Sapiens

I woke up at four thirty in the morning, fully awake, and the first thought in my head was that humanity is going to end. Something is going to take over us, and I actually need to do something about it. Not a dream exactly. I had been dreaming, but this was me awake and thinking, at four thirty, about a global problem. I could not explain it in good words even to myself. Then I understood why. I had been reading this book heavily, and the last thing I did before bed was read it.

That is the kind of grip it had on me. It was one of my first real books, the first one I read all the way through because I wanted to and not because school told me to.¹

I thought I knew history

I am not a history person. If you ask me what I am into, it is business and building stuff, not human history. And still, I always had the mindset of someone who knows history. I had watched so many documentaries. I knew the key events, the big moments of humanity, whatever. I thought I had a grip on it.

This book showed me I know a little fraction of it. That was humbling, and honestly it was very cool at the same time.

It even talks about that. Harari says the Scientific Revolution, about five hundred years ago, started when humans admitted they were ignorant, and that is when we became as powerful as we are today.

The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance.²

Which is kind of what I am saying here about me and history.

It is a complex book, it talks about so many things. I only really saw that when I put it next to another one. I had started Attached, the book about attachment styles, and I like that book, I still think it is good. But it talks about one topic. Sapiens talks about so many things. Reading them side by side I could feel the difference in the writing and the quality, which I never thought I would notice in books. Sapiens sits in a top tier for me. Attached is a very simple book, that is how I see it. I stopped Attached a quarter of the way in and went back to finish Sapiens first.³

What it talks about

I read it a year ago, and I cannot recall exactly what I thought of each part back then. I was too busy being amazed to argue with him. So this is what the book says, as close as I can put it, and the parts I connect to now.

The book opens on something I had never really thought about. A hundred thousand years ago we were not alone. There were at least six human species walking around at the same time, Neanderthals and others, and we were one of them, and not even the strongest. Today there is only us. Harari's question is how that happened.

His answer is stories. Around seventy thousand years ago something changed in how we think, he calls it the Cognitive Revolution, and Sapiens became able to believe in things that do not exist. A spirit, a god, a nation, a company. That sounds like a weakness, and his argument is that it was the whole trick. Without stories, he says, a group can only hold together as far as gossip reaches, about a hundred and fifty people who all know each other. With a shared story, strangers can work together, thousands of them, millions. A Neanderthal could trust his small group. We could trust anyone who believed what we believed.

Then he goes further. Money, he says, is one of those stories. Nations are. Laws are. A company is. None of them exist in the physical world, there is no company you can touch, and they still run everything because millions of people agree to believe in them together. He calls money the most universal and most efficient system of trust humans ever made, because two strangers, even two enemies, who agree on nothing else will still both accept the same coin.

Wheat

Then farming. The usual story is that farming was the moment humans got it right. We stopped running after animals, we settled, we built towns, progress. Harari calls it history's biggest fraud.

His point is that farming gave us more people and more food in total, but the single person had a worse life. A hunter gatherer moved all day, ate all kinds of things, worked fewer hours. A farmer broke his back in the same field for his whole life, ate mostly one crop, and lived next to his animals and their diseases. And the way he says it is that we did not domesticate wheat. Wheat domesticated us. A plant that used to be nothing ended up spread over the planet, and we were the ones doing the work for it.

It sits right next to something I already believe. Our ancestors used to move a lot. Today the world is turning into a place where comfort is everywhere, and I bet the calories a person burns in an average job are way lower than they used to be. Same with making things. Our ancestors made their own tools, and today we just buy everything, and I really think there is a fulfillment in creating something with your own hands that we lost along the way.

Happier?

After farming come the things that tied all of us together, money, empires and religions, and then the last five hundred years, science, and the money that funds it, credit and growth, the bet that tomorrow will be richer than today. Every part could be its own book.

Then near the end he asks a question I did not expect from a history book. After all of it, are we actually happier than the people who lived before us, a medieval farmer, a forager? He says historians almost never ask. And he leans toward no. His argument is that happiness depends a lot on our biochemistry and on what we expect, and when life gets better our expectations just go up with it. He ends that chapter on Buddhism, the idea that chasing good feelings is the problem in the first place.

The last chapter is called The End of Homo Sapiens. It is about what comes next, engineering our own bodies, cyborgs, life that is not even biological. He ends on the idea that we became something like gods, powerful enough to change nature, and we still do not really know what we want.

I read it on the way to work, when I got home, before bed, while waiting for something. I just held it all the time. A hundred and fifty pages in under three days, then three hundred, then the whole thing, about four hundred pages in three weeks to a month. For a guy who before that could count the books he had read in his whole life on one hand, that was a huge book, and finishing it was a win on its own.

It cost twelve euros.⁴ I remember thinking, if I read fifty books like this in the next year I will be someone else, I will probably be Einstein by then. That was the feeling.

I would definitely reread it. Maybe five years from now, maybe three, I do not know, but it is the kind of book I want to come back to later. And I would recommend it to anyone, it gives you a lot of perspective. Get the physical version if you can.

When I bought it I saw he had written other titles too, and I could not wait to read them.⁵ It took me a year to get to one, and it took me the same year to write this. I am a bit ashamed of that, honestly. A year to review the book I keep calling one of my favourites. But I decided to post it now because I am starting his next one, Homo Deus. Harari is a really smart and great dude.

I cannot forget this book. It was one of my first legit books.