Title: I Am Only Human
Author: Georgi Danov
Publisher: GDD Publishing
Genre: Psychology, Sociology
First Publication: 2021
Language: English
Book Summary: I Am Only Human by Georgi Danov
- Do you feel like you are constantly playing catch-up?
- Are you tired of trying to meet everyone’s expectations?
- Do you sometimes feel overwhelmed and want to leave it all behind?
- Do you often find yourself opting for the easy decision, not necessarily the best one?
If your answer to any of these questions is yes, then this book is for you!
In I Am Only Human, Georgi Danov tells a compelling story about the human psyche, the incessant demands of modern life on each of us, and those characteristics of our human nature that often make us fall short of perfection.
Written with a bit of humour, a hint of implicit criticism, and a huge dose of sincerity, the book spectacularly captures the complexity of the human psyche and some of our key psychological, emotional, and cognitive flaws. However, this book is not about exposing the intrinsic weaknesses of our kind. Quite the opposite: it is written in defence of humanity.
Using a combination of evolutionary and social theory, real-life examples, and a vast number of personal observations, the book portrays the irrationality and fallibility of our nature as a major obstacle on our way to success and perfection. We have limited emotional and cognitive capacity, which often stays in the way of rationality and our ability to meet the ever-growing list of expectations and social pressures to which we must conform. But this does not make us unfit or incapable; it makes us human.
The power of this book does not lie in the ground-breaking research or revolutionary thinking behind it. Rather, it lies in the different perspective taken by the author, in the simplicity of the concepts discussed, and, most of all, in the enormous relatability to the lives of each and every one of us.
Book Review: I Am Only Human by Georgi Danov
“I’m only human
Of flesh and blood I’m made
Human
Born to make mistakes”–The Human League, Human
I Am Only Human is an informative, thought-provoking and polemic book designed to refute ordinary conceptions and intellectual arguments which cut against a sociobiological understanding of humans and human society. In a world where the human genome has been mapped and much of the physical world has been explored, analyzing human behavior may be one of the most exciting frontiers of science.
Georgi Danov’s I Am Only Human looks at the question psychologists have been asking for over a hundred years – why are we the way we are? It starts with us, humans, our mind and behaviour, broadening out to look at our relationships with society. As a result, the book vividly explains complex aspects of the human behaviour, as well as key psychological, emotional and cognitive flaws.
The book offers insights into the people in our everyday lives, how they form our personal universes, how they determine who we are, and how they influence our behavior, beliefs, attitudes, and ideologies. Author Georgi Danov tells the story of social psychology, its history, concepts and major theories discussing the classic studies that have defined the discipline.
Taking us from the first ideas of the discipline to its most cutting edge developments, Georgi demonstrates how social psychology remains profoundly relevant to everyday life. From attitudes to attraction, prejudice to persuasion, health to happiness -I Am Only Human provides insights that can improve our understanding of human or I’d say the world. The book depicts our irrationality and fallibility as major obstacles on our way to success by combining evolutionary theory, social theory, and a wide range of personal observations of author.
In terms of emotional and cognitive ability, we are often limited, which hampers rationality and our ability to meet ever-increasing social expectations and pressures. In I Am Only Human, author Georgi Danov ambitiously attempts to justify human behaviour theory that human beings come into this world free of innate characteristics, ready to be moulded and shaped by society.
So where do humans get their morals from? The book tries to answer this question and attempts to lift the conversation to that place where nuance and evidence are grounded in a humanistic understanding of our role as scholars and thinkers. The author, through his exploration of the various themes and evidence, tries to make humans epistemic creatures – people who can have beliefs and values but suspend them in order to explore counter-evidence, new theories, and hypotheses, and sharpen values with knowledge.
Perhaps the question should be not where but how do we get morality and virtues. Sociology see social values as originating to unify people and protect themselves from their own savage natures. But if this is true why do people often choose an altruistic stance even when it goes against cultural edicts. Along comes the science of evolutionary psychology which states our morality is not from societal causes but our own genes. As genes originates physical changes, they also originate behaviors that help us survive through generations. In I Am Only Human, Georgi Danov illustrates, not just through human examples but other animals, how certain moral behaviours have developed to insure survival, which in the sense of letting natural selection takes its normal course.
Can the average reader handle and dig all the brain talk in this book? I think the author does a great job keeping the jargon down in the narrative and justifying significant points with a huge collection of references stored in the back. Georgi Danov is an eloquent, witty, and insightful writer on the issues of cognitive psychology and linguistics who has the rare talent of making his subjects accessible and appealing to academic and lay audiences. He has some wonderful stories to back up the general points.
With light humour, Georgi makes psychology easy to understand, even for people who haven’t studied it before. I Am Only Human is a definite book you should read if you want to better understand the world, know why they feel what they feel and know why people behave the way they do. Highly recommended.
