Yuval Noah Harari — "Happiness is not a natural state; it's a social construct."
Happiness is not a natural state; it's a social construct.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Yuval Noah Harari
"We are moving from a world of 'free choice' to a world of 'designed choice'."
"Facebook can know you better than your mother does."
"We are probably one of the last generations of Homo sapiens."
"Silicon Valley is creating a new religion—Dataism—that worships data instead of gods."
"The greatest myth of all is that we are free individuals."
About Yuval Noah Harari (born 1976)
Israeli historian whose Sapiens (2011) and Homo Deus (2015) reframed big history for a mass audience and sold tens of millions of copies. Closely associated with Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel author and Harari's clearest intellectual ancestor) and Steven Pinker (data-driven optimist contemporary). For an intellectual contrast, see Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist and Maps of Meaning author — Peterson's Maps of Meaning argues that religious-mythological structure is the load-bearing architecture of human meaning — exactly the framing Harari's 'religion as useful fiction' thesis treats as historically transitory. The two are the largest-platform popular intellectuals of the 2010s with opposite views on whether religion encodes deep truth.