In four simple words: dot-connecting, eye-opening.

This was the first long book where I fully applied the principles of slow reading, which I described here. One of the core principles of Slow Reading is to invest time in choosing what to read and why. I’m glad I did. It was worth it.

Reading Sapiens at 43 felt like putting on glasses for the first time… and suddenly realizing how blurry the world had been. This book didn’t just teach me history. It reshaped how I understand humanity, progress, happiness, and myself.

Harari doesn’t just guide you through the timeline of Homo sapiens; he challenges the stories we usually believe.

Take the Cognitive Revolution.

It wasn’t just about brain size as I thought about it. It was about shared myths. Religions, nations, money aren’t real in any physical sense. They’re powerful stories we all agreed to believe.

The Agricultural Revolution, often seen as a huge win for humanity, turns out to be the opposite. Harari argues that wheat domesticated us, not the other way around. More food came with more work, more disease, and more inequality. Progress, it turns out, often comes with a hidden cost.

Also, a fascinating part of the book explores the modern spiral of progress driven by a combination of science, politics, and economics.

I also found myself questioning the very idea of happiness. Technological advances, capitalism and empires have shaped our world, but have they made us happier? Harari asks: if we’re not more content than ancient foragers, what’s the point of all this complexity? That’s a solid question.

I marked the last pages of the book with pink and yellow highlights. The idea that happiness is constrained by biochemistry and that meaning is often just a shared narrative. Not truth, not reality, just a story we choose to believe. And a pure biochemical process in our brains.

Harari shows how humans are shifting from products of evolution to products of intelligent design: bioengineering, AI, cybernetics. We sapiens are gaining godlike powers, yet we have no idea what we actually want.

We conquered the world but built no world worth celebrating, not for ourselves, not for the animals we dominate.

And I often find myself repeating the book’s final line:
“Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?”

I like how the book made me feel uncomfortable.
And somehow, it brought me back to the oldest wisdom: I know that I know nothing.

P.S. Fun fact: my highlights and notes from the book turned into a 33-page document: