How We Are

Summary

The first book in a major trilogy—one that will help readers everywhere live fuller, more satisfying lives.

We live in small worlds.

How We Are is an astonishing and ambitious work that gets to the heart of what it means to be human: how we are, how we break, and how we mend.

Deary first explores the power of habit and the difficulty of change. We live most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of comfortable routine—what the author calls Act One. Conscious change requires deliberate effort, so for the most part we avoid it. But inevitably, from within or without, something comes along to disturb our small worlds—some "news from elsewhere." And with reluctance, we begin the work of adjustment: Act Two.

Over decades of psychotherapeutic work, Deary has witnessed the theater of change—how ordinary people get stuck, struggle with new circumstances, and finally transform for the better. He is keenly aware that novelists, poets, philosophers, and theologians have grappled with these experiences for far longer than psychologists. Drawing on his own personal experience and a staggering range of literary, philosophical, and cultural sources, Deary has produced a mesmerizing and universal portrait of the human condition.

Part psychologist, part philosopher, part novelist, Deary helps us to see how we can resist being habit machines and make our acts and our lives more fully our own.