"The Book of Being Human—What we need to know about body, mind, love, meaning and death" is a concise field manual for living more deliberately. It begins with the body—sleep, food, sunlight, movement and recovery—then moves inward toward habits, attention, money, ego, belonging, love, forgiveness, meaning and mortality.
At its heart is a simple idea: lasting inner change often begins on the outside. We do not always think our way into a better life; we act our way into one. By changing what we repeatedly do, how we care for the body and how we relate to others, the inner life can gradually follow.
Drawing on personal experience, scientific research and philosophical reflection, Dr. Michael W. Driesch offers guidance without pretending to provide universal rules. Readers are invited to test each idea against their own lives, keep what proves useful and argue with what does not.
The book ultimately reaches beyond wellbeing and self-development to larger questions: what gives a life meaning, what the mind may be capable of, whether “God” names something real, and what—if anything—awaits us at death. It offers no map, only a compass.
"The Book of Being Human—What we need to know about body, mind, love, meaning and death" is a concise field manual for living more deliberately. It begins with the body—sleep, food, sunlight, movement and recovery—then moves inward toward habits, attention, money, ego, belonging, love, forgiveness, meaning and mortality.
At its heart is a simple idea: lasting inner change often begins on the outside. We do not always think our way into a better life; we act our way into one. By changing what we repeatedly do, how we care for the body and how we relate to others, the inner life can gradually follow.
Drawing on personal experience, scientific research and philosophical reflection, Dr. Michael W. Driesch offers guidance without pretending to provide universal rules. Readers are invited to test each idea against their own lives, keep what proves useful and argue with what does not.
The book ultimately reaches beyond wellbeing and self-development to larger questions: what gives a life meaning, what the mind may be capable of, whether “God” names something real, and what—if anything—awaits us at death. It offers no map, only a compass.
Everything in this book came the long way—through university, business, art, and eventually science, learning what science can do and then, slowly, where it goes quiet. Somewhere along that road I began to notice that the things steadying me most, the things quietly rebuilding my life, were not always the ones a laboratory could stamp and approve. They were what experience kept handing me—mine, and other people’s—until I could no longer pretend I hadn’t seen it. So this is not a report on the research. It is a report on a life. Mine.
I am sixty-two as I write this—and calmer, happier, and more hopeful than I had any right to expect, and, to my own continued surprise, healthier too. I did not get here by accident, and not from any single trick. I got here from all of it together: the way the body actually runs, how the small daily things quietly decide a life, why forgiveness frees the one who grants it, and, at the far end, what I came to believe about dying. And I never planned the way it came. The peace I had gone looking for inward, for years, never once surfaced while I dug for it; it arrived sideways, and late, almost as a byproduct of how I had slowly changed the way I lived. That is the whole reason this book exists. I found something that made the years lighter instead of heavier, and I am simply not able to keep it to myself.
So let me be honest about what this is, before you give it your time—because attempting a book about being human, in a book this thin, is a faintly absurd thing to do. People have spent whole libraries on a single chapter of what follows and still not finished the thought.
This is a field manual. It is short on purpose. Each entry is one piece of understanding, set down as plainly as I could manage. You can read it front to back like a story, or crack it open wherever your life is currently on fire. Both work.
And it runs one direction throughout—worth saying out loud, because it cuts against the grain: outside in. It does not try to fix you from the inside, or ask you to excavate your past and interrogate your feelings until they confess. It goes the other way. Change how you live—what you eat, how you move, whom you forgive, what you give away—and the things you were chasing head-on, the calm and the clarity and the contentment, tend to arrive through the back door. We are not assembled from the inside out; we are shaped, slowly, by how we live. So that is where the book pushes—on the living—treating you as a body to be tended and as something more than a body, and trusting that if you get the first right, the second has room to breathe.
Here is what it is not: a set of instructions. You will not find wake at six or drink three liters a day in here, and if you somehow do, treat it as a typo. The reason is the closest thing this book has to a law—you are not anyone else. What wrecks one person barely touches the next; what heals you might do nothing for your neighbor. Anyone who hands you a universal rule for your particular body and your particular life is selling something. So the book tries the harder, more respectful thing: it explains how the machinery works, and then gets out of your way. You run the experiment. You keep what works. You remain the final authority over what you choose to carry into your own life—this book just refuses to pretend otherwise.
Which raises the fair question: how do I know any of it works? From several directions at once. I have watched it work over many years—in my own body and life, in my family, and in other people close enough for me to see more than the polished version. I have also spent those years reading the science, following the studies, and comparing what the research said with what life kept showing me. And I learned to look beyond the borders of conventional medicine as well, into older traditions of natural healing—a door first opened for me by Petra, the mother of my children, whose curiosity and knowledge changed the direction of my own thinking. That credit is hers, and it belongs here.
None of those sources is sufficient on its own. Personal experience can mislead; a study can measure the wrong thing; a tradition can preserve wisdom and error in the same old bottle. But when observation, research, repeated experience, and different ways of understanding the body keep pointing in the same direction, I pay attention. Experience is evidence—the oldest kind there is—but it is strongest when tested against other lives, against science, and against time. And “it worked for me” is also exactly what every snake-oil salesman says. So where I can be checked, I have held myself to a harder standard than the loudest voices on either side—the ones who will tell you the sun is pure poison, and the ones who will tell you it cannot hurt you at all. Where I cannot be checked—and some of the most important things in here cannot—I will say so plainly and tell you that we have walked off the edge of the map and are going on something older than proof.
And there is one more thing this book is not, especially where it touches on medicine: against doctors. Modern medicine is a genuine miracle in an emergency: the accident, the infection, the thing that would have killed your great-grandmother by Tuesday. If you are bleeding, close this book and call for help. But much of the system is organized around rescue, with far less time and fewer tools devoted to the slow tending that decides whether a life gets gradually better or gradually worse. That slow tending is what this book is for. It is the part nobody has seven minutes to tell you.
You will notice the book has a point of view. It thinks nature is mostly on your side. It thinks the mind reaches into the body far more than we are told—but also less magically than some would like. It thinks love and forgiveness are not soft subjects but load-bearing ones. And near the end, when we reach meaning and death, it stops pretending to be neutral and tells you what one person came to believe. You are under no obligation to agree. I will not promise you my life—no one can hand another person a life, and you are not me—but I can set down, as plainly and honestly as I know how, everything that built the peace I am writing from. Disagreeing well is its own kind of understanding, and I would rather have you arguing with the book than nodding through it.
So here is the whole instruction—the only one you will get. Read slowly. Argue back. Try things on your own body and your own life, and keep what proves itself to you. The book closes by pulling everything into a single compass—not a map, because nobody can map your particular road, but a way to find north when the ground moves under you. The rest is yours to walk.
Come in. There is more good news in here than anyone ever told you—and you are far more capable of this than anyone has led you to believe.
This is one of very few books that I rate as "must read." What makes that even more unusual is that I rated it that way even though I wasn't completely in agreement with everything that the author said. However, I did see eye to eye with the author on most key things.
This book is, in my opinion, incredibly optimistic without being unaware of the challenges of life. It definitely urges readers to reflect and develop mindsets that work towards a brighter future. And even though it touches on some very challenging things - pain, illness, death, stress - it does so with a certain tenderness and care.
A lot of the ideas in the book are pretty basic - move more, create good habits, forgive others. And as the book explains at the end, it's not intending to be a hard and fast road map for the future. Instead, it's a compass to help guide readers. If you're like me, some chapters will have you internally nodding your head, and others will at least give you food for thought, and some will encourage deep reflection on either things you've done in the past, things you're doing now, or things you want to do in the future.
The book reads like a conversation, like someone with a great deal of life wisdom and experience is passing along lessons learned over the years. The author clearly has a lot of insight to share, and does so without coming across as showy or pretentious. Sometimes the insight seems a little bit of a paradox - but no more so than life generally is (particularly the idea that giving is actually selfish, in a way, but it makes sense in the book). This is a great read for anyone looking for a chance to reflect on many different facets of life.