cached feelings

Homo Deus is a book that extends the confidence of Sapiens into the future and seems surprised when that confidence begins to wobble.

Where Sapiens is strongest as synthesis, Homo Deus is fundamentally speculative, and the shift matters. Predictions are presented with the tone of inevitability, and possibility is too often mistaken for trajectory. The book is less interested in what might happen than in what Harari believes is already on its way, and that distinction is not always acknowledged.

The central ideas—dataism, algorithmic authority, the erosion of humanist narratives—are not uninteresting. Some are genuinely provocative. But they are repeatedly framed as universal futures rather than culturally and politically contingent ones. Power, inequality, and access are treated as side notes to technological progress rather than as forces that shape who gets a future at all.

I found myself increasingly resistant to the book’s framing of humanity as something already being outgrown. There is a quiet disdain for ordinary human experience here—for care, dependency, slowness, and embodied life—that feels less analytical than ideological. The future imagined is sleek, abstract, and disproportionately designed for people who already have power.

What unsettles me most is not that these futures are possible, but how little space the book gives to refusal. To alternatives. To the idea that societies might choose badly, slowly, or not at all—and that this, too, would be human.

I finished Homo Deus feeling less informed than positioned. Nudged toward a way of seeing the future that values optimisation over meaning and inevitability over agency.

This is a book that wants to be taken seriously as foresight. I read it instead as a document of its moment: a snapshot of late-capitalist techno-confidence, polished and persuasive, already beginning to age.

I came to Pride and Prejudice late, with the mild resentment of someone who has been told for years that this book would change my life if I would simply sit down and behave myself long enough to read it.

What I found instead was something quieter and sharper: a novel about how easy it is to misread people when you are young, defensive, and a little too certain of your own clarity of vision.

Elizabeth Bennet is not wrong about the world, exactly—but she is wrong about people, and watching her realise that is the real romance of the book. Darcy’s transformation matters less than hers; his pride is obvious and legible, but her prejudice is subtler, more flattering to the self. Austen understands that the most dangerous misunderstandings are the ones that feel morally justified.

The marriage plot works because it is not really about love at first sight, but about love after recalibration. About learning to sit with the discomfort of having been incorrect. About choosing someone once the performance has fallen away.

I was surprised by how funny this book is, and by how modern its emotional intelligence feels. The social world is rigid, yes, but the psychology is not. Austen knows that women are constantly observing, constantly adapting, constantly negotiating power through conversation—and she takes that seriously.

I am docking one star mostly for personal reasons: I am tired of misunderstandings as a narrative engine, and I found parts of the middle stretch repetitive in their insistence on them. That said, the ending earns its grace.

This is not a swoony book for me. It is a steady one. A book about growing up without losing your spine. A book about learning when to revise your story about someone—and when not to.

I understand now why people keep it close.