Harari is one of my favorite authors of late, and his books Sapiens and Home Deus are among my favorites. This book builds on those, and is equally faHarari is one of my favorite authors of late, and his books Sapiens and Home Deus are among my favorites. This book builds on those, and is equally fascinating. He is one of those clear thinkers who is able to put together multiple macro trends combined with philosophical perspective. Sapiens is about the past, Deus about the future, and this book purports to be 21 lessons about the present. But it is also rooted in the past, and preparing us for the future.
One of Harari's key themes in Deus and this book is AI and what it will mean for humanity in the future. Many people - thanks to Hollywood - equate AI with machines that achieve consciousness - I tend to not agree with that, as I think it more likely that AI will just be exceedingly smart. But regardless, along with nuclear power and climate change it's one of the great risks to our future. And it is being advanced rapidly. This will have a lot of side affects, the top one of which is what will happen to humans. I think this quote might be one of the most key from the book, and certainly a key theme of Harari's:
He goes on to further explain that our whole economic system is causing us to head in this direction, and to - except for a small number of people who opt to prioritize differently - largely ignore how to improve ourselves.
Another consequence of AI that is fascinating is that it can enable intelligence at a scale we today can't comprehend, which can be dangerous if it is controlled by the wrong people. AI is just a function of the data you put into it, so it follows that who holds the data in the future, will hold the power. I think this is a key concept.
Harari talks about trends in globalization, nationalism, immigration, religion, terrorism, and war. A common theme across these is that many people worry a lot that trends in these areas is a cause for concern and causing decline in our world. However the truth is that in most of them, we have come a long way and made a lot of progress - however because we live in an unprecedented age of information sharing - "media" - people are a lot more aware of even small issues in these areas. Also, our governments are predicated on keeping us safe from political violence, so even small issues like terrorism (small in the sense of how many people die from it each year) can have outsized importance to people.
He talks about the danger of propoganda/fake news and fascism and how in todays technological climate there is more risk of them so its better if everyone understands them. He explained this really well in his TED talk - highly worth watching.
But in the end, the only major recommendation Harari makes is around meditation. He impressively meditates for TWO HOURS per day, and TWO MONTHS per year. That is obviously a *huge* time commitment, and yet one he finds fulfilling. If we are going to invest in ourselves, the biggest way might be to start with our minds, and to stop worrying about all of these trends - because in the end, they don't matter to our ability to have a good, happy, loving life.
Basically, we worry a lot. A LOT. We live in dark times (with a scary president), etc. Pinker points out why we worry so much: the news. The news cycle is designed to play on our fears, and thus it is largely negative, focusing on all the bad things that are happening in the world. And we are consuming more news than ever in human history! And if the news focused on all the good things, the ratings would plummet, after all. But one of my favorite lines in the book points out that we would be hard pressed to find negative news if we were covering the last 100 years, instead of the last day.
And that was the eye opening thing about the book - if you take a long term view, every metric you can find has gotten better. Life expectancy, health, extreme poverty, prosperity, peace, freedom, safety, literacy, leisure, and even happiness - he has chapters and graphs for each of them, showing them vastly improving over the past centuries and usually with most gains in the past century. An interesting point is that most graphs show third world countries only being ~20-30 years behind first world countries, but the shape of the graphs looks the same in terms of the rate of progress. I won't recap all the graphs and numbers, but here is a small example of how life has gotten better.
This is not to say that there aren't still large problems in all of those areas left to solve. Nor that we haven't created other problems - the book has chapters on some of those, notably climate change and nuclear war - but again there we have actually made progress. For some reason I haven't quite fully fathomed, Pinker and this book have gotten a lot of criticism. I think some of this is from people who object to him saying "the world is great" because there is so much progress left to be made - yet Pinker often admits that in the book. Or from people who think he is measuring progress along the wrong metrics, and we are all headed for an apocalypse. Certainly, there are lots of books about apocalypse, but it's much more pleasant to be an optimist, and believe that as long as we keep applying reason and science and making progress, the world will keep getting better....more
This was a really compelling book for me - it made me think deeply about myself and the world and opened my eyes a bit too. It's no coincidence that mThis was a really compelling book for me - it made me think deeply about myself and the world and opened my eyes a bit too. It's no coincidence that multiple of my smarter friends have told me to read it!
Meditation is a subject that is interesting to me because of how many smart/successful people that I've talked to or read about highly recommend it. I wanted to better understand it, but I didn't predict all the directions this book would take.
One of the main interesting takeaways was how strongly the book ties the theory of natural selection with meditation.
This makes sense, we evolved over millions of years according to an algorithm that simply said: the ones who live pass on their genes. This has a lot of implications however, the foremost being that our ancestors - the ones that passed their genes on to us - evolved to be particularly good at finding food, mating and having kids, being alert to and surviving various dangers, and being positive contributors of their tribe (as outcasts don't survive). They did NOT evolve to be "happy".
This to me was a huge insight. I am constantly seeking new experiences, and am fortunate to have experienced many amazing things. But each thrill quickly fades and I find myself worrying about whatever is next remarkably quickly. To know that we were evolved that way on purpose - because our ancestors who killed a mammoth would only survive if they killed another one next week - is both fascinating and illuminating. This is why it is true that money doesn't make you happy, nor do successes in career.
The book delved into our emotions around human relationships a lot, which I found very interesting. Because as much as I would love to say "I don't care what others think of me", it's simply not true. In fact, random encounters with people I don't know and will never see again - can bother me. Also, encounters with people I do know can worry me quite a lot too. So it's somewhat comforting to realize that we evolved to be this way. Interestingly, interactions with strangers is a newer thing to us and has likely added to our modern day stress. The book also talks a lot about essence, as many of us have impressions of others (eg nice, not nice, helpful, jerk, selfish, weird, etc) that aren't really "accurate" - they are just our perceptions, and by being aware of this, it can better help us interact with such people.
So meditation can help us by recognizing that our mind is running these "algorithms", which come in the form of emotions, and cause us to "worry" about things, instead of focusing on being present in the moment. By observing which emotions and worries pop up, we can become more aware of them, and somewhat strangely - worry a lot less about them.
The book had an interesting section on "the self". Most of us think there is an "I" inside of us that is calling the shots in our lives, or as the book calls it, our internal "CEO". But in Buddhism, one of the key concepts as you advance is you are supposed to learn that there is no self. But we aren't really in control of ourselves - if we were we wouldn't have all kinds of thoughts all day worrying about or contemplating all kinds of random things. The book proposes that what is really going on is that there are a number of "modules" (or algorithms as I prefer to think) that are competing for our attention. There is the "mating" module, the "get food" module, the "look good socially" module, etc. Any thought or anything we see or hear or smell can easily trigger the emotion that starts any of these modules.
So, to summarize, humans suffer from "dukkha" or unsatisfactoriness, which means we have a constant craving or thirst or desire, which can't be quenched because if we attain our desire we will just have a new one. The only solution is to be mindful of the desires we have. To notice when we have a feeling, to examine the feeling, turn it over until you understand its root. By doing this, it loses its power over you. You can also start to recognize patterns in your thoughts if you do this a lot. The book says meditating 20min a day is a great start, but the difference between 30min a day and 50min is huge, as is the difference between 30min and 90min. But it also seems to imply that a weeklong retreat is likely also required if you really want to see benefits.
This all leads to a question that is interesting to ponder but the book only touches lightly on, which is that: is the way we evolved the way we need to behave to be happy and thrive in modern times? The answer is likely not as humans over the past 1000 years have changed a lot - even the past 100 years. So how could we help a lot more people be aware of this and what impacts could that have? A good question!
Giving a high rating because I heard the organizer of the Long Now Foundation speak and it was very inspiring. The Interval Cafe in San Francisco is aGiving a high rating because I heard the organizer of the Long Now Foundation speak and it was very inspiring. The Interval Cafe in San Francisco is also awesome and has The Long Library in it.
The part of the story that I liked most was the power of long thinking. How Oxford College has some gorgeous oak tree beams in their dining room, and they were crumbling, and so they wondered how to replace them. They created a search, and happened to ask the Oxford groundskeeper if any of the oak trees on campus would work, and he said yes, they should use the grove that was planted 500 years ago for that very purpose. So they did, and then planted another grove for 500 years from now. That's the power of long term thinking - how many of us are able to think that far ahead? That story is what inspired the clock, which is getting closer to completion and sounds pretty cool.
The book was published in 1999 so I found a bunch of the ideas dated and found myself skimming through them, so only partially read this. ...more
I first read this after college when my father gave it to me as a graduation gift. I almost didn't read it, but was very glad I did as it was very impI first read this after college when my father gave it to me as a graduation gift. I almost didn't read it, but was very glad I did as it was very impactful on me, and I think helped shape me into the person I am today. I recently decided to re-read it after a meditation teacher was talking about it - and was glad to discover that it's just as relevant to my life now as it was before. It's a book I can easily see myself re-reading every 5-10 years.
The book is a story about how to be mindful and live a happy, aware life - coached in the story of young Berkeley gymnast who meets an old man - who he names Socrates - at a gas station. Socrates becomes his coach and mentor - and teaches him that his goals in life were all wrong.
If there is a motto of the book it's this quote, which I've had on my wall since I first read this book:
The way of the peaceful warrior is to appreciate every moment, regardless of how dull or ordinary it may seem. To live in the now. Once you become aware of this, it's kind of amazing how much of our time we don't spend in the current moment - instead worrying about the past or the future. Our minds are swimming with the thoughts and worries of our lives, and we lack the easy ability to just be present. As Socrates said:
The best way to live in the present moment is to learn to meditate. Meditation teaches you to become aware when the mind wanders, and that awareness is a muscle that like all muscles, needs constant exercise or it becomes diminished. What I liked about the book was it discusses where meditation can go - and how one can be meditating constantly. In fact, it's not really meditation, but the art of focusing the mind that feels so good and fulfilling to us. This is why sports are so great - you are forced to focus your mind 100% on what you are doing, and distracting thoughts fade to the background. That ability to focus is calming, and appealing. I like how the book explains that using gymnastics.
But I liked how the book goes much deeper than meditation. There were cool bits about breathing properly, monitoring your internal organs, massage, having the mindset of a child, and eating healthily.
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