Day 0332

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is the kind of book I would write. Speculative, sloppy, breathless, a syncretic amalgam of other books with only a modest addition of new thought. Very easy-reading, tolerably interesting, the humanities student in awe of science.

It's more or less an admixture of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, Steel; Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature; Niall Ferguson's Empire and The Ascent of Money; Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow; Dawkin's God Delusion; Kurzweil's Singularity; Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness
and Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Everyone who reads all these books is groping in the same direction, building up layers on a new understanding of who we are and what we should do about it. I get a sense of convergence, that a lot of people are simultaneously attending to the same questions and approaching similar conclusions, and that if one person doesn't think or write the next chapter, another infallibly will.

We always return to the twin monoliths of happiness and death and must decide how to turn towards one without falling in the shadow of the other.

Nothing in the comfortable lives of the urban middle class can approach the wild excitement and sheer joy experienced by a forager band on a successful mammoth hunt.Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens

So perhaps happiness is synchronizing one’s personal delusions of meaning with the prevailing collective delusions. As long as my personal narrative is in line with the narrative of the people around me, I can convince myself that my life is meaningful and find happiness in that conviction.Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens

We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals.Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens