Reviews and Comments

Like any 21st century pop science author, the premise of a long book about sleep couldn't be a down-to-earth argument of marginal health improvements. Instead, it doubles down multiple times on how this has to be, "undeniably", the most important yet neglected health knowledge ever - a common recipe for best sellers, promising immense rewards for memorizing a few key concepts.

Stripped down of the obvious marketing strategy, the over-the-top framing and all the speculative fluff mixed in with the actual research data, the book does a good work on hammering the need of caring for our sleep. And like any book of its kind, in the end the advice is as predictable and close to common knowledge as one would guess:

1) Go to bed and wake up at the same time every day; 2) Exercise at least 30 minutes, not too close to bed time; 3) Avoid caffeine and nicotine after noon; 4) Avoid alcohol before going to bed; 5) Avoid large portions before going to bed; 6) Avoid medicines that delay or disrupt sleep; 7) Don't take naps after 3PM; 8) Relax before bed; 9) Hot bath/shower before bed; 10) Dark & cool bedroom, no screen devices; 11) Get morning sunlight every day; 12) Don't lie in bed awake;

Most annoying of all, no concrete answers on "why we sleep". Walker presents some speculative argumentation regarding what fits an evolutionary and utilitarian viewpoint, but very little evidence is available anyway and, most worryingly, zero counter-evidence or opposing research viewpoints are discussed. In the end, the answer currently available is as obvious as the 12 advices above: because it's good for us.

Probably not the book for me because I was already in agreement with pretty much the whole thesis, so revisiting arguments and anecdotes on "How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited" wasn't super engaging or entertaining. The book contains a lot more testimonials and personal accounts than I expected, which might make sense for a target audience but it's not my jam. For someone not so into history, sociology, anthropology etc this might be a heavy read, it really goes from ground up on many intersectional topics.

I think this book is a great introduction to the issue and I recommend a read to help recent startup/corporate survivors to process their grief. I did find the ending a bit watery; the author had hundreds of pages to deconstruct the employee identity but gave themselves a few paragraphs to try to end on a positive note. Not very successful to my eyes, and I think it would have been best to not try. Embrace the depressive nature of being exploited by unfettered capitalism, no sugarcoating.

Every time I re-read this book a new golden nugget appears, which is incredible considering how succinct the fable is. This time I found specially amusing the cat's engagement on the re-education committee and found myself laughing at the clever writing multiple times, like remembering old morbid humour jokes that still warrant a nose exhale.

Orwell's goal of putting to pen in simple terms a trajectory from democracy to authoritarianism through revolution is achieved with flying colours, but it is also quite tragically amusing how his work is mostly interpreted nowadays as a critique of anything anti-capitalist as a whole - despite Orwell himself being a democratic socialist. Given how far we are in the current globalized economy from the possibility of further communist revolutions and how close we became with strongmen nationalism, I'd say reading modern takes on authoritarianism like "How Democracies Die" by Ziblatt & Levitsky is more useful. Still, Animal Farm holds to its title of the most ludic take.

The blurb was very promising, some of which I was interested in - " this book shows how to enjoy the inescapable solitude that is at the heart of human life" - and a bunch of which I'm not very enthusiastic about - "spending time in remote places, appreciating and making art, practicing meditation and participating in retreats, drinking peyote and ayahuasca."

I understand that when Huxley published his accounts of psychedelics, Bachelor's generation ate that like hot cake because it was a brave new world to behold. We're just in a different zeitgeist now, and I could not be less interested in personal accounts of someone experimenting psychedelic rituals. I admire his secular buddhism, but that admiration wasn't enough to color this reading with anything of interest to me.

Another big chunk of the book is dedicated to indirectly reading Montaigne, which is not something object because I do enjoy "reading" all sorts of buddhist teachings via Batchelor's lenses, but it was not as engaging as I hoped. We know a lot more about Montaigne than we know about masters of the distant past, and the fallibility of a real person does a real number on how impactful their teaching is. I cannot reconcile with a man who alleges radical agnosticism a la Socrates and uses that as a basis to defend social norm conservatism, the cognitive dissonance is too violent. I don't know why Batchelor would include such a section in the book if not to undermine the virtues of Montaigne. Was it just the fruit of collage randomness?