone's nuts is my own flourish, of course.

Ibid., pp. 482–488.

The oft-repeated motto of Woodstock and much of the free-love movement of the 1960s was "If it feels good, do it!"

This sentiment is the basis for a lot of New Age and countercultural movements today.

An excellent example of this self-indulgence in the name of spirituality is depicted in the Netflix original documentary Wild Wild Country (2018), about the spiritual guru Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (aka Osho) and his followers.

The best analysis I've seen of this tendency among twentieth-century spiritual movements to mistake indulging one's emotions for some greater spiritual awakening came from the brilliant author Ken Wilber.

He called it the Pre/Trans Fallacy and argued that because emotions are pre-rational, and spiritual awakenings are post-rational, people often mistake one for the other—because they're both nonrational.

See Ken Wilber, Eye to Eye: The Quest for a New Paradigm (Boston, MA: Shambhala, Inc., 1983), pp. 180–221.

A. Aldao, S. Nolen-Hoeksema, and S. Schweizer, "Emotion-Regulation Strategies Across Psychopathology: A Meta-analytic Review," Clinical Psychology Review 30 (2010): 217–37.

Olga M. Slavin-Spenny, Jay L. Cohen, Lindsay M. Oberleitner, and Mark A. Lumley, "The Effects of Different Methods of Emotional Disclosure: Differentiating Post-traumatic Growth from Stress Symptoms," Journal of Clinical Psychology 67, no. 10 (2011): 993–1007.

Great thinkers have cut the human mind into two or three pieces since forever.

My "two brains" construct is just a summary of the concepts of these earlier thinkers.

Plato said that the soul has three parts: reason (Thinking Brain), appetites, and spirit (Feeling Brain).

David Hume said that all experiences are either impressions (Feeling Brain) or ideas (Thinking Brain).

Freud had the ego (Thinking Brain) and the id (Feeling Brain).

Most recently, Daniel Kahneman and Amon Tversky had their two systems, System 1 (Feeling Brain) and System 2 (Thinking Brain), or, as Kahneman calls them in his book Thinking: Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), the "fast" brain and the "slow" brain.

The "willpower as a muscle" theory of willpower, also known as "ego depletion," is in hot water in the academic world at the moment.

A number of large studies have failed to replicate ego depletion.

Some meta-analyses have found significant results for it while others have not.

Damasio, Descartes' Error, pp. 128–30.

Kahneman, Thinking: Fast and Slow, p. 31.

Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 2–5.

Haidt says he got the elephant metaphor from the Buddha.

This silly Clown Car analogy actually works well for describing how toxic relationships between selfish narcissists form.

Anyone who is psychologically healthy, whose mind is not a Clown Car, will be able to hear a Clown Car coming from a mile away and avoid contact with it as much as possible.

But if you are a Clown Car yourself, your circus music will prevent you from hearing the circus music of other Clown Cars.

They will look and sound normal to you, and you will engage with them, thinking that all the healthy Consciousness Cars are boring and uninteresting, thus entering toxic relationship after toxic relationship.

In philosophy, this is known as Hume's guillotine: you cannot derive an "ought" from an "is."

You cannot derive values from facts.

You cannot derive Feeling Brain knowledge from Thinking Brain knowledge.

Hume's guillotine has had philosophers and scientists spinning in circles for centuries now.

Some thinkers such as Sam Harris try to rebut it by pointing out that you can have factual knowledge about values—e.g., if a hundred people believe suffering is wrong, then there is factual evidence of their physical brain state about their beliefs about suffering being wrong.

But the decision to take that physical representation as a serious proxy for philosophical value, is itself a value that cannot be factually proven.

Thus, the circle continues.

This is an example of "intrinsic motivation," when the simple pleasure of doing an activity well, rather than for an external reward, motivates you to continue doing that activity.

See Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (New York: Plenum Press, 1985), pp. 5–9.

You could say that negative emotions are rooted in a sense of losing control, while positive emotions are rooted in a sense of having control.

Tomasello, A Natural History of Human Morality, pp. 13–14.

Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 27–54.

This also comes from David Hume, "Of the Association of Ideas," section 3 in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg, 2nd ed. (1748; repr. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Classics, 1993); and Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 2: Of the Passions, parts 1 and 2 (Mineola, NY: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2003).

This technique is known as the Premack principle, after psychologist David Premack, to describe the use of preferred behaviors as rewards.

See Jon E. Roeckelein, Dictionary of Theories, Laws, and Concepts in Psychology (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 384.

For more about "starting small" with behavioral changes, see "The Do Something Principle," from my previous book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (New York: HarperOne, 2016), pp. 158–63.

One way to think about "guardrails" for your Consciousness Car is to develop implementation intentions, little if/then habits that can unconsciously direct your behavior.

See P. M. Gollwitzer and V. Brandstaetter, "Implementation Intentions and Effective Goal Pursuit," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73 (1997): 186–99.

We're not being harmed because we suck; we're being harmed because we're great! So, the narcissist goes from feeling that the self deserves nothing to feeling that the self deserves everything.

The Treaty of Versailles decimated Germany economically and was responsible for many of the internal struggles that allowed Hitler to rise to power.

Real-life Newton was actually a raging, vindictive asshole. And yes, he was a loner, too. He apparently died a virgin. And records suggest that he was probably quite proud of that fact.

Real-life Newton's Laws of Motion also sat collecting dust for about twenty years before he dug them out and showed them to anyone.

The superiority/inferiority of a person can easily flip-flop because what remains constant is the intensity of our emotional reaction to them, caused by the size of the moral gap that is felt.

Spiritual experiences are often perceived as love, as they involve surrendering one's ego-identity and unconditional acceptance of a greater entity, a 'melding' with someone else or the universe.

As countries industrialize, their religiosity drops precipitously.

Humanism could be seen as worshipping the 'in-betweenism' of all people - that there are no inherently good or evil people, and that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

The Buddhist concept of dukkha, or craving, suggests that human cravings can never be satiated, and that we generate suffering in our constant quest to fulfill those cravings.

The ancient Greek concept of hope, as represented by Pandora's box, could also be translated as 'deceptive expectation,' suggesting that hope can lead to destruction.

If you are willing to treat humanity as a means to gain greater freedom or equality, then you will inevitably destroy freedom and equality.

We all require a "Goldilocks" amount of pain to mature and develop. Too much pain traumatizes us—our Feeling Brain becomes unrealistically fearful of the world, preventing any further growth or experience. Too little pain, and we become entitled narcissists, falsely believing the world can (and should!) revolve around our desires.

Growth requires engaging the pain, as we'll see in chapter 7.