Harari says that the agricultural revolution didn't make us any happier, indeed the people who worked in farming, life became harder. Hunter gatherers had better lives, though infant mortality and injuries were more serious. Every step in the evolution of human civilization didn't necessarily improve things.
He's saying that happiness is biochemical, we have set points, and good or bad things happen and we are unhappy or happy for a while, but we eventually reset to the happiness baseline. So how would we even measure if things are getting better. You win the lottery and your happiness returns to baseline pretty soon. You get in a horrible accident and have a lame leg, and your happiness returns to the baseline in a year.
I wouldn't know how to evaluate many of his claims, but they are provocative, interesting and make you think that that's all I want out of a book. There is a larger perspective. I liked learning a lot of little history tidbits that I didn't know about. I didn't know about Göbekli Tepe.
Book Review Links:
Guardian Galen Strawson uses "swashbuckling" quite a lot.
New Yorker Listening takes 68 minutes.
Comments
Post a Comment