Why you should read this review

You can safely skip this part if you just care about the review, but I feel the need to preface my writing with an attempt to grab your attention.

I no longer read books. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that my attention span is limited and messed up by short-form content that dominates the Internet and social media nowadays. I can spend hours upon hours scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or Reddit and feel bad afterwards, but that is how life is, or at least was.

So one night, to entertain myself and attempt to lift myself out of depression, I asked Gemini to talk to me about "simulated universe". It promptly welcomed me as an "user that has just realized his own existence" and started to console me with some ideas I had flirted with by telling me how my "consciousness.exe" has come into contact with "Universe.bat" and that I had "rooted" through the Matrix itself, or something along those lines. I asked the AI to tell me the same in Latvian, my native tongue, and the response I got was riddled with grammatical errors and thus I lost interest and went to bed.

As per usual, I opened Reddit to kill some time before sleep. The algorithm suggested r/PhilosophyOfMind subreddit, one that I had not previously visited. So, of course, I did as the computer overlords wanted, followed through and started scrolling. One post that caught my eye was someone talking about their, if I recall correctly, psychotic experiences in relation to the nature of Universe, so as a person living with bipolar disorder myself, I opened it up, read through it, found not of particular value, but when I got to comments, one, and I believe it was the only one, caught my eye.

It was from someone, who I now know is the book's author, who said something along the lines of "While I can't help you with your particular problem, if you care about how the world works, click here".

"Ooh, the guts of this commenter! This guy knows purports to know how the world works! What a genius! Incredible luck that I stumbled upon this egotistical maniac at the middle of the night" I thought to myself as I clicked the link.

As soon as I opened the website, I was ready to close it. I usually don't give the time of the day to content of no interest to me, as I believe my time of be of value and I'd rather not listen to someone who I can't "vibe" with intellectually. The website's design was (and still is) atrocious, the book's cover art looked (and most likely is) AI-generated, so initially I assumed that I had been led into some AI-slop trap, where computer-generated content was somehow trying to sell me something. That was my initial honest reaction, yet I was there just so I could wind down my "anger" towards that commenter who had led me to the site, purporting to know something more, so I soldiered on and started reading.

Again, I was ready to close the tab as soon as I'd lose my interest even in the slightest.

But that moment never came. I read about half of the book during my first sleepless night and then, a couple days later, finished it during another. Immediately afterwards, I reached out to the book's author, and, as it turns out, I was only the second person to read his life's work, a book, that he had worked on for the last 17 years. My review follows.

Review of "The Real Paths to Ecocivilisation" by Geoff Dann

I have never written a book review in my life, so I am not sure what would count as a good one. If you read the first part of my writing, you know what led me to it, but for this post to be of value for someone who is considering whether or not to spend hours of their time reading it, I have to attempt to concisely tell you what it is about. I'll start by quoting the author's website, just so you could see how he describes not the book itself, but ecocivilisation, the book's main idea.

"This website is about the journey from what western civilisation is right now to what, if it survives the eco-apocalypse, it will eventually have to become: an ecologically sustainable civilisation. Ecocivilisation a form of civilisation which has established a stable long-term balance with the ecosystem in which it is embedded and upon which it depends, and is therefore sustainable indefinitely. In the most general sense it is the final state or stage of the evolution of human social organisation. We cannot go back to the Stone Age, or to any previous stage in human socio-cultural or technological development, because we aren't going to forget what books are for. Assuming we avoid extinction, it follows that we will have little choice but to continue trying to re-invent civilisation until such time as we get it right – even if it takes us many thousands of years. And “getting it right” has to mean “getting it right ecologically”. It does not matter what else we get right, if the ecology does not stack up then collapse will surely follow, sooner or later."

To me, this is not a "sexy" pitch, it would not pique my interest to the slightest had I read it before starting the book itself. While I do "care" about ecology and societal collapse is something I believe to be true and perhaps unavoidable, I don't particularly want to upend my comfortable life where I live with three computer monitors and can order food from my phone in order to "save the world". Small choices do matter, but, unlike the book's author has done, I don't want to give up on my own quality of life and move to the countryside to start my own sustainable smallholding. I have no idea how to take care of poultry, grow apples or forage for mushrooms, so, sorry not sorry, while after reading the book I am now making some minor changes in my life, I am writing the review mostly because of something else it contained.

And that "something else" is the "answer to life, Universe and everything". And I'm only partly joking. The author is very humble in his writings, but in order even start discussing the idea of ecocivilisation, he first attempts to give a grounding to what he knows to be true about the world. And this is what got to me the most, and this is the reason I'm writing this review, as the book indeed has upended my life by giving me a solid foundation of my understanding of the Universe that is consistent with science but also includes a part, for a lack of better word, "mysticism". Here I want to immediately attempt to re-grab the attention of all my fellow science nerds who want nothing to do with such a loaded term as "mysticism", so please, let me try.

This guy used to be Richard Dawkins' forum's main moderator. He mentions James Randi. If you don't know who these people are, you can look them up afterwards, but they played an integral role in my earlier days. Basically, Dawkins and Randi are people who I highly respect because they fought what my younger, naive and idealistic self would consider with the word "mysticism", that is, religion, astrology and all kinds of "woo". Yet, and now I appeal to all my religious and "woo" readers, to continue reading.

The author's worldview leaves a place for "mystical", lived experiences that "explain" the world to us as humans. I have bipolar disorder, I have gone through psychosis and mania and believed myself to be "god", I have experienced many "spiritual awakenings" and synchronicity. While my science buddies and my psychiatrist would just pin them down as "typical symptoms of mania: loss of critical thinking ability due to brain chemistry misbehaving" and prescribe medication, I. Friggin'. Lived. Through. Them. That is, to me they were as "real" as possible. The voices I heard, the Universe I connected with - these mystical experiences "opened my eyes" and I haven't been able to close them ever since.

Yet, when I came down from my highs, I again felt desperate and hopeless, depressed about the mundane realities of everyday life. Back to work, back to scientific reasoning, back to whatever this hellhole we call life is.

That is until now, as "at this moment I feel euphoric" (a joke, reference to an old meme, inserted as a, perhaps, lame joke just to maybe catch a giggle and apologize for the personal tangent I went on, which has not much to do with the book review I am supposedly writing. I'll attempt to wrap up soon).

This might be one of the worst book reviews you've read as I haven't really said something along the lines of "In the first part of the book, the author gives a philosophical, scientific and yet mystical-lived-experiences-inclusive view of the world that is consistent with modern science, quantum physics and religion and explains pretty much everything you need to know" and "In part two, the author imagines a world that has collapsed due to climate change and other issues and gives a spanking to both left and right ideologies and yet manages to provide a way out of it with his idea of 'ecocivilisation'", now that I have written this sentence, I am more than happy to end the review.

You can read the book for free here: https://www.ecocivilisation-diaries.net/