This is Rutger Bregman’s treatise to get you to do more with your life than simply get a job to earn lots of money and find a position of power. He says that you have a deep moral obligation to make a change in the world with your work and that far too many people work just to earn a company more money, or get landlords out of treating tenants well.
None of this means that you need to be the one that’s out on the ground wildly protesting, in fact more change often comes from that lawyer who consistently challenges laws and quietly helps draft new ones. More may get done by a writer who boldly challenges the world of power with their prose.
While the book started off strong, a number of the later chapter were really just stories about people doing good stuff so that readers become inspired to also do more good stuff.
Chapter 8 was the most problematic for me as Bregman looked at effective altruism and ignored most of the strongest critiques of it coming down mostly on the positive side. Effective altruism is used regularly by rich people to say that they have money so they should decide how things run and earning money so they can “do good” is the best thing they can do with their lives. Put aside all the nice things these rich people get out of the deal, they’r rich “for the people” to “do good” in the world.
I had high hopes for the book, but it’s only okay. I am thinking about how I can use my writing to do more good in the world, combating the manosphere keeps coming to mind, but I think you can safely skip this book.
- Purchase on Bookshop.org – support local bookstores
- Purchase on Amazon