I mentioned in my last review that I do not read a lot of non-fiction, but I have made it a goal this year to diversify my reading list. Tom Phillips’ Humans: A Brief History of How We F***ed It All Up examines human history and how we keep making the same f**kups over and over again without learning from them. I actually enjoyed reading this book and thought it was interesting (until I finished it, and then I felt sad lol). Phillips injects humour into his writing, which helps make the very heavy subject matter more palatable.

Warning: the rest of this post contains a lot of F-bombs.

According to Phillips, our first major fuckup was inventing agriculture. This led to humans leaving behind a nomadic lifestyle and grouping together in permanent settlements. Coming together into settlements led to inequality as the elites began to emerge, and agriculture brought new diseases into contact with humans while living in settlements created the conditions for epidemics. Agriculture may have also led to war when humans from one settlement began raiding on other settlements.

It is amazing how many things humans have fucked up over the years, from introducing species into areas where they really should not have been introduced, to war, to slavery, to the things we have invented, and it is scary how we have not learned from our earlier fuckups. There is also some amazingly fucked up people from our history and somehow these same types of fucked up people keep ending up running countries (if you have no desire to read this book, at least Google Saparmurat Niyazov. Like, WTF?? How have I never heard of this wacko before??).

Phillips’ attempts to end the book on a positive note, while at the same time pointing out what appears to be our future fuckup (cryptocurrency), but honestly, if you are like me and are very anxious about the future of the human race and our planet, you will find this book to be depressing as fuck. If we have not learned from our previous fuckups over the past 70,000 years, how can we expect future generations to not keeping fucking things up?