Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up begins with the now all too familiar premise that the human brain is not built for the modern world, but for the world we found ourselves in tens and hundreds of thousands of years ago. Phillips starts off with the usual list of stupid things our brains do: confirmation bias, availability heuristic, Dunning-Kruger effect… On a side note, at this point I have spent so much time reading other books citing Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow that I wonder if I could save time by actually reading Thinking Fast and Slow and skipping over any parts of future books that talk about it.
Anyways, the remaining chapters bucket human failures into different categories: humans vs nature, humans vs technology, humans vs humans… actually there were many many chapters about humans vs humans. Phillips used to be a writer for Buzzfeed UK, which might explain why each chapter (and sometimes even sections within a single chapter) feels like a totally distinct article with its own hook and witty conclusion. Not that I have anything against that; these days I find myself reading for shorter periods of time (i.e. thirty minutes on the way to and from work) and so these “non-cumulative” books are a lot easier to digest. Plus it’s more obscure (and hilarious) historical events and figures to shove in the back of my brain.
What was lacking is a unifying theme. There is no satisfying bow that ties all the stories together. The book's conclusion that “we are good at making mistakes but maybe hopefully we won’t make as many mistakes in the future because we should try to be better” was also pretty underwhelming.
IRL Update (10/14/2024): About a month ago I started waking up at 5:30 a.m. (yeah I’m so sigma I know :P) to commute downtown and hit the gym before work. My reasoning was literally just that I get to skip the morning rush hour on the commute and skip the evening rush hour at the gym. I don’t know if this is supposed to be good or bad for your body/health, but I do know that this is the best I have physically felt since the start of university, so that’s gotta account for something right? Also I feel like I keep promising “more book reviews coming soon” and then I never find the time for them. So the next review is coming whenever I feel like it.