cached feelings

There is a particular pleasure in books that offer coherence. They take the mess of history, biology, politics, belief, and violence and arrange it into a shape you can hold in your head. You close them feeling taller, clearer, better equipped.

Sapiens is very good at this.

The danger is not that these books are wrong. It is that they are convincing. Confidence is a narrative technique, and when it is done well, it feels like truth rather than interpretation. The line between synthesis and simplification is thin, and readers are rarely encouraged to linger on it.

What Sapiens offers is not neutral knowledge, but a worldview—one that privileges scale, abstraction, and pattern over intimacy, contradiction, and lived experience. This is not inherently bad. It is, in fact, often illuminating. But it is also partial.

I find myself increasingly wary of books that leave me feeling intellectually satisfied without also leaving me ethically unsettled. Books that resolve too much. Books that explain human behaviour without fully reckoning with power, care, or whose labour has been rendered invisible to make the story flow.

This is not a call to reject popular history or big-idea nonfiction. It is a call to read them slowly, with friction. To notice when admiration turns into deference. To ask which voices are being summarised, which are being smoothed over, and which are not present at all.

Feeling smarter is not the same as being more careful with the world. The books worth keeping close, I think, are the ones that sharpen both.