The Humanual, Volume 3: The Passengers - Hardcover

by Adam Blak (Author)

You are a social animal. This was not optional. You arrived pre-wired to attach to other humans, to be shaped by them, to need them, and to find them absolutely baffling.

The Passengers is the third volume of The Humanual, and it is about everyone else. It begins with the original wiring (attachment, and why your earliest relationships still run in the background), moves through the impossible art of communication, the collision of two people who each think the other is the difficult one, the drug called love, the elephant in every room (sex), the first country you were ever a citizen of (your family), the unpaid relationship (friendship), the invisible fences called boundaries, and the cost of caring, which is grief. Then it widens out: the herd and what it does to your judgment, the water of culture you cannot see because you are swimming in it, the predators who exploit social wiring on purpose, and finally the construction of relationships that actually work.

Every chapter is fact-checked against current research, honest about what psychology has failed to replicate, and finished with practical scripts, Frequently Panicked Questions, and the myths that have been ruining dinners for generations.

Warm, funny, and occasionally uncomfortable in the way that useful things are, The Passengers is for anyone who has ever thought: other people are a lot. They are. Here is how they work.