Indian Craft Brewery is psychologically closer to the airport than home, so it made sense that we dropped in there for dinner on our way back from a vacation.
As with most breweries, the place is huge, and the high ceilings add to the effect. I thankfully missed the mandatory artificial water body, but it does exist.
I have to admit that I began reading Nexus with a bias – courtesy Harari’s earlier works. While I liked them when I first read them, further reading and critical takes reduced the good impression considerably.
So, while I really liked the first two chapters, I did find irony in him writing about information and truth after bring rebutted by experts on agricultural revolution and various other things he is not an expert on. And while I really like reading history, his meandering on Niall Ferguson mode in the first part of the book didn’t endear himself to me at all.
Part 1 was on the OS of my life, Part 2 the professional version, both written in 2022. This one is a little more ambitious – civilisational!
The thought stream started thanks to one of my favourite newsletters, which gave me an insightful metaphor – “Religion is the operating system of a civilisation” – attributed to Rudyard Lynch.
One of the other insights that has taken up quite a lot of space in my mind is courtesy Ernest Becker (via The Worm at the Core) – that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture. Humans apparently invented symbolic systems – everything from soul to religion to nation to art to legacy as a means of managing the terror of death.
