Everything Is F*cked

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square.^22 People were sadistic, impulsive fuckers. For most of history, the
world has not been a pleasant place to live, and that was largely because
everyone’s Feeling Brains were running amok.^23 The Classic Assumption was
often the only thing that stood between civilization and total anarchy.


Then something happened in the last couple of hundred years. People
built trains and cars and invented central heating and stuff. Economic
prosperity outran human impulses. People were no longer worried about not
being able to eat or about being killed for insulting the king. Life was more
comfortable and easier. People now had a ton of free time to sit and think and
worry about all sorts of existential shit that they had never considered before.


As a result, several movements arose in the late twentieth century
championing the Feeling Brain.^24 And indeed, liberating the Feeling Brain
from the Thinking Brain’s suppression was incredibly therapeutic for millions
of people (and continues to be so today).


The problem was that people began to go too far the other way. They went
from recognizing and honoring their feelings to the other extreme of believing
that their feelings were the only thing that mattered. This has been particularly
true for white, middle-class yuppies who were raised under the Classic
Assumption, grew up miserable, and then got in touch with their Feeling
Brains at a much later age. Because these people never had any real problems
in their lives other than feeling bad, they erroneously came to believe that
feelings were all that mattered and that the Thinking Brain’s maps were
merely inconvenient distractions from those feelings. Many of these people
called this shutting off of their Thinking Brains in favor of their Feeling
Brains “spiritual growth,” and convinced themselves that being self-absorbed
twats brought them closer to enlightenment,^25 when, really, they were
indulging the old Feeling Brain. It was the same old Clown Car with a new,
spiritual-looking paint job.^26


The overindulgence of emotion leads to a crisis of hope, but so does the
repression of emotion.^27


The person who denies his Feeling Brain numbs himself to the world
around him. By rejecting his emotions, he rejects making value judgments,
that is, deciding that one thing is better than another. As a result, he becomes
indifferent to life and the results of his decisions. He struggles to engage with
others. His relationships suffer. And eventually, his chronic indifference leads
him to an unpleasant visit with the Uncomfortable Truth. After all, if nothing
is more or less important, then there’s no reason to do anything. And if there’s
no reason to do anything, then why live at all?


Meanwhile,  the person  who denies  his Thinking    Brain   becomes impulsive
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