Hey all, long time no see! I’ve been reading Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari and I’m in love with the book. Just as with his previous book Sapiens, Homo Deus captures our attention by hitting home on the ideas we hold most dear to our hearts. Sapiens showed us a “brief” history of the past and how we got to where we are today while Homo Deus shows us how the future may look.
Yuval manages to intricately weave this web of ideas of past, present and future and bring a realistic view of how the future may look without getting "science fictiony” about it.
Current Book & Quotes From: "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" by Yuval Noah Harari
Today is Better Than You Think
Yuval starts Homo Deus by reminding us that today is much better than yesterday and the future will be even brighter still:
“Most people rarely think about it, but in the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war. Of course, these problems have not been completely solved, but they have been transformed from incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. We don’t need to pray to any god or saint to rescue us from them. We know quite well what needs to be done in order to prevent famine, plague and war – and we usually succeed in doing it.”
Whereas our ancestors would experience famine, plague and war and consider it “God’s punishment” or some other supernatural entity striking down upon them for wrongdoing or lack of sacrifice or some other “story” of why such things are happening, in modern times we are able to look at it from a more scientific perspective.
Today, when famine, plague and war strike we consider that it’s somebody’s fault. A tyrannous dictator is doing a poor job at ruling his kingdom and has allowed for such mistakes to add up to famine, plague and war.
Why is it so important that we’ve moved from considering these things to be the doing of supernatural entities to now being the doing of man or natural forces?
It’s important because now that we know the disease, we can come up with a cure for it. Now that we accept the problem for what it actually is, we can work on solving it. And we are already doing a great job of that…
“Rather, when famine, plague or war break out of our control, we feel that somebody must have screwed up, we set up a commission of inquiry, and promise ourselves that next time we’ll do better. And it actually works. Such calamities indeed happen less and less often. For the first time in history, more people die today from eating too much than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases; and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists and criminals combined. In the early twenty-first century, the average human is far more likely to die from bingeing at McDonald’s than from drought, Ebola or an al-Qaeda attack.”
We’ve gotten so much better at being a collective society that we are more likely to die from eating too much rather than too little. I know that this is not the case for the entire world, but it is in fact the case for the average human on a global scale, which is mind-blowing.
Yuval then poses the question: "“Like firefighters in a world without fire, so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves?”
This question is very important and one that will become increasingly important in the years and decades to come. Humans are great at solving problems and it’s my belief that an interesting life is one that is filled with problems and then work to find the solutions to those problems.
Whenever I think about a life where there are no problems, I’m taken to the image of a sort of robot-like aristocrat who lounges around and binges on whatever food or drink they please without a care in the world. Emotion-less - neither in pain nor in ecstasy. That’s not the type of life that I would want to live.
I want to live a life filled with mystery. Filled with excitement and challenges. I want to live a life where I’m constantly pushed to become a better version of myself and to make progress in my own life and in helping others as well.
Question of the Day: What kind of world do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a world where there are no problems to solve and everyone is perfectly ok - neither happy nor sad?
Side Question: Have you read either Sapiens or Homo Deus?