Thoughts about the book What is our problem by Tim Urban 📚

I finished the What is our problem by Tim Urban. The book was hard to read at times. The text got me thinking about how the world works. And it gave me a better mental model to voice the tendency I observe on this planet happening right now. The feeling that everything is going to shit (sorry, the language).

I had been a regular reader of his blog for many years and was sad about him going silent on it for a long time during the book writing process. However, in the end, we got a long and thorough book that expands upon the topic he started on his blog all these years ago (The Story of US1 and also The Thinking Ladder,I would love to link to them, but he deleted them :-(2).

On top we have colored stick figures representing what you say out loud. And three brains which indicate the real thought of the stick figures. The stick figures are all on the right side of the opinon spectrum, but the actual opinions are all over it.

Screenshot of one of the many illustrations out of the book. Picture taken from page 348 of the book.

The horizontal bar at the bottom display the different oppinons about a given topic. The stick figures represent what you say out loud and the brain what you actually think.

So, back to the book. It is a long read, and at times it triggered me. But It nicely explains why I often dislike publicly voicing my political views. And how the woke crowd managed to silence me. I constantly fear that you are not allowed to say (or think) certain things. Now I understand the mechanism behind this better, and I can also start working on it to, in the end, get to be a better person. And to be more “enlightened,” not only thinking that I am while still being guided by my inherent biases.

I recommend this book to everybody, it explains so much. And it triggers you no matter with which political side you identify yourself.

  1. Ok I it found now on the Way Back Machine: The Story of Us: Full Series ↩︎

  2. And I can’t find it on the internet archive. At least I found a low-quality pdf of The Story of US - it looks to be complete and has the stuff in it that I remember3. ↩︎

  3. And that is why I save a PDF of all my sources in my note system nowadays! ↩︎

Comments

@V_ Nice review. Thank you.

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