Personal nonfiction by Daniel Berry
The Inconvenient Human
Desire, Power, Grief, and the Limits of Self-Mastery
I began with questions about human nature. My own life kept getting in the way.
Desire. Ambition. Grief. The wish to be seen, the pull of work, and the people who live with the choices we make. In The Inconvenient Human, I start with those experiences and test the questions they raise against research, history, and lives beyond my own.
Understanding a pattern does not mean I have stopped repeating it. That is part of what I am trying to understand.
Where this begins
The question
came home.
I started with an argument about human nature. Then the conversation turned toward my own life.
Read the introduction ↗“The theory had not become false. It had become inconveniently personal.”
Across the book
Desire. Power. Grief.
And a life in the middle.
Love and fear. Loyalty and conscience. Ambition and the people beside us. I begin with what I have lived, then turn to research, history, and experiences beyond my own.
Recognizing an impulse is only the beginning. The harder question is what responsibility asks of us.
Spend a little time here
Two places to start.
“Recognition is not obedience.”