How to Live

How We Are is an astonishing debut and the first part of the monumental How to Live trilogy, a profound 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. This first audiobook explores the power of habit and the difficulty of change. We live most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of comfortable routine - what author Vincent Deary calls Act One.

We are creatures of habit, living most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of more or less comfortable routine. But sometimes outside forces compel us to adjust, and sometimes we must make changes ourselves. What happens when change disrupts our lives? This book is the first in a trilogy which offers an insight unlike any other into the human mind and heart: how we are, how we break, and how we mend. It is about all of us, humbly figuring out how to live.

The second book of the How We Live trilogy moves away from the journey of normal change, with all its resistance and excitement, and focuses on the journeys that get derailed, dealing with the common ways in which we break: trauma, anxiety, depression, doubt, despair, or simply getting into a rut. How We Break shows how the human animal gets stuck, not because of some “pathology”, but because of the nature of the creatures that we are and the kinds of processes that constitute our being.