It has been a long long time since publishing the last book review, David Joseph is here again, sharing with you his take away from this worthy reading book!
AUTHOR: MARK MANSON
CHAPTER ONE: THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH AND THE PARADOX OF PROGRESS
We live in an interesting time in that, materially things are arguably better than have ever been before, yet we all seem to be losing our minds thinking the world is one giant toilet bowl about to be flushed. An irrational sense of hopelessness is spreading through the world despite all the advancements and improvements in human life. In fact, progress has continued uninterrupted, throughout modern history. We are more educated and literate than ever before. Violence has trended down for decades, possibly centuries. Racism, sexism, discrimination and violence against women are at their lowest points in recorded history. We have more rights than ever before, cured diseases than ever before and with more wealth than ever before, and surprisingly more hopeless than ever before. Basically, we are the safest and most prosperous humans in the history of the world, yet we are feeling more hopeless than ever before. This is the paradox of progress, the better things get, the more we seem to despair.
And since hope is the mother of our mental engine, giving us confidence that things can still get better, providing us with reasons to keep striving, telling us that something still matters, or worthy living for, then hopelessness makes us feel that there is nothing left for us, and that we are nothing! And of course, without hope, we are really nothing! Seriously, if we are sure that things will not get any better, why the hell doing anything at all? Why enduring all the suffering, if we have no hope that there will be a time when we will experience joy? What’s the rationale of being alive while we have millions of reasons to jump from a cliff? Hope gives us reasons to live, something to wake up for in the morning. Hope tells us not only that there is a better future after the end of the tunnel, but also there are ways to navigate the hell just to find a safe heaven. Hope gives us the ability to strike a match to light up the void. It shows us the possibility for a better world-not a better we want to exist, but a better world we didn’t know could exist. If we have no hope, then we are fucked, as our lives will have no meaning, giving us reasons to throw ourselves under a moving electric train. For a matter of fact, hope enables us to avoid the uncomfortable truth about life. The truth that we and everyone we love will die, and that beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what we say or do will ever matter, that everything we think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it, that we are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck, imagining our own importance and inventing our purpose. Hope gives us life!
To build and maintain hope, we need three things; a sense of control, a belief in the value of something and a community. Sense of control means as though we have the power to transcend the hell and affect our fate, believing in set of values means there is something worthy working for, something that is important to us, and community means the sense of belonging to a group of people who believe on the same values as our values-be it family, or whatever you decide to call it. Without community, we feel isolated and our values lose meaning. Without values, why suffering in this world? Nothing feels worthy pursuing if nothing feels important to us, and without sense of control, we feel as powerless as blank to pursue our values. We lose one of the three, we lose the other two, we lose one of these, we lose hope! For us to understand why we are suffering through the crisis of hope today, we need to understand the mechanics of hope, how it is formed and maintained. In this book, the author takes us through the processes of sense of control, belief of values and sense of belonging, all these to help us understand the mechanics of hope. He finally takes us back to our core question, why are we experiencing the paradox of progress and become the most hopeless generation of all time, despite the fact that we are more advanced than ever before? And the answer might surprise you. Pour a cup of black sugarless coffee, and don’t forget to buckle up, for its going to be a bumpy ride on a rough road!
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