Book Review - Sapiens
Sapiens - why the myths we live by are due for an update.
I read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari about a year ago, and it’s one of those books that quietly rewires how you see things. No dramatic twist, no emotional arc. Just a clear breakdown of how humans got from foraging to finance to fiction.
What stuck with me most was the idea that everything we organise society around, money, nations, laws, religion - only exists because we agree to believe in it. It’s not fake. It’s just not physical.
“You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven” (Sapiens, Harari).
It’s ridiculous, but also kind of genius. Our entire species runs on imagination that’s been agreed upon at scale.
It got me thinking about how much of modern life still runs on those same stories, even when they don’t quite fit anymore. We have global problems and local playbooks. Systems designed for a different time. But the story hasn’t caught up.
That’s where Harari’s idea of the Cognitive Revolution clicked with me. When humans learned to talk about what wasn’t in front of them, we unlocked everything from religion to gossip to reputations. We didn’t just describe the world. We started redesigning it.
“The ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language” (Sapiens, Harari).
It’s also what I’ve been learning in my own life, how much hinges on communication. Not just what you say, but whether others believe it, share it, build on it. We’re still shaping reality with words.
Harari also asks a deceptively simple question: has civilisation made us happier? Foragers apparently worked less, ate better, and had more downtime (unless a predator showed up). Meanwhile we invented the 9 to 5 and called it progress.
“We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us” (Sapiens, Harari).
That quote hasn’t left my head. It makes you wonder which systems we think we’re running, when they’re actually running us. Civilisation gave us structure, yes, but it also locked us into routines and hierarchies that serve the story more than the people inside it. That’s the bigger point. These myths don’t just organise life, they shape what kind of life feels possible.
I also liked how the book was structured. It starts with biology and ends with belief. Each chapter stacks like a timeline of tiny shifts that somehow added up to now. The chaos of history starts to look almost intentional, or at least understandable.
It’s a strange comfort, seeing the world as a story with room for rewrites.
If you could rewrite part of the story we all live by, where would you begin?