Humanity Is Trying: Experiments in Living with Grief, Finding Connection, and Resisting Easy Answers

Summary

From Jason Gots, creator of the podcasts Think Again and Clever Creature, comes a philosophical love letter to the slow, difficult work of building a life and living with your dreams in the face of reality.

You could say this book is about a series of experiments—some impulsive and foolish, others grandiose, and still others that strive for honesty, humility, and timing to yield some promising results. Experiments in connection with self and others in spite of the enormous gulf that yawns between your subjective experience and mine and all that is lost in translation when we try to find the middle ground.

Humanity is Trying is itself an experiment in resurrecting two people—a sister and a best friend—from beneath the sad stories of their deaths. Because we are not our stories, not reducible to that, however compelling they may be.

Driven by the losses of his best friend, John, and sister, Meri, Jason Gots looks back on their lives and his own, how they shaped each other in life and how their deaths drove him as an artist, musicians and creator of the podcasts Clever Creature and Think Again.