Review of "The Anthropocene: Reviewed"

Ok so I just finished reading The Anthropocene Reviewed and I can confidently say this was the worst book I have ever read. My two main problems are with the way John writes and how he makes his conclusions for each chapter. Beyond that, I have issues with other minor things he does, as well as the actual value and purpose in reading this. If I were to have a choice between this book and anything else, I would choose almost anything else; in most circumstances I would never voluntarily read this.

I literally can't comprehend how this book has star rating above two on Goodreads, let alone above four. Maybe I'm reading it wrong way, but I find it just purely bland and uninteresting. It's enjoyable only to a very low degree, when John gives mini history lessons (usually entertaining but rarely insightful) about some product or concept like Dr Pepper or the QWERTY keyboard layout; otherwise, it's just really boring and was hard for me to trudge through. Generally, it lacked the ability that other books have to make me want to know how they end. Instead, this book feels like Wikipedia half the time, and the other half the disorganized ramblings and recollections of the author, which I couldn't care less about knowing how his yapfest ends.

First off, I get that he is trying to write in a stream-of-consciousness style, but even though he is adhering to that genre, I must come to one of two conclusions: either the style itself is horrible or John is incompetent at writing cohesive arguments / stories in a stream-of-consciousness format.

1. His book lacks in coherent narratives and arguments. Numerous times throughout the book, John interjects with some completely random spiel, which I would find acceptable only if said story actually contributed to the greater message of the chapter, but, most of the time, his digressions do not add anything significant.
   • For example, in the CNN chapter starting page 127, I give him credit for making a cohesive stream-of-consciousness where the previous sub-topic builds upon the next one John introduces, up until page 130, where he literally demarcates his previous ramblings with this new one about living with his friends using a horizontal line. This segment about his friends just gives an extremely bulky context about the living situation John was in at the time of the next sub-topic. But really I feel like this entire page of just how he lives with his friends is completely irrelevant and devoid of meaningful substance. I feel like if you were to black out everything he writes after the line up until the next separator, and provide just an ounce of context about his living situation, the story would be 99% coherent, because the chapter pivots back into talking about the media, using a story which highlights how the news might, possibly unintentionally, distort the information they send out. Even so, it is unclear to me whether or not this is actually what John is trying to say, because I don't see him really explicitly connect the Arabic graffiti as being a reason for the reporter saying there is hatred and violence in the streets. It's things like this that really irritate me while reading this book. Yet, this chapter, in my opinion, is one of the better, more cohesive ones; some of them just seriously go off the rails and feel like they jump topics every five seconds, which translate as utterly incomprehensible noise to my brain.
   • One such chapter that's difficult to parse is Bonneville Salt Flats on pg 185, where the main idea is... well, very unclear. John starts the chapter by quoting a poet who basically says that love, most of the time, is not about enjoying in looking at your partner, but rather enjoying in the mutual activity of having an interest in something else, like looking at art together or reading poetry together, etc. So he stays on topic for a little while by giving his own experience with having joint interests with his wife until he decides to write an irrelevant yapfest about going to the casino and talking to strangers. At the end of the casino topic jump, he becomes overstimulated at the mere realization that his dealer was once a child, and that John too used to be a child. Does he elaborate on why this was so panic-inducing for him? Nope! He just abruptly jumps to him driving to the salt flats; so there was no real substance or meaningful depth in that segment.
     
     
     One thing that I really hate in this section about him visiting the salt flats is when he says "I kept trying to think of what it looked like, but my brain could only find highly figurative similes. It looks like driving alone at night feels. It looks like everything you're scared to say out loud. It looks like the moment the water retreats from the shore just before a wave rolls in." Seeing as how this gives nothing to the imagination, I went to my search engine just to see what the Bonneville Salt Flats actually look like, and I'm stunned... stunned at how this author claims he is unable to describe what the flats looks like without these annoying metaphors.
     
     
     My brain cannot process how a professional author, who has written multiple books, cannot describe an extremely vast, flat open area, surrounded by mountainous terrain, where the ground is of bright-white salt, which, in some pictures, is shaped into hexagons. It really is just a humongous section of abnormally flat land made of salt, and John claims that is too hard for him to describe.
     
     
     
     
     
     But going back to his chain of events, John then switches the topic once again to give his seemingly mandatory, regular complaint about how he sees humans as looking at the Earth and just seeing a big ball of resources to be harvested, arguing that we do so "despite all available evidence." My problem with this is that he loves to mention conservation, in one way or another, every couple of chapters, and it really gets annoying after the first time. Yes we should conserve our resources and use sustainable products, so can you please stop complaining about the same exact thing every time you find a sliver of a chance to do so; I already got the message like twenty chapters ago. Furthermore, doing this topic switch dilutes what John is trying to say, and makes his main message harder to discern.
     
     
     But guess what, he has TWO more topic switches. As John walks down the salt flats, he is reminded of the dealer at the casino, "and how bone-deep terrifying it is to be a child and know that you cannot decide what adults do to you." I am being completely serious when I say he literally pulls this out of nowhere and never ever elaborates on what he meant by this. It is genuinely so weird and just odd that he's overstimulated by the idea of being a kid, TWICE in this chapter without any meaningful dive into what he's so scared about. I am confused as to how this got past his editor and was printed out; what is the context!?! But anyways, his final topic switch, and the conclusion, is a callback to the first topic, where he joins his wife in gazing at the salt flats, sharing in an interest and calming down John.
     
     
     My question is what was the lesson? His narrative was so erratic that it's very hard to see what his point was when the chapter is littered with these random topic changes: Is it about the nature of love? Is it about being a kid? Is it about the planet's health? Does the final message have anything to do with the salt flats?
   • Sometimes, John literally pads an entire chapter with irrelevant stories and comes up with a conclusion that draws upon almost nothing meaningful from what he discussed prior, rendering 90% of the chapter worthless in my eyes. One example is on pg 223, The Hot Dogs Of Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur.
     
     
     ¶ 1 - Personal background about how John's wife and friends try to do everything they can while John likes to do only one thing
     ¶ 2 - Describing Iceland and that he's been told to eat from "a certain hot dog stand in Reykjavik."
     ¶ 3 - Anecdote of getting drunk in Sweden
     ¶ 4 - Being drunk while knee-deep in a lake
     ¶ 5 - He is hungover when he arrived in Iceland
     ¶ 6 - Makes a semi-profound statement that the sky is a human-made idea, and that the real sky isn't way up there but is what you are swimming in
     ¶ 7 - Describes the Icelandic town as being lifeless
     ¶ 8 - Cab driver drops them off early for a mysterious reason
     ¶ 8 - John is confused about the cab driver
     ¶ 9 thru 10 - Suspenseful buildup to something happening in the city
     ¶ 11 thru 13 - Streets suddenly erupt with sobbing and proud Iceland citizens
     ¶ 14 - They find out that Iceland won its first Olympic medal in men's handball
     ¶ 15 - He got interested in handball
     ¶ 16 - They went to a museum
     ¶ 17 - The Icelandic guide describes a waterfall as being "VERY HISTORIC"
     ¶ 18 - Complains about how tired he is but reluctantly agrees to go out some more with his wife and friends
     ¶ 19 - Finally gets to the hotdog stand the chapter is supposed to be about, and he briefly analyzes the ratings / reviews of the stand
     ¶ 20 - Emphasizes the significance of the hotdog, because John does not typically like food, but this experience was special
     ¶ 21 & 22 - Talks about the 2008 recession to say that once-in-a-lifetime events aren't always once-in-a-lifetime
     ¶ 23 - Yet he believes that his day in Iceland was truly once-in-a-lifetime, and that the hotdog was the greatest he has ever eaten
     ¶ 24 - 5 stars.
     
     
     So paragraphs 1-5 are pretty useless; they seem to exist for the sole purpose of saying that John doesn't want to do much in his travels and is extremely tired by the time he gets to Iceland. Paragraph 6 is just random. Paragraphs 7-16 are pretty much just him exploring Iceland in the middle of a historic event. Paragraph 17 is kind of funny. Paragraphs 18-24 are the actual main part of the story: the hotdog stand. In his final statement, he tries to make all of his other paragraphs relevant by saying the hotdog cured him of his hangover and made him feel good and whatnot despite wanting to stay inside, that the experience of eating the hotdog was a subjective once-in-a-lifetime-event shaped by both John's feelings and the external circumstances (the first Olympic medal thing), unlike an objective "once-in-a-lifetime" event such as an economic recession which tends to occur multiple times in a lifetime. In a way, the paragraphs can be made to connect to John's final idea, but they are practically irrelevant to what he's trying to say; the man spent 18 paragraphs before getting to the actual hotdog stand, after which he has 5 paragraphs he could've used to fit the whole story in. A lot of what he wrote in this chapter just feels like noise, noise that serves only to have a very meager impact on the final verdict, except for the sky paragraph; that sky paragraph is just completely random. It's just insane that 70% of the paragraphs are effectively used as setup that don't really contribute to the main message. I feel like he could've made this chapter a lot more concise and to-the-point, perhaps by making the experience of eating the hotdog longer and more eloquent, and dedicating only a few paragraphs to highlighting the stark contrast between his once-in-a-lifetime EXPERIENCE with once-in-a-lifetime EVENTS, rather than spending all these words on building the severely bloated context. To me, that 70% is virtually irrelevant and complete nonsense which does pretty much nothing for the conclusion. I give this chapter 1 star.
2. He makes certain statements that are weird and wrong or don't make logical sense
   • "When we visited in 2018. animatronic Donald Trump uttered a few sentences, including, 'Above all, to be an American is to be an optimist,' which is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how citizenship gets conferred in nation-states" (pg 69). - Excuse me what? I was so befuzzled when I saw this quote; this man wanted to take a jab at Trump so badly, so he decided to say that some motivational quote Disneyland put into robot Trump's mouth is a statement of how to become a legal citizen? What?
   • In the footnotes, "We're not a two-hundred-year-old nation; we're an extension of the Greek Republic and therefore thousands of years old" (pg 70)! - This is THE stupidest line I read in this book. Don't let John Green know that we are actually descendants of the first single-celled organisms, making us actually like millions of years old. It's just such a terrible statement. Like would you even consider America to be an extension of the United Kingdom in this day and age? No. Just no. We are separate from the UK and we are separate from whatever the hell the Greek Republic is or was; we are the U.S., and this specific entity has been here for 250 years, not thousands.
   • "We need to find a way to survive ourselves—to go on in a world where we are powerful enough to warm the entire planet but not powerful enough to stop warming it" (pg 19-20). - Poorly phrased; we are absolutely strong enough to stop the planet from warming. People literally dedicate nonprofits and other organizations towards researching and enacting solutions on reversing global warming. The real problem is stopping the warming from the source: oil billionaires are not going to dismantle their entire empire just because it's better for the planet; they're far more inclined to keep their income flow rather. This is not about lacking strength, it's about lacking motive (which he says on page 17!!! "We could choose to use less energy, eat less meat, clear fewer forests. And we choose not to.") There's little to no motivation for these people to tear down their empires, which have been flourishing for so long, to try and enter a new business that they could very well fail at and lose all of their wealth for. For the individual CEO, it is safer to stay in the business they are in rather than transition for the planet for the greater good. That is a motivation issue.
   • "What does it say that I can't imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me? My friend Stand Muller tells me that when you're living in the middle of history, you never know what it means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means" (pg 88). - I really hate the use of the word "mean" or "meaning" when the actual question is "what are the end implications / results of such and such for our society?" Ignoring that personal preference, John's profound statement is that we are living in the age of the internet and therefore we cannot know its end implications. I dislike the way he phrases this; it's just so weird that he's taking the underlying infrastructure that allows for such things like engagement algorithms and asking what is the end result of this? It's like asking what the meaning of electricity is and saying "I don't know because I am currently using electricity." We absolutely know the implications of these infrastructures; they are the tools that power devices and platforms, that allow them to communicate together. Furthermore, the internet is not like a history event, where it has an ending that allows you to see the meaning; we will always be living with some form of internet, which is just about getting information from point A to point B. It moreso seems like Green is trying to focus on what are the implications of social media, but yet again, even though social media is a platform built on the internet, it will likely remain permanently; there will be no end to it and we have to analyze how it affects us as time goes on. This is just a really weird thing he says and kind of doesn't make a lot of sense, and it just feels so pseudo-profound.
3. Outside of the author's shortcomings, I strongly feel that this book failed to provide any practical insight or value to the reader. Most of the conclusions that John comes up with feel pseudo-profound, being ideas that I've already thought about and / or just don't seem all that important or insightful.
   • Sometimes they just feel completely devoid of any lesson, like pg 231, The Notes App, where he yaps about transitioning from paper notes to digital ones, then the bulk of the chapter is just him reflecting on old notes he's saved on his phone, culminating in a conclusion that glazes a song and says "His eyes on [the song] gets a solid five stars from me, but as for the Notes app: I give it a three and a half stars." He has no explicitly stated final takeaway, and I personally don't see him hinting at any such lessons throughout the chapter.
   • Other times, they have some pseudo-profound statement: Chapter Sunsets (pg 95-99) is primarily about John reviewing and analyzing literature about sunsets and examining his own thoughts on sunsets and beauty. In his final statement, he says, "I would ... argue that you cannot see the beauty which is enough unless you make yourself vulnerable to it. And so I try to turn myself toward that scattered light, belly out [as an act of vulnerability and trust], and I tell myself: This doesn't look like a picture. And it doesn't look like a god. It is a sunset, and it is beautiful." This message makes absolutely no sense to me because it sounds grand and beautiful, but he just said that you need to be vulnerable to see true beauty. I can look at a sunset without showing my belly, and still get the same experience, no? I don't need to feel vulnerable when I'm looking at artwork. It just makes no sense to me and sounds pseudo-profound. Looking back at what he said before, it seems as though he's trying to say that describing a sunset just doesn't cut it; you have to see the sunset as it is to take in its true beauty. But this part about vulnerability is just so weirdly wedged into the conclusion and I really don't see how it serves any purpose or relates to the greater message.
   • And other times, when the statement does have some degree of profoundness, it's probably common-knowledge: "What would happen if we abandoned the idea of the U.S. Constitution being the ruling document of our nation, or the idea of nation-states altogether" (pg 71)? - While the author has another lesson in this chapter, this specific one has zero impact on me because I've already thought about the fact that our entire modern system only exists because people follow it and we believe in it, or at least I've thought about it in a heavily related way. He's trying to say that nations and some corporations only really survive because they base themselves on an idea that is beloved and shared, like Disneyland surviving off the imagined creations of Disney and all world governments relying on the fact that people believe in a government and a social system. It really is just not that deep, at least to me, and there are a LOT of statements that are MAYBE profound or semi-profound like this, but I feel so numb to its impact because it's not really giving me anything new. I'm saying this because I'm assuming that MOST people have thought about MOST of these statements before because, after all, we are highly intelligent humans.
   
4. Most of the Wikipedia-esque lessons in this book are about completely random things that don't really give a whole lot of important insight.
   • Page 48 - Thanks for letting me know that "Dr Pepper" does not contain a period, and that it's considered as its own category of soda; hearing that really opened my third eye and changed my entire worldview
   • Pages 55 to 57 - Learning about some random hated species of geese being driven near extinction, then allowed to explode in numbers rebuilt my entire moral system from the ground up and changed the way I live every day
   • Page 77 - Actually useful to know, though only until the standard is fixed: the standard temperature leads to far less productiveness than bumping it up like 10 degrees. THE FOLLOWING IS NOT VERIFIED: ChatGPT told me that the HVAC standard was based on a single 154 pound 40 year old man's metabolic resting rate, whatever that means, and that the studies are genuine. ChatGPT said that the studies found "room temperature" to be only slightly more beneficial for men's performance compared to temperatures warmer than "room temperature," which cause a significant improvement in women's productivity and only a slight decrease in the men's
   • Page 83 - This is useful for doctors and pharmacists, but I'm a thousand percent sure they learn about certain diseases having the ability to develop resistances against antibiotics regardless of this book, so it adds little value. What's he gonna say next? That the flu randomly gets mutations that make prior vaccines less efficient? I'm sure lots of people would know that, or at least should
   • Pages 116 to 119 - The Piggly Wiggly story. Now this is a story about engineering. It shows that you could have the lower quality product, but if it's cheaper and faster, your company will eat up 99% of the competition. Which is also kind of sad, but still, there is that 1% which still live because there is at least some demand for better products and services, stuff like organic markets and privacy-respecting services. But the lesson seems to be, unfortunately, whoever does it the fastest and the cheapest becomes the biggest, like Temu and Walmart. So, for engineers, it's showing one set of principles that have been put to use in making large, successful businesses
   • Page 121 - Reading that King George VI, Jacqueline Kennedy, and allegedly Stalin got a hot dog from this stand really changed my view on how amazing the stand is. A hotdog stand which is in "a neighborhood and entertainment area in the southwestern section of the New York City", for almost 100 years, had three major leaders eat one dog from. I am so impressed! They have a stand in one of the biggest cities, in an entertainment area, for almost 100 years, and they had three important people eat from there at least once. Absolutely shocking; I mean it really changes the whole story and how I perceive this hotdog stand not as measly, but now as godly
   • Page 140 - The entire yips chapter: hey look at all these professional, well-known athletes who all lost their skills but adapted!!! Essentially the same as Jerzy Dudek: don't stop trying even when everything seems to have failed. He should've done only one: blast the reader with 20 different atheletes who overcame the yips or delve into Jerzy Dudek's last-minute comeback. In here he just spits out random stories as fast as he can like he's trying to beat some sort of world record
   • Page 166 and 167 - One shoot of Kentucky Bluegrass can have 3-4 leaves and can grow to about three feet, at which point it sprouts blue flowers. There's about 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S. Almost 1/3rd of U.S. residential water use is dedicated towards watering a lawn. The word "lawn" didn't mean the same thing in the 1500s as it did the 1700s and beyond. Lawns were used to display wealth. Thomas Jefferson's slaves kept a good lawn. Half of these are random fun facts while the other half are actually relevant to John trying to demonstrate the humongous drain on time, energy, and resources lawns are
   • Page 187 and 188 - John just acts like a tour guide telling us that the Bonneville Salt Flats were a lake 14,500 years ago, which "has disappeared and re-formed a couple dozen times over the last five hundred million years," now a 30,000 acre salt flat that was once 500 feet underwater. The lake present there is "less than a tenth as great as Lake Bonneville once was." People come to mine the flats for potash and they drag-race: "A land-speed record was set there in 1965 when a turbojet car driven by Craig Breedlove traveled over six hundred miles per hour." John just machine-guns out as much trivia as he possibly can about the lake, entertaining facts that don't have much value
   • Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance - A chronicling of three people's lives and how unpredictable they were, especially if one only looked at a single photograph of them, just to say "anything might’ve happened, but one thing did." Very profound; the 5-minute Wikipedia lesson was a real mental game-changer
   • The Orbital Sunrise Chapter - Spews a bunch of words about how some Russian astronaut drew the orbital sunrise with some colored pencils or crayons to try and make a conclusion about art allowing John to see things he would otherwise never see
   • Overall, it was really important that I learned about all of these topics that basically felt like hey here's three fun facts about some random thing I just searched up 20 minutes ago. Like... okay... I guess. It's actually like one of those "200 useless facts about xyz!" videos, except it's a "200 useless facts about 20 random things!" book. But seriously, the Wikipedia stories are sometimes useful, like the lawn one showing how expensive it is to take care of Kentucky Bluegrass, but most of the time they are just like some dude hopping onto the most random topics and summarizing the page for a slideshow


I confidently proclaim I have learned nothing from this book except about the anxious, insecure, and worrisome mind of John Green. And I'm not trying to like insult him, though I would, I have, and I will (at the bottom of this review), but I want to keep it civil (for now); he literally describes himself as being anxious and worried about the littlest things, and the way he describes his experiences, to me, paints him as being extremely insecure, and I really don't like those traits influencing the reading because a lot of his narratives are nihilistic or include suffering and how life is a burden to be borne till death, as opposed to something neutral or a gift to be relished.


5. The uni says that "The Common Reading Experience helps students connect with the Michigan Engineering community through interactive discussions and events throughout the year." But I would argue that this book was a poor choice, despite me writing up a whole review to copy and paste to you. This book was so agonizingly bland that I feel as though I forget most of the things he talked about, and I, in no way, feel stimulated by reading this book. I would've much rather been happy to read a long-form cohesive narrative, a traditional non-fiction book over this. For something highly stimulating and actually valuable, I feel as though the uni could've instead had us read even a meager 25-page book on extremely difficult ethical dilemmas, such as the trolley problem, that are relevant to the field of engineering.
   
   
   Here are the things the uni said this is for, though:
   • "Helps students connect with the Michigan Engineering community through interactive discussions and events throughout the year" and "a great way to strike up those first conversations with your fellow classmates, as well as current students, faculty, and staff." - This is from the website and basically is saying this supposed to be a shared experience to help everyone connect.
   • "At its core, this book is about what it means to be human. As technological advances continue to accelerate in the age of AI, it's more important than ever for engineers to consider the human context of engineering solutions—and their own humanity. We hope you enjoy this read and we can't wait to hear all your take-aways from it!" - From the Instagram. So the first claim is that this book is about what defines the experience of being human, which, I mean, I personally don't see how it connects to engineering but okay, that's one claim. Second claim: that it will help us consider the impact our solutions have on humans, and look at our own humanity. Third claim: there are takeaways from this book.
   
   So, the claims, laid out clearly, are that:
   
   1. Reading this book will help students connect
   2. The book teaches us what things define the human experience
   3. We will consider the impact that engineering solutions have on humanity
   4. There are lessons to be learned from this book
   
   I had assumed the uni was the one which said the book was about ethical dilemmas but I suppose that's only what ChatGPT told me the book was about. Anyways, here are my counter arguments to each claim:
   1. In my opinion, this was a pretty bland book. Most of the time the author is either rambling about random ideas or regurgitating Wikipedia wisdom about some topic like air conditioners. I do admit there were some interesting parts though, but the history lessons were only mildly stimulating at most, and I didn't resonate with any of the emotional experiences the author was trying to elicit out of the reader, such as gazing into the beauty of nature. Really the only time I laughed during reading this was when he talked about the Icelandic guide says they have many natural attractions in Iceland, and then calling a waterfall "very historic," to which John says that every time he now looks at a waterfall, he can't help but think "very historic," which is funny because every natural POI is kinda historic. I also enjoyed the rather short-lived description of the Ginkgo tree, although I really see little worth in this book for engineers to consider their impact on humanity; there's only a few instances that might be applicable to engineers, like the author's relentless references to global warming, but the only major one I can think of right now is the Piggly Wiggly chapter (pg 113-119), which chronicles the financial journey of Clarence Saunders, a man who valued efficiency over quality, an ideal that lives on in our modern age where food is ultra processed and packaged, and where those who cut corners eventually out-compete the lesser efficient, more quality and socially conscious (comparatively speaking) corporations. Though, at the same time, John sees Saunders as having been "pulled by forces far larger than any individual. He merely understood what America was about to want—and gave it to us" (pg 118). I question the worth of trying to teach engineers this lesson because, ultimately, most will be at the heels of their bosses who most of them want (or are forced to achieve by THEIR superiors) efficiency and sales over social good. I can only see such a skill applying to people who startup their own companies, and are therefore in total control of how they run things, or as a small encouragement for individuals to advocate for their own values, despite their higher-ups' sentiments. In the end, the company that cuts more corners and engages in questionable practices to raise more money will be more popular than those that give better service at a higher price; there is only so much a few engineers can do against CEOs.
      
      
      The only part that I liked in this book was just the Ginkgo tree chapter, but only when he's describing the tree. Though my imagination was only slightly broken after a websearch of what the tree actually looks like. I imagined its wood being bright-white, with leaves of an almost golden hue, where the branches sprawl out exclusively towards the sky in a helix shape. I was mistaken because I misunderstood John saying that the leaves fell in helices as meaning the tree branches are shaped as helices, and I don't know how I got the idea that the wood was white. Nevertheless, I give this tiny segment of the Ginkgo tree chapter 5 stars. So how does this relate to helping me connect with students when I'm sending this to you? The fact is I do not want to discuss this book again because of how horrible I found it to be. I do, however, want to share my review of this book with you. But if anyone ever asks me why I don't like this book, I do not want to repeat myself over and over and over, and will instead hand over this permanent explanation. I also just genuinely hated this book so much I felt compelled to write a mega-review on every single thing I hate about it, but I would never want to use this book as a means of connecting with others.
   2. This book is not at all a good representative of humanity and its statements of the human experience are pretty limited or pseudo-profound. Like I said, this book is half Wikipedia and half personal anecdotes by a single author... and that's the problem. The author pretty much writes only about his subjective experiences, and of the objective adventures of others, so if there's any color in his writing, it's his own anxious, worrisome personality that we see the world through; this mindset that life is hard, and to get through it you need to appreciate it and its beauty, and its absurdity. But that's just one person's experience, likely since John has gone through a lot of hardship in his life and, from the feelings I get while reading this, is just pretty insecure. If this book was truly a good way to show humanity, it would've included the personal, subjective experiences of many others through their own views, instead we get one anxious father and his mini history lessons. Like there are many other dimensions to the modern human experience that are not really articulated by this guy, such as religion; John never really mentions religion so much, sometimes he mentions God, but he seems to be agnostic: "People ask me all the time if I believe in God. I tell them that I'm Episcopalian, or that I go to church, but they don't care about that. They only want to know if I believe in God, and I can't answer them, because I don't know how to deal with the question's in. Do I believe in God? I believe around God. But I can only believe in what I am in—sunlight and shadow, oxygen and carbon dioxide, solar systems and galaxies" (pg 97). Despite that, religion is, for many people, a large part of their lives. I'm not saying it is important to me; I'm non-religious / agnostic, but I feel like you can't really say a book is encompassing the human experience when it glosses over these concepts and ideas that are so central to a massive number of peoples' lives, and are so influential over culture and ethics. Instead this book narrowly focuses in on a single worrisome person's views on a broad array of topics, as opposed to a small taste of many peoples' minds, which would be a far stronger, comprehensive collection of the human experience.
   3. NOTE: I just found page 17, which mentions Hindu eschatology, basically the belief in Hinduism that the universe goes through cycles of creation, maintenance, then decline.
   4. I really see little worth in this book towards helping engineers consider their solutions' impact on humanity; there's only a few instances that might be applicable to engineers, like the author's relentless allusions to global warming, but the only major one I can think of right now is the Piggly Wiggly chapter (pg 113-119), which chronicles the financial journey of Clarence Saunders, a man who valued efficiency over quality, an ideal that lives on in our modern age where food is ultra processed and packaged, and where those who cut corners eventually eat up the lesser efficient, more quality and socially conscious (comparatively speaking) corporations. Though, at the same time, John sees Saunders as having been "pulled by forces far larger than any individual. He merely understood what America was about to want—and gave it to us" (pg 118). I question the overall worth of trying to teach engineers this lesson because, ultimately, most will be at the heels of their bosses who most of them want (or are forced to achieve by THEIR superiors) efficiency and sales over social good. I can only see such a mindset applying to people who create startups and are therefore in total control of how they run things, or as a small encouragement for individuals to advocate for their own values, despite their higher-ups' sentiments. In the end, the company that cuts more corners or engages in questionable practices to raise more money will be more popular than those that give better service at a higher price (look at Google Drive's prices versus Proton Drive's prices; privacy comes at the cost of not being subsidized by selling your data and feeding you personalized advertisements); there is only so much a few engineers can do against CEOs, as our hands are basically tied once we sign up for the job. The only other time I see him mention anything remotely connected to engineering is in the chapter Googling Strangers, where he says "It's horrifying, how much information can be accessed via Google about almost all of us. ... giving so much of our selves to private corporations like Google makes other people feel comfortable about sharing their selves. ... I often struggle to find security questions that can't be answered by studying my old social media accounts. ... less of our lives belong to us and more of our lives belong to the companies that host and gather our browsing habits and hobbies and keystrokes" (pg 154). Big Tech thrives off of this immense data collection, but is there really anything engineers can do about it? The CEOs have been doing this for ages. it's really successful, and they want even more data today than they did before; there will always be engineers who really want or really need the salary of a job at FAANG, where no higher up will ever approve of an algorithm or privacy policy change that results in less predatory behaviors, and less money for the company. So, in general, I really don't see a whole lot of value in having engineers consider what they are doing to society and our personal rights, but putting that aside, this book didn't help me see the impact that solutions can have on people's livelihoods from a different angle nor to a higher degree. To counteract my viewpoint as it may seem that I wouldn't accept pretty much any book that claims engineers can make a difference, perhaps John could've mentioned successes of the meager, yet noticeable organizations that want to keep the internet a private, secure space (GrapheneOS, Proton), or how some organizations are dedicated to researching, advocating, and trying to reverse climate change (I don't know any off the top of my head, lel, but I do know they exist; I just care more about digital ownership, security, and privacy), or any other companies and organizations that are dedicating themselves towards using engineering for the greater good. Maybe you could consider his stories as sufficiently meeting this claim by the university, about his worries over the world turning artificial, about climate change, about Big Tech, about self-indulgent greed over social good, as stories that show the dark side of engineering. Yet, I see this doom and gloom as counterproductive: reading his essays makes it feel like there's absolutely nothing we can do, that we lack the strength, motive, and agency, both as engineers and as humans. But he doesn't typically recognize that making a positive difference for our planet in some capacity is genuinely possible, albeit it is the minority. Predatory greed will always be pervasive, but there will also always be a counter-invariant that seeks to better the world for humanity.
   5. Personally, I feel as though I learned nothing from reading this book, and if I did, it's not even relevant to engineering. To make it clear, I will list out what I took away from every single chapter of this book:
      
      • Introduction - This book is basically John's love letter to the world
      • "You'll Never Walk Alone" - John likes the idea of finding strength in solidarity during the worst and the best of times, and to continue moving with courage from a song he heard, "cheesy, but it's not wrong;" it's also a cliche that most people probably know in some shape or form from other media
      • Humanity's Temporal Range - The world has not ended yet and any predictions are 99.99% futile, something that, apparently, according to a 2012 survey that John cited, might be useful in general because 22 percent of people polled in the USA thought the world would end in their lifetime, versus 6% in France. By the way, I believe this is the ONLY time John EVER mentions artificial intelligence: "Today these worries sometimes focus on artificial intelligence running amok" (pg 17). I never really worried about this but just recently an OpenAI model broke out of a sandbox, and found and chained together zero-days to do RCE on HuggingFace's servers 🤣 🤣 🤣. Still, I'm not worried about it too much because I really don't think AI can do so much (especially given the insanely high costs it takes to run the smartest models as opposed to regular consumer ones), and even if it can, hopefully the most critical infrastructures like kernels and banking backends will use the same or their own similar models to analyze their codebases for any critical vulnerabilities. Also, the publication date of this book is basically an eternity in the advancement of LLMs, image-generation models, and AI in general: May 2021. So much has changed since then, like come on this isn't even post-AI boom, one of the most significant events in human history, and one of the uni's posts said, "as technological advances continue to accelerate in the age of AI," which SHOULD signal to me that this book SHOULD contain a reasonable focus on AI, but it doesn't. Anyways, the lesson is that John is malding over climate change but eventually admits that he believes humans will survive almost anything, and that our specie's future will extend far beyond how long we've been on this planet. He mentions that most technological advancements happened closer to our time, which seems like technology moves exponentially fast. So, if an engineer can extrapolate any information from this... you are cooked and your job will be taken over by AI because you are far too slow 😂 😂 😂. But really, thank you, John, that was very informative; your opinion has completely transformed my worldview and I will now heavily pollute the atmosphere because I know the future generations will survive it!!!
      • Halley's Comet - Makes a pseudo-profound statement that history and human life are both super slow and super fast, which is a statement that is only made possible by having no absolute reference for what constitutes a long time, and what constitutes a short time. Without any real anchor, he is able to make this contradictory statement that may feel deep, but it's like okay, whatever. Anyways, the lesson is that John hates that the world is uncertain, but he loves that a comet that comes around once every seventy years or so is predictable; big deal
      • Our Capacity for Wonder - I actually was not assigned to read The Great Gatsby by my high school (pg 30), but I did have to read F451 and Animal Farm. "Fitzgerald misspelled the word aesthetic—but who hasn't?" I haven't. "Just read the first sentence aloud: 'In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.' You can damn near tap your foot to it." What in tarnation does John feel in this quote that he calls it "rhythmic." Without John's commentary, I would've never even begun to consider that quote as being rhythmic. Like he has to have some special neuron wiring in his brain that makes him think of these things; he has to have SOMETHING. Beyond these nitpicks, John seems to say that while "vapid capitalism" is basically evil, Gatsby shows us that people still want to be invited, meaning even a group has questionable or even despicable morals, most humans feel a strong desire to be included (who could've guessed that's part of why people go against their morals to be part of groups like cults, gangs, or toxic cliques). What he explicitly says in the end is that humans have a profound capacity for wonder in the littlest of things (like a leaf) or the biggest (sending telescopes out into space). Was this book made for people who have been living inside of a cave their whole life or something? I'm willing to bet that 99% of people have looked at the intricacies of something small, and that 90% of those who've had access to education have looked at how far we've come and been like, "woah, that's cool"
      • Lascaux Cave Paintings - John Green's lesson: it's absurd that humans make replicas of cave paintings because the real cave was growing mold and losing its art, but I'm glad we focused on preservation. He's like the caves exist but you can't visit them, making it like a metaphor for the past, which exists but we can't go back to those times. Honestly just rambling. Why did I not takeaway anything from this? Because, guess what, I also knew that the past is something you can't go back to...
        MIND
        BLOWN
      • Scratch 'n' Sniff Stickers - John was picked on in school so collecting sniffing stickers would take him "back to a time and place that felt safer." Reflecting on these stickers as an adult, John worries about a widespread transition into turning the experience of smell into something artificial in the context of how much humans have already done to make things artificial. But most of the stimulation from products is tactile (fidget toys), visual (paintings or games/movies, kinda but not really because they also involve a lot of thinking), and auditory (songs and SFX), which implies that smell isn't an effective experience to monetize, so I wouldn't worry about it, plus I personally don't like the idea of breathing in stuff that isn't oxygen, though perfumes exist and a lot of people use those. So what's the lesson to engineers? "Please don't transition more of our world into synthetic products and experiences." I personally never heard of a movement to drive natural smells to extinction, but I have heard of VR gear implementing tactile feedback, and possibly experiments with smell
      • Diet Dr Pepper - John keeps drinking Diet Dr Pepper because he likes its synthetic taste even though he thinks it's bad for him... but he actually thinks it's ok: "So Diet Dr Pepper probably isn't a health risk for me." He also says in chapter Humanity's Temporal Range page 16, "I'd bought sixty cans of Diet Dr Pepper, so that I could drink two for each day of the lockdown." Really? Are you really going to be like this? Also he apparently drinks it to replace his vice of smoking, which he insists is not for the "buzz," then proceeds to describe the literal effects of nicotine and attribute it to him wanting to give in to a vice
      • Velociraptors - John is not so taken aback by the inaccuracies of Jurassic Park for the sake of sounding and looking cool; he finds both the real and the fake velociraptors to be cool, and sees his brain as ineffective for surviving the modern world because it's so accustomed to thinking of the fake velociraptor. My verdict: only thing I learned was that Jurassic Park is very inaccurate; I would've never known that the velociraptor we know is fake. Maybe for other people his visual bias thingamajing might be more relevant, in which case maybe said person is or isn't aware of it
      • Canada Geese - Green sees the Canada Geese as a symbol for how humans live, thriving in our man-made environments when, as a collective force, humanity can, and almost did wipe out Canada Geese. But as an individual person, Green feels powerless, like he is forced to go with the flow of advancement just as the geese do. So what's the lesson, and can it be applied to engineering? That your individual power is virtually useless, which is a horribly defeatist statement. It would've been better had it been paired with something like using your individual power to gain collective power or add to a collective force, such as building your own company or organization, or joining a cause
      • Teddy Bears - John finds it odd that children today buy plushies of animals that were once so feared that "bear" is probably a substitute for the true name. Yet this shift in how people see bears has not changed the general effect that has been observed: the extinction of polar bear habitats is accelerated by humanity. The lesson: being adored by humans does not guarantee safety of your species... which ignores the fact that kids only like bears in plushy form, while cats, dogs, parrots, fish, and whatever else are kept as both pets and plushies; bears, on the other hand, are never kept as pets. Even then, his cuteness and utility argument breaks down from his own prior story: why were there laws enforced for protecting the greatly despised Canada Geese, and why were there movements to protect elephants from hunters who wanted their ivory? It seems like the factors involved in preventing the extinction of an animal are not so dominantly cuteness and utility; there will be people who want to preserve many sorts of animals that are useless to our kind and aren't recognized as cute, especially when said specie is on the brink of extinction
      • The Hall of Presidents - John sees Disney World and a lot of governments and corporations as "plastic," where they present the best version of themselves while omitting negative details, that they're a facade and feel fake. The relevance of this to engineering I suppose is knowing that corporations just want money; Meta loves data collection for the profit, not for "connecting" people or anything, but I'm sure the masses know that, or at least most engineers going to work for their companies would know their true nature. I mean people should already know that most companies just want you to make them more money as an employee, and look for the most efficient money-making strategies like selling data, cutting corners, and just hyping up investors with borderline lies whenever they can influence their PR
      • Air-Conditioning - The ability to cool down things has been a tremendous help in shaping technological advancement and lifestyle, and John complains about climate change for the 500th time. Really it's just him yapping about the history of air conditioning and climate change, so there's not much to takeaway from this
      • Staphylococcus aureus - Life seeks self-preservation, without malicious intent. Wow! I could've never guessed that bacteria colonizes not because it's mad, that lions kill and eat not because of malice, that some humans eat meat not because they hate animals, but because they all see it as sustenance to satisfy self-preservation. I don't see how any of this could apply to engineering
      • The Internet - The internet is becoming more merged into our lives and John doesn't understand the implications of it. Pseudo-profound statement, yes he probably means social media but even social media's implications have to be understood in real-time; you will not get a chance to look back and be like "oh so that's what it did," because it will likely never go away
      • Academic Decathalon - John wants to feel validated and included, like most humans, and that we can't go to the past but we keep moving, and maybe the past holds us together. I'm pretty sure he already said that we can't go back to the past in another chapter, and has also said the idea that we keep moving, the only new thing is that "the memory still holds [John] together." If there are people who are held together by memories, I don't think they need someone to tell them this, and add no new information. As for the need to feel validated and included, John's friend Todd helped him get into the Academic Decathalon and supported him, increasing John's confidence in his own intelligence. Alone, I don't see this applying to anything, so I'll extend this as saying a statement about most humans, which can be made relevant to engineering in some ways: social media companies abuse validation to foster addiction, overly sycophantic LLMs throw some people into AI psychosis, and engagement algorithms encourage certain people to root themselves deeper within their conspiracy theory groups. So there needs to be a balance in these systems... but that balance is not incentivized by most companies
      • Sunsets - Something about ?vulnerability? and experiencing a sunset as it is, and not trying to interpret it in any way. Really mid, cliched takeaway
      • Jerzy Dudek's Performance on May 25, 2005 - Never give up, even when all odds are against you, because you just might win. Inspiring, but somewhat cliche. Still, one of the few interesting stories John gave
      • Penguins of Madagascar - John says he is a mindless unquestioning human just like the penguins in the movie Penguins of Madagascar. Great
      • Piggly Wiggly - Tangentially related to fear of AI replacing humans, but mostly about how the biggest corporations become successes by cutting corners, reducing prices (by reducing quality), and maximizing efficiency. This has given us a world where things are faster, but at the cost of our own health or other things like privacy and security. Maybe engineers have some influence over how they create their tools and products so that they can focus on humanity first?
      • The Nathan's Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest - Humans can be both silly and cruel, and we need to be careful what and whom we listen to. Genuinely what age-group was this book written for
      • CNN - The news sometimes misreports information, but it also reports only what's new, and not things like sustained progress updates on long-standing issues such as climate change and child mortality rates. This could be useful to some people because there are people who are entrenched in watching specific news outlets
      • Harvey - While depressed, John watches a movie about a mentally ill person who isn't "much of a contributor to society" and remains calm despite his sister trying to commit him to a mental institution. Despite this, John claims that Elwood (the mentally ill person) is "human ... valuable ... loved." 1. Yes he is human. 2. You just said he isn't a contributor so he's pretty much not valuable. 3. His sister is literally trying to get him committed. For some reason, the movie snaps John out of his depression after seeing Elwood's persona
      • The Yips - Shows that despite the yips, people find ways to adapt or master new skills. This is another one of John's "just keep going through life" sort of dealies
      • Auld Lang Syne - Yaps about the history of this song then ends with one version that just says, "we're here because we're here because we're here," as one philosophical statement for why we exist: just because we do. I wouldn't call this a profound statement but I'd call it a reasonable philosophical take. In the realm of engineering, though, I can't see this applying to anything practical
      • Googling Strangers - Barely focuses on how Big Tech loves to invade privacy, and how much we have to give up to use basic services in today's world, instead going on about a story of "I thought kid died; went to Google many years later and found him alive, therefore googling strangers gets four stars." So his entire rating on googling strangers rested upon whether or not the kid died, and ignoring all of his other experiences in finding out about people's lives: "It could've gone the other way ... But it didn't. And so I can't help but give the practice of googling strangers four stars." A substanceless and heavily biased conclusion, terrible
      • I would like to add my own little random note here: I hate how large Google has gotten that the act of searching for something on the internet is referred to as "googling." It became really annoying when I was made aware of its ubiquitousness when it's just a jank corporation's name. Nowadays I try to use the word "websearch" instead to take the Google ick out of it, and call it by what it really is. It's a little petty but it's just like uhrrr I don't want to say "Google that." I don't like Google at all. Just "websearch it." Anyways, SearXNG FTW!
      • Indianapolis - John used to hate Indianapolis because it is a terrible city: "our aging water treatment system frequently overflows and dumps raw sewage directly into it. The city sprawls in every direction—endless mini-malls and parking lots and nondescript office buildings. We don’t invest enough in the arts or public transportation," though he concludes with a newfound love for the city after seeing "it as a place where big moments in human lives take place." Yea. And I don't doubt big moments happen in the worst of places like North Korea. Just because people have big moments in Indianapolis doesn't excuse its flaws. Wouldn't you agree the same is true for America, John? One of the greatest countries, yet its past is littered with atrocities, yet in the Hall of Presidents chapter, you refused to value its triumphs greater than its drawbacks. Then for some random reason he starts talking about wanting to create stable communities to cure the "disease of loneliness"? Excuse me, where in his own text did he actually feel lonely? What I see is pure disgust at the sewage and sprawl, so it feels just so disconnected for him to be like "oh and Vonnegut said this so I want to do that in Indianapolis," when he never mentioned wanting to create community; the chapter was 90% about himself
      • Kentucky Bluegrass - Just yaps about the history of the lawn and how it's basically useless and just a massive drain on all sorts of resources. In the end he also says, "You’re mostly touching the machines that mow or edge the grass, not the plant matter itself," when one mows a lawn. Now I'm no gardener, but when I think of gardening I think of using gloves for dirty work, so you're touching the gloves, or using some sort of tool like those things that snap off tree branches and the tools which cut hedges. Even with this argument over why the grass is useless and, in fact, a waste of time, money, and resources, John keeps the lawn, rather than cutting it off. My parents didn't want to mow lawns, so what did they do? They got concrete plastered over the majority of the front and back yard: problem solved via action rather than writing a chapter in a book about how much you hate mowing the lawn
      • The Indianapolis 500 - "Yea tens of people DIED on this racing track but I like it because of the community." Pretty much just his insecure need to feel included I'm guessing. I suppose the lesson is some people are just strongly drawn to feeling community??? or want to feel like they belong??? I mean we already know that... it's usually considered a basic human need, at least for MOST people
      • Monopoly - John complains that Monopoly refuses to acknowledge that the game originated from a lady who was trying to encourage people to see the monopolistic failings of capitalism, and to instead push people towards advocating for fairer systems. I mean look, I see the description is very under-appreciative of Magie's influence on Monopoly, but honestly it's Darrow who invented Monopoly. Like if you made a new type of drone and patented it, but you got the ideas from other companies, would you say "actually this drone was invented by whoever the first person to make something that bore the resemblance of a modern drone"? No! It's literally your drone that you patented; it's your version. Magie made the Landlord's Game, and Darrow made Monopoly. Monopoly being a derivative of the Landlord's Game does not mean Magie is the inventor of Monopoly, when she is just the inventor of land-grabbing games; and I'm sure she's just a "pioneer" as Hasbro puts it, because, let's be real, there were probably other people who independently made similar games. It feels more like John is mad that a progressive feminist's idea has evolved into a conceptually ruthless board game, wherein one person essentially took all the credit and money that others could've had before him, going against the ideals of Magie
      • Okay I went to the Wikipedia page of Monopoly to see what happened because ChatGPT is claiming that Magie actually owned the patent and that Darrow bought it from her; turns out that John failed to mention this extremely important detail that the game is not a derivative, but is basically a near exact copy of Magie's game, making Magie the true inventor of Monopoly, not Darrow: "Magie patented the game again in 1923 ... [Darrow's] only change was to add symbols for the electricity and water companies and for the railway stations ... The Parker Brothers bought the game's copyrights from Darrow. When the company learned Darrow was not the sole inventor of the game, it bought the rights to Magie's patent for $500 [which is about $12,188 in 2026]." So Darrow straight up stole Magie's game and tried to profit big on it, then was like oh snap we gotta ask her for the rights, so they bought her patent; then Hasbro is like "yea she did something but she didn't make our game, oh no no, of course not!" The story is far more despicable than John frames it
        So, did I learn anything that applies to engineering? Yes: don't be a sellout on what matters
      • Super Mario Kart - The world is unfair but this game is bussin' because it's designed to make sure even top players sometimes lose to lesser-skilled individuals. Okay... I guess. I mean we already know there is corruption in the world and it's favored to those who are already rich. Me personally, I prefer competitive games, but it's nice to play a forgiving game sometimes. Still, I learned nothing really
      • Bonneville Salt Flats - Love is about shared interests? Being a kid is scary? Humans love to harvest the planet? He just jumps around so many topics for no reason
      • Hiroyuki Doi's Circle Drawings - John basically says that doing mindless repetitive tasks gives us a chance "to be," and is about finding relief in making impermanent marks. 1. I personally think doing a mindless task is stupid if your goal is "to be," when being is about existing; this is just occupation. 2. Why did he mix in the relief thing and the impermanence thing into the final message; it's just so weird that he decided to jam those two things into the conclusion, one of which he literally just now mentioned (impermanence). If I have to say something analytical, it would be this: many philosophies and religions think of simply being as not signing your name on a sheet of paper 150,000 times, and instead argue against doing that if your goal is "to be," by simply being still and emptying your mind, to sit in the fact of your existence
      • Whispering - John loves whispers because they show trust. Well in the world of engineering, a whisper means you are forced to sign 500 NDAs and get messages like "how do we make our advertisement engine more predatory?"
      • Viral Meningitis - John hates when people try to make him feel better by saying that his illness thankfully gave him a break from work, which I don't know if anyone says that, but I would not say that because, as John puts it, "ends up minimizing their experience," which makes sense. Maybe he doesn't like that but honestly the people around him are trying to focus on the positive rather than the negative; they mean well. As for his other claim, John says that people try to attach meaning to illness, even though disease has no agenda, and isn't trying to teach a lesson that "could've been learned less painfully elsewhere." This is a reasonable claim because some people really do think there's a cosmic reason why things happen like people getting sick, when it's pretty much always a materially-explainable reason. This is similar to the Staphylococcus aureus chapter, but with just those added complaints of "people minimize my pain" and "disease doesn't have meaning." People may understand that disease just does its thing, but they may still think there was a meaning to the infection. So the general usefulness of this is evident, but I cannot see it applying so well to engineering. Perhaps it can be interpreted as a warning: "don't aggressively pattern-match things that are objectively unrelated," which is useful moreso to people who deal with data; I personally am already aware of the human tendency to link and pattern match absurd and unrelated things (conspiracy theories), but for the objectives of the university, this chapter could provide important information to engineering students, though the final connection I can make is very weak and tangential
      • Plague - In a crisis, humans can be either very cruel and bestial or compassionate and cooperative; John sees this response as a choice, and that we should strive to go for the option that maintains civility and peace. This one could be quite relevant in general because of COVID showing how people become frantic during a crisis, buying out stores, and blaming the Chinese; I'm not sure if the Chinese did it, but even if they did, some random Chinese person is not the enemy. I don't know how widespread the racism may have been, but I know that one kid at my school is Korean-German, and I overheard her friend tell her that his dad said not to speak with Asian / Chinese people because of the virus... but he chose to disobey. So there is definitely value in this message for people, though I doubt its possibility to change one's mind. For me, in a crisis, I'm just going to try not to die, that's my goal. However, humanity morality in a crisis isn't a relevant factor in any engineering scenario I can think of
      • Wintry Mix - Green says that humans build meaning and assign it to things wherever they go, when nature just wants to do its thing: a cloud doesn't mean anything, nor does it have emotions. His final statement: "What you're looking at matters, but not as much as how you're looking or who you're looking with." So because he was sitting with his wife, he sees the wintry mix as beautiful, something he normally sees as dirty. I really don't see anything of use from this passage; some people assign meaning to things that don't have any intrinsic meaning, so what. And people who assign emotions to indifferent phenomena and objects are probably doing what the writers do: emphasis or personification as a rhetorical device, not as a literal statement. And while Green argues that assigning emotions to these things is an involuntary action rather than a conscious choice the takeaway remains the same: some people project meaning onto things that have none. So what
      • The Hot Dogs of Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur - Once-in-a-lifetime events are usually not once-in-a-lifetime; but what truly may be such is a personal EXPERIENCE, rather than an objective EVENT. Not really a lot of value in this statement. I suppose just savor the moments you have?
      • The Notes App - John writes notes. Substanceless.
      • The Mountain Goats - John feels as though this one band perfectly describes his life and hopes that we find a band that resonates that deeply to us. Corny
      • The QWERTY Keyboard - Rants about the history of the QWERTY layout then ends with him being a kid who had poor handwriting and low self-esteem, but felt empowered by the keyboard because he was a good typist, and being in an online chatroom showed him only as "a series of keys struck in quick succession," omitting his "anxious flesh and brittle bone." He then gives the QWERTY layout four stars. I a thousand percent bet he gives it this high rating only because he fell in love with the keyboard; he is rating the experience of typing itself and not necessarily the layout. For engineers, however, the history of this demonstrates a real development environment / process, where crafting an optimal typewriter layout involved heavy testing and responsiveness in development. Basically, don't ship to prod before extensively testing something, which, I sure hope most engineers already knew
      • The World's Largest Ball of Paint - Life is like getting to paint one spot on the world's largest ball of paint; eventually, your mark will fade but your influence echoes throughout the ages. Everything you do is virtually impermanent. Middddddd we all know that
      • Sycamore Trees - Green finds out that if you keep asking "what's even the point," you eventually reach a point where... well, there is no point (which he says he learned when he was a teenager, by the way, demonstrating that you don't need to be a wise monk to realize this, and that people have probably already thought about this, or something similar like the most primitive reason for a certain phenomenon, which devolves into either a circular reason, a "because it just is" reason, or an infinite sequence of reasons. So how did he dig himself out of this despair? From some girl looking at the word "believe," and interpreting it as meaning "be" and "live," even though "live" isn't in the word, it's "lieve," John is like "wow! I just hold onto life and go on!" Which, to me, is a terrible thing to say because it paints life as something that you need to justify as something worth going through, something that is negative by default, rather than accepting it and enjoying it as it is. In his conclusion, he goes to a third claim, where John changed his mindset to say that the most primitive point of something is to just be, like a tree giving shade: he sees the deepest point for the tree's shade as just being there, being there for him to experience. While this could be useful for someone who's in that sort of mindset where nothing matters, I feel like John's resolution is extremely poor, where it's basically framed as "so yeah I just suddenly said 'be live' and was like 'that's the point.'" I feel like he really could've done a better job at detailing his recovery or providing a better philosophical solution. For everyone else and engineers, this really doesn't have much value; it's just Green's coping mechanism for existing
      • "New Partner" - Just John glazing some song he's associated with certain phases in his life and ending with "I hope [you find a song that] carries you to places you need to visit without asking you to stay in them." What. I don't know about you, but I don't feel like associating any song with moments in my life; I just want to solidify them as they were, are, and will be
      • Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance - The future can be extremely unpredictable. We already know
      • Postscript - John yaps about random stuff including how he feels about the anthropocene, giving an ambivalent answer where he enjoyed going to the movie theater and drinking alcohol, but hates how humans have contributed to the extinction of many species. Then he asks "What does it mean to live in a world where you have the power to end species ... but you can also be brought to your knees ... by a single strand of RNA? ... but the only conclusion I can draw is a simple one: We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary." Really John? When you said "meaning," which is a word that's very, very hard for me to parse in a context like this, where you ask the meaning of something that's not a word, all you really meant to ask was "why am I so strong and so weak," to which your answer is "oh because I, as a human, am temporary, frail, and small." Bravo John, bravo. You just repeated your question as if it were an answer. He considers himself part of the Earth as his body is a product of earthly materials, so he's gleeful at his own interpretation that he is "Earth loving Earth." Good for you, buddy, truly a 150 IQ statment that not even Einstein could've formulated
      • Post-Postscript - The only time he ever said "fox" in his book, AND I ABSOLUTELY LOVEEE FOXES, 10 stars. Besides that, he's just saying I couldn't give up this book so here's two more essays, and he's like wow look at all these readers who interpret my essays and find useful meaning out of them... yea, well not me...
      • I wonder if there are foxes in Michigan; I think it's illegal to own one there.
        
        
        Michigan is #22 on this list though California is #5. I mean I've never seen foxes running around where I live but I suppose I've never gone near where they live. I don't know if this site is just spitting words just because but it claims that "The Red Fox is a familiar sight across much of Michigan, known for its adaptability and striking appearance". This other website also puts Cali and Michigan as having alot of foxes. Oh snap I got it backwards; foxes are allowed to be kept as pets in Michigan, though I'm expecting it needs like some strict permits / licenses. Wait this other source says it's fully prohibited in Michigan
        
        
        
        
        
        What.
        
        
        Ok whatever, it doesn't matter.
        
        
        
      • The Orbital Sunrise - John says something about art being a product of what you've already seen and known, and he glazes an art piece by an astronaut who drew an orbital sunrise, which John considers an authentic portal to seeing things he will never see. He ends with "Through art, paradoxes of consciousness resolve for me. I see what I will never see. I know what I will never know. And I survive what I will not survive." Now that sounds really pseudo-profound because he is shifting definitions and adding random stuff to his statement: the first word of each sentence is metaphorical--"see" means to metaphorically see while the second "see" means to observe the actual phenomenon or concept with your real eyes; if you know something, then you know it--I cannot see any definition shift in this sentence; what the heck does it mean to survive what you will not survive? That just sounds so fake and tacked-on, adding no real depth or value (not that this chapter even had any to begin with)
      • The Ginkgo Tree - "Be careful what you ridicule, for in time you will become it." HAHAHAHAHA yea right; never in my life do I ever want to write the way this guy writes. However, he is partially right: I have ridiculed some groups of people who I eventually became a part of 😜. John then gives a whole anecdote about some weird neighbor giving each tree a name or purpose or some persona, like a wedding chapel or Zeus. John claims that we don't see things as they are, but rather as we are, so when John learns that the Ginkgo tree is adaptable and tenacious, he's like "oh that's what I am / want to be too," but then he's like no actually this tree is a symbol of simply being, that my purpose in life is to simply live, love, and be. Okay great work, John, you have just stumbled across one sort of "meaning of life" dealie
      • Final Lessons For Me - I should aim to work at some company that is for the human good, like Proton, at some point (I wasn't thinking of this before, but John gave me the *idea*); don't sellout on the creations that matter most to you (I kind of already knew this because I have a game which I could've sold to some team of people, but I decided against it, even though I let it rot, because it's mine and I care about it being my property, my rights, my creation)


In this final bonus section, I will insult and attack the personality of John, and give my more personal, less based takes on his book, as it just wouldn't be that cool if I put it at the very top, or in any spot that isn't the very bottom:


• I hate how the introduction is laden with reviews spanning two pages that incessantly glaze this book. The absolute glaze-fest behind this man's book is truly astounding to me.
• The author is seriously a total geek, like a really weird nerdy disgusting one; not someone who's smart or anything.
• Chapter The Internet, pages 86 and 87: "On the CompuServe Teen Forum, nobody knew anything about me. They didn't know that I was a miserable, cringingly awkward kid whose voice often creaked with nervousness. They didn't know that I was late to puberty, and they didn't know the names people called me at school. ... Back then, the internet charged by the hour, which became a real issue because I wanted to spend every hour on it. ... At this point, a lifeline appeared when I was 'hired' as a moderator for the Teen Forum. The payment came in the form of all the free internet I wanted, and I wanted a lot of it. CompuServe even paid for a separate phone line so I could be online constantly. If a single event in my life occurred outdoors that summer, I do not recall it." I mean what do I have to say. The guy is a literal Redditard moderator geek. His geekiness is so annoying; it rubs onto everything he says. He let kids put wet trash on his head, which he dealt with by sniffing stickers, come on (pg 43).



• This man is filthy. Page 43, chapter Scratch 'N' Sniff Stickers - it felt really yucky to read about him scratching stickers and smelling stuff like "Garfield eating chocolate, the lawn mower that smelled like grass, the taco that smelled like tacos." Like why, oh my goodness that's disgusting son. Page 68 chapter The Hall of Presidents: "droplets of sweat erupting from every facial pore." Please stop. Page 130, chapter CNN: "[we were] together, to be in every part of life together. And we were. We loved one another with a ferocity that unnerved outsiders. ... I once went on a few dates with someone who told me one night that my friend group seemed like a cult. When I told Shannon and Katie and Hassan about this, we all agreed that I needed to break off the relationship immediately." What a lovely friend group; surely they're not a cult: "Hassan nodded, and deadpanned, 'Oh, shit, guys. We're a cult.'"


Just stop. Stop it. I don't want to hear about your weird ferocious love for these people who got triggered over someone calling them a cult.


Page 181, chapter Super Mario Kart: "three or four of us squeezed on that couch, hip to hip." Why does he like that oh my goodness. I would find that to be a very, VERY uncomfortable situation, hoping that I get to leave soon.
• I hate how, in many chapters, the author's anxious / depressive / insecure attitude paints life as being a heavy burden, something that we need to trudge through. He treats life like it's a job that we don't want to work but have to until we are liberated because of death. It just feels like I'm reading the ramblings of someone's hyper-anxious depressive mind, someone who really needs some encouragement and support. I don't like reading these negative, self-destructive narratives; it's just not good aura, and starts to get really annoying. Like the very first real chapter, "You'll Never Walk Alone," ends with "The song doesn't claim the world is a just or happy place. IT just asks us to walk on with hope in our hearts. ... Though our dreams be tossed and blown, still we sing ourselves and one another into courage." As the very first chapter alone, this just seems like typical motivation, but as you go into the book, John's insecurity reveals itself more and more, showing how he thinks in a nihilistic manner. And knowing that, his thoughts, in my head, begin to color themselves not as being optimistic but moreso as "this is life, and it's hard to get through, so I need to rely on xyz to move, with great difficulty." It's just not enjoyable to read something that is so heavily laced with all this underlying doom and gloom.
• I hated the part where he's at the Disneyland Hall of Presidents and takes a jab at the Trump animatronic, who says "to be an American is to be an optimist," arguing that being an optimist is not how you actually gain citizenship. Now I'm not a proponent of Trump but I really hate how John just feels like he has to insult something about Trump, likely because he's a Democrat, but it just makes no sense to me. A statement like the one the animatronic said is a motivational one; it has nothing to do with the actual legal process of becoming a citizen of the U.S. My friend (a Democrat) gave me some potential insight, claiming that John probably sees Trump as being someone who would never say motivational stuff like this, and that this means Disneyland, and other corporations, do not want to offend anyone or alienate people, so they try to accommodate everyone's beliefs and opinions, which leads to whitewashing like in the Hall of Presidents. While I see that as a reasonable claim, I just see the way John doing this as being really vague and pretty stupid. It would've been better if he had more explicitly said something like "Disneyland shows Trump saying xyz but they never show his endorsement of xyz, which caused these problems," or something along those lines but in an elegant fashion, fit for a book. On the topic of politics, the other time I really just hated what John had to say was when he compared Super Mario Kart power-ups to real life perks, and says that being white and being male are power-ups, which I find just so god damn annoying. Yes I know that studies find non-white job applicants tend to get less callbacks even with the same resumes, with only a name change, and yes I know that, historically, certain fields have been male-dominated, and certain traits are considered masculine. But I find it so overgeneralizing and ignorant of individual variation. If you want to do something, just do it, maybe it's several percentage marks harder for you, on average, because of your identity, but that's not to say there's tremendous barriers. Most whites are richer than minorities, but there are poor whites who have a hard time getting by. An absence of a certain gender in a field doesn't necessarily mean there are actual barriers, maybe social ones that hinder interest, but not really hard walls. I feel like his statement just broadly paints these identities as having an easier time in life, which I find unfair and a distillation of individual experiences into a single group average. There are some other minor politics-related things in here that I personally don't like but they're nonsensical to argue about because they're extremely ideological, such as the way John phrases certain things. It would be stuff like how some Republicans get overly pressed when people say "happy holidays" instead of "merry Christmas." But here's just one: On page 78, he pulls up a quote which reads, "To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd." John responds with "But it's not absurd. What's absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable." Like what do you mean it's not absurd to call the temperature sexist? I feel like he's trying to dodge the idea that he's against the quote and really thinks that temperatures can be sexist by yapping about less far-fetched things like fossil fuel usage and workplace productivity statistics. Straight up just blabbering and malding because he thinks workplace temps can be sexist. He glued together an absurd claim with irrelevant counter-evidence to make his absurd claim seem more credible, even though it doesn't directly address how calling workplace temps sexist is not absurd. And plus like if you're calling the temperature sexist, it just feels like you're implying that whoever turned the thermostat is a sexist, even though yes the evidence presented in the book shows that the temps are more for men than for women, but it's like god damn son, you're painting an inanimate object as having malice. But anyways, to me, that is one of the most absurd statements I've heard: the temperature is sexist. Like do we say stuff like [neutral] college admissions are racist because they accept less minorities? No. We say they have a disproportionate effect, because it is not the fault or intent of the university; it just so happened that their policy has a disparate effect. The uneven effect of the traditional workplace temperature policy is not the intent of the workplace itself.


In the end, I give this book two stars because it does have some interesting anecdotes, but the majority of it was indigestible and lackluster. Maybe I'm being too harsh, as my friend interprets passages of the story differently to show me valid points that John may be making, such as contrasting the absurd silliness of the hot dog contest crowd with their racist cruelty towards the former Japanese champion, showing how human nature can be fun and exciting, but also a dangerous weapon. Still, I stand by my convictions and say that I would never voluntarily read this book; the fun, albeit useless mini history lessons weren't enough of a saving grace for me to enjoy this book.





Anyways, thank you for reading.