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Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Sapiens, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Foraging, Industry, and Human Happiness
Fiction, Cooperation, and Culture
Science, Wealth, and Empire
Human-Caused Ecological Devastation
Summary
Analysis
Harari thinks the world has changed dramatically since the Scientific Revolution, but he wonders if people are actually happier as a result. He thinks about earlier periods in history, and he wonders if ancient foraging Sapiens were happier. He thinks most current ideologies don’t think about human happiness properly. Capitalists think the free market will make people happy. Communists think the opposite. Most scholars assume that modern humans have achieved so much, so we must be happier than people in hunter-gatherer societies, but Harari’s not convinced. He thinks that peasants had to work harder than foragers, but they got less nutritious food and more disease out of it.
Although many scholars argue that life has been improving over time for humankind, Harari disagrees. He thinks that the more societies progress, the unhappier people become. In this chapter, Harari is going to discuss multiple ways of measuring happiness to show that in each case, the modern human is much unhappier than humanity’s ancestors were—even though humans today live wealthier, more luxurious lives than our ancestors did in the past.
Themes
Some scholars romanticize the past and think that a comfortable middle-class person could never be as happy as a forager enjoying the thrill of the wild. Harari is hesitant to over-romanticize the past. He recalls that child mortality rates are much lower and humans have modern medicine nowadays. But he also thinks about famines, which plagued modern societies until the 1950s, and the miserable lives of nineteenth century coal miners. Then he thinks about ecological destruction and the misery of other animals. He thinks it’s a mistake to only think about human happiness, or the happiness of the upper classes.
Harari acknowledges that ancient foragers’ lives were not free from suffering—child mortality rates were much higher, and modern medicine was nonexistent. Nonetheless, he still thinks that as history has progressed and human societies have evolved, humans have consistently grown unhappier. Harari also thinks that the more powerful humans become, the more other animals suffer. Overall, thus, Harari thinks the present is not better than the past, but worse.
Themes
Now, humans tend to be richer and healthier than they were in the past, but Harari’s not sure if those qualities makes people happier. He wonders if rich people feel alienated and bored. He also wonders if people living in small, tight-knit communities felt more content than people in large nations. He decides he needs a way to measure happiness, so he can figure out how to weigh all this up. Harari thinks about psychological studies into “subjective well-being” (surveys that assess how positive people feel about their lives). Such studies generally conclude that money increases happiness and illness decreases it, but Harari’s not so sure that’s true.
Some scholars argue that wealth, health, and strong communities make people happy. Here, Harari disagrees. He thinks that having low expectations about life makes people happy, and that modern humans have over-inflated expectations about life, which makes us deeply unhappy. He’s going to look at various methods of measuring happiness to show wealth, health, and community don’t affect a person’s happiness—so, to Harari, such factors are irrelevant.
Themes
Money will definitely help people who struggle financially feel better, Harari explains, but he thinks that once a person is already wealthy, more money doesn’t make them happier. He also decides that illness causes short-term unhappiness, but people with chronic conditions still live happy lives. Psychological studies also show that family and community have a deep impact on human happiness. Harari wonders if the collapse of the family and community in the last 200 years offsets the happiness that wealth and medicine provide. Harari thinks about this a bit more, and he decides that happiness doesn’t actually depend on external factors like “wealth, health, and community.” He thinks happiness depends on a person’s expectations.
Harari thinks that wealth and health do affect a person’s happiness to some degree, but not enough to make a substantive difference to their overall well-being: he thinks that many rich people are unhappy, and many sick people don’t let their diseases make them unhappy. He also thinks that a person can be happy in a community and on their own. He decides that what really matters is a person’s expectations. Effectively, Harari thinks that people who want too much out of life end up unhappy. He’ll unpack this idea a bit more in the following sections.
Themes
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Harari thinks that a peasant who wants a new cart and gets one will be happy, while a person who wants a Ferrari but can only afford a Fiat will be unhappy. He decides that “when things improve, expectations balloon,” which can leave people unsatisfied. He decides that modern humans have “an arsenal” of resources like painkillers and modern conveniences, but we have high expectations that our lives will be easy and fun, and we don’t tolerate inconveniences well, so we’re probably unhappier than our ancestors were.
Harari thinks that modern humans have very high expectations that our lives will be easy, fun, and painless, but real life is often difficult—and when it is, that makes us feel disappointed and discontented. Harari thinks that ancient humans had more realistic expectations about enduring hardship in their lives, so they coped with it better, leaving them happier overall.
Themes
Harari suggests that mass media and advertising also inflate human beings’ expectations, leaving us discontent. He thinks a teenager in a village 5,000 years ago would probably think they’re good looking, because they’d be comparing themselves to others in the village, most of whom would be old and wrinkly. He imagines teenagers today comparing themselves to movie stars and supermodels on Facebook and feeling miserable. Harari wonders if the quest for immortality will leave humans discontented. He imagines science curing all diseases—then he imagines a bunch of angry poor people who can’t afford the new treatments, and a bunch of anxious, rich, disease-free people who are terrified to take risks in case they die by accident.
Harari uses the example of teenagers comparing themselves to movie stars on Facebook to suggest that modern humans constantly compare themselves to the world’s elite, which gives them inflated expectations that they too can be rich and powerful. In actuality, the vast majority of people won’t achieve fame and riches in their lives, but if they expect that they will, they’ll spend their lives disappointed. Harari thus suggests that modern humans (unlike our foraging ancestors) have unrealistic expectations about life, which causes deep unhappiness.
Themes
Biologists also conduct surveys on human happiness. To them, houses, cars, and true love don’t make people happy. Hormones do. Evolution has molded humans to feel sensations of pleasure when we do things that help us survive (like eat or mate), but only for a short while—so that we keep doing those things and stay alive. Some people also have better biochemical luck—their bodies generate more of the pleasure-inducing hormone (serotonin) than others. Harari thinks that a person without enough serotonin will never be happy, no matter how rich they are.
Harari explores another approach to measuring happiness. A biochemical approach suggests that a person feels happy when they have a lot of serotonin in their body. Harari brings up serotonin because he thinks there’s no reason to assume that modern humans have more serotonin in their bodies than ancient humans, so there’s no reason to believe that they’re any happier.
Themes
Harari compares a medieval French peasant who lives in a mud hut next to a pigsty and a modern Parisian banker who lives in a luxury apartment on the Champs-Elysées. Intuitively, it seems like the banker would be happier, but Harari disagrees. When the peasant finishes building his house, his brain secretes serotonin, making him happy. When the banker pays for his luxury apartment, his brain also releases serotonin—but Harari thinks there’s no reason to think the banker’s brain secretes more serotonin. That’s why, Harari thinks, companies invest in research into products like Prozac, which makes people’s brains produce more serotonin.
Harari underscores his claim that modern humans don’t have more serotonin in their bodies than ancient ones. He argues that whether a person builds a mud-hut or buys a penthouse, once they finally have a dwelling, they’ll experience a serotonin rush. To Harari, there’s no reason to believe that one experience releases more serotonin than the other. In other words, even though it looks (from the outside) that a peasant living in a mud-hut life looks like they have a more miserable life than a rich banker living in a penthouse, there’s no reason to assume that the peasant is actually unhappier on the inside.
Themes
Harari thinks the situation with happiness isn’t so cut and dry. He wonders if happiness is more like feeling your life is meaningful. Medieval people, for example, had tough lives overall, but were typically religious, meaning they believed their lives had meaning because they were working towards heavenly bliss, even though they were deluded. He thinks many modern, secular people probably feel like life is a lot more meaningless. Harari thinks all attempts to ascribe meaning to one’s life are somewhat delusional. He wonders if happiness depends on self-delusion.
Harari also suggests that there are many secular people living in modern societies, while people in the past tended to be more religious. Harari thinks that many modern, secular people feel like their lives are meaningless, because they have no afterlife to look forward to. So, as before, even though from the outside, the medieval peasant’s life looks more miserable than the modern, affluent, secular person’s life, the peasant might actually be better off emotionally. This means that the modern person is not necessarily happier than their impoverished ancestor’s life, even if modern life looks more comfortable from the outside.
Themes
Harari thinks that modern society privileges the individual, and tells people to trust their inner voices. Historical religious societies, in contrast, told people not to trust their inner urges and control their desires. Buddhists argue that the cycle of emotions makes people suffer. They think people are freed from suffering when they learn that feelings are impermanent, stop constantly craving them, and feel serene and calm instead. Harari considers all of these approaches to defining happiness, and he decides that many of them conflict with each other—it’s not even clear if people should trust their own feelings or not. He concludes that scholars have a lot more work to do to figure out this happiness business.
Harari argues that it’s actually really difficult to pin down exactly what happiness is, and there are lots of different views about it. This means that it’s difficult to assess happiness levels in the human population—both historically and in the modern day. Despite his hesitations, Harari will still ultimately conclude that ancient foragers were happier than modern people, mostly because he thinks ancient foragers didn’t have such high expectations in life, and therefore felt less disappointment on a day-to-day basis.
Themes
