It took me a whole lifetime to fall in love with the world, but in recent years I feel it more and more. Falling in love with the world doesn't mean ignoring or overlooking pain, human or otherwise. It means looking at the night sky and letting your mind slip between the beauty and the infinity of the stars. It means embracing your children when they cry and seeing the plane trees bloom in June. When my chest tightens, my throat closes, and tears flood my eyes, I want to turn my gaze away from the emotion. I use irony or something similar as a distraction to avoid direct emotions. We all know how love ends. However, I want to fall in love with the world. I want it to break me into pieces. I want to feel everything there is to feel while I'm still here.

In the enjoyable essays included in this book about life in the Anthropocene - the current geological era defined by human intervention - beloved author John Green describes with humor, insight, and deep sensitivity what it means to live in this contradictory era: How can we be both so harsh and so compassionate, so persistent and so ready to give up everything?