Book: 20190909 to 20190929，"Everything Is F*cked" by Mark Manson

20190909， chapter 1. "The uncomfortable truth"

"Hope" contains three parts: control, values and community.

People who don't feel happy must lost one of them.

My current understanding is,

1. "Control" is almost impossible, and it should be replaced by "habit".

2. "Values" is more about "action", instead of "status". We can read more excellent books, and do a lot of practice to get it.

3. "Community" could be any organization small enough, such as family, corporation, or a few friends, etc.

People who own "hope" can achieve something amazing. They could be heroes and legends.

Although, from God's viewpoint, all "hopes" are so trivial.

20190913， chapter 2. "Self-control is an illusion"

Interesting!

So, value is attached with emotion. Without emotion, we cannot judge value.

What left, is instinction.

This reminds me of "baby". Babies follow their basic instinction, but don't know the difference in value of different objects. But they can eventually build the concept of different stuff.

So there are three independent parts in our brain/mind

1. Instinction (habit, big data)
2. Feeling brain
3. Thinking brain

Feeling brain is the most powerful one. Thinking brain can only help a bit.

This theory explains why I am not good at cooking: I don't have passion on it.

The only way to change that is get habit. For example, learn a new dish every week. Although I don't have intensive interest in it, I would learn 50 new dishes in one year. This is what the thinking brain tells me. Will My Feeling brain follow it? I can give it a try.   :-)

The other one is about Jeremy and Tianchi's study. Should I force them to study? Yeah, again, the only way to help Feeling Brain is to set them in good habit.

20190914， chapter 3. "Newton's Laws of Emotion"

Pain or stress can block our Thinking brain. Both physical one and mental one can do that.

Feeling brain has a "priority bookshelf", and Thinking brain can help to rearrange this bookshelf" (not just "habit"). But this is very hard.

This "priority bookshelf" means our "values/identity".

"Emotion" is more about "fairness/balance".

Everyone/everything is just part of this world. Nobody/nothing is special.

No matter bad thing or good thing happens, it's more likely caused by randomness. But if we act correctly, more good things would happen.

"Priority bookshelf" only exists in our brain. Actually, everything is imaginary, include our names. It should be not so hard to change it.

"Get out of comfortable zone" means touching stuff conflicts with our "values/identity", which may change our current "values/identity", which means we may lose part of existing "values/identity". That's why we feel it is painful.

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Each person's value/identity is like a solar system. We have our own core value, and other less important values around it.

A community is like a galaxy. Many solar systems are spinning around a "core value". These people share the same love and hate.

When one galaxy conflicts with another, war may break. Or, they can absorb each other's "core value". If they can accept each other, the war is avoided.

That's why multicultural society is so important.

Mark Manson is genius. His metaphor of "Newton's Laws" suits "Emotion" very well.

20190921， chapter 4. "How to Make All Your Dreams Come True"

This chapter is about "religion".

Is it "network effect"? I prefer to call it "resonance".

There are three types of religion: spirital, ideological, and interpersonal.

They all build illusion to guarantee the ultimate value, promise ultimate happiness without critical thinking and hard work.

To against it, the best solution is asking for "evidence". Asking "why", is not allowed in spirital religion. And that's the way to see the "uncomfortable truth".

My question is, what's the reason that Jesus supported with this religion? Considering that most of people didn't have knowledge or self-discipline, religion was a good approach to improve their living standard.

20190922， chapter 5. "Hope is Fucked"

This chapter is about Nietzsche's philosophy.

"Hope" is the one which drive us ahead, and also the source of pain. Nietzsche's philosophy is very similar to Budda's faith: Living in the moment.

Enjoy the moment. Made a plan, then do it. No matter how the plan goes, just enjoy every second.

Failures and frustrations will be all along the way, but that's part of the life. That's how things going. Why feel upset about it?

"Man is a rope, tied between beast and Superman - a rope over abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture [to something greater.]"

20190923， chapter 6. "The Formula of Humanity"

Just what "4-Hour workweek" says: to improve the productivity of food intake, physical exercise, study or work, we need to make it as boring as possible; but, to increase life experiece, we should keep trying new stuff, challanging ourselves, and get out of comfortable zone.

"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." - Immanuel Kant

Happiness. Short term benefit. Long term benefit. Better self.

Drug give us happiness. Winning lottery gives us short term benefit. For long term, we all gonna die, so, what's long term benefit?

Only "better self" is real. Our aim should always be "better self".

20190925， chapter 7. "Pain Is the Universal Constant"

Like what Lucy said in the movie ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2872732/ )

"Learning's always a painful process."
"Like this pain you're experiencing. It's blocking you from understanding. All you know now is pain. That's all you know, pain."

It's not just about physical pain, and it's more about mental pain/stress. That blocked our brain from normal functionality. We cannot see the long term future, because we are too buy in short term activities.

Pain and happiness are the root of our emotion. They are inseparable.

Pain is at where our attention is on. However, we can choose what to focus on.

Different attention brings us different pain and different consequence.

Pain is always there, but we can get a better self through it.

Budda didn't really want to get rid of all pain. Instead, he accepted it.

No desire is not really "no desire". He chose to focus on something else. I am curious what he was focused on. Meditation?

So, meditation is not "attention". It makes us capable of understanding ourselves.

20190927， chapter 8. "The Feelings Economy"

Personal thoughts today:

To get strong and healthy body, we need nutritious food and physical exercise.
To get resilient and beautiful soul, we need read (non-fiction) and meditation.

Feeling brain is all about "fake freedom". The world provides everyone so much "fake freedom", it's hard to get enough attention to think what we need and what we want.

What we need is real freedom, and what we want is fake freedom.

Thinking brain knows what we need, and feeling brain can only tells us what we want.

If most of people are controlled by feeling brain, they are childish and always asking for more and more pleasure. That may lead to the end of civilization. These people will not be happy about "democracy", and inevitablly turn to support tyranny.

20190929， chapter 9. "The Final Religion"

Three major threats to human kind: massive nuclear war, global warming and AI.

Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk all agree about this.

There is nothing we can do with AI. We can pray for mercy, but I don't see why AI should/need to treat us well.

AI only need a few hours/minutes/seconds to learn Chess, then they can beat us easily. In other words, they evolve extremely fast. AI lives in different time dimention to any other living creature. To AI, time is almost frozen. Human need seconds to respond to some input, AI needs only microseconds. AI never forget, and can analyze things in perfect pattern.

AI has no feeling/emotion. So why does it need to treat Homo Sapiens well?

One reason I can figure out is diversification. But does AI really need it? One thing for sure: to kill all Homo Sapiens is easy, but to bring the life back is almost impossible. So, maybe, it's better to keep them alive.

Anyway, AI can kill all Homo Sapiens at anytime, if necessary. Homo Sapiens is not a threat to AI, that's for sure.