THE HUMANUAL
The owner’s manual for being a human.
You were issued a body, a mind, other people, a planet full of systems, and roughly eighty years to work out what to do with them. Nobody handed you the manual. This is the manual: five volumes, rigorously fact-checked, frequently ridiculous, and written for the person who suspects, correctly, that none of this was ever properly explained.
Checked, not vibed
Every claim was run against the evidence. Where science has settled a question, the book says so. Where it hasn’t, the book says that too, which is rarer than it should be.
Funny on purpose
Humor is the scaffolding, not the decoration. You remember the defense network that declares war on a peanut. You do not remember paragraph four of a textbook.
Usable on Tuesday
Every chapter ends with practical maintenance, a set of Frequently Panicked Questions, and the myths you can now stop believing. The tools live online at the Toolkit.
- Series
- The Humanual: The Owner’s Manual for Being a Human, five volumes
- Author
- Adam Blak
- Publisher
- Good Work Press (The Good Work), Philadelphia
- On sale
- 30 September 2026, all five volumes, worldwide
- Formats
- Paperback $19.99 · Hardcover $29.99 · Ebook $9.99
- Size
- 5.5 × 8.5 in · 248 to 416 pages per volume · English
- Where
- Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Apple Books, Kobo; any bookshop or library by ISBN via Ingram
- Toolkit
- goodworkmovement.org/toolkit, the practical layer, free
Key facts
The Hardware
The owner’s manual for your body.
Congratulations. You have been issued a body. It arrived without paperwork, it cannot be returned, and roughly 60 percent of it is the same substance that fills puddles.
The Hardware walks through the machine one system at a time: the frame that was designed for walking and is now mostly folded into chairs, the engine room that beats about a hundred thousand times a day without being asked, the defense network that will occasionally declare war on a peanut, the wiring that runs the whole operation on one unbacked-up main cable, and the shutdown sequence you keep trying to skip. How each part works, how it fails, what the evidence says about looking after it, and which of the things you were told are myths.
Two dollars’ worth of minerals, currently reading this sentence.
Full details, excerpt and FPQs Read the opening (PDF)
Contents
- Welcome to Your Body: A General Orientation
- The Frame: Your Skeletal & Muscular Systems
- The Engine Room: Your Cardiovascular & Respiratory Systems
- The Processing Plant: Your Digestive System
- The Messengers: Your Endocrine System
- The Defense Network: Your Immune System
- The Wiring: Your Nervous System
- The Sensors: Your Senses
- The Wrapper: Your Skin, Hair, and Nails
- The Filtration Plant: Your Kidneys and Urinary System
- The Continuation Department: Your Reproductive System
- The Moving Parts: Exercise and Physical Activity
- The Shutdown Sequence: Sleep
- Surface Maintenance: Hygiene and Preventive Care
- When Things Go Wrong: Illness, Injury, and the Art of Being a Patient
- What You Put in the Tank: Substances and Your Chemistry
- The Warranty Expires: Aging
- The Vehicle Is Not Permanent: Death
- Appendices: The Body’s Dashboard · The Maintenance Schedule · Emergency Quick Reference · Glossary of Parts
- ISBN
- paperback 979-8-952870-01-7
- hardcover 979-8-952870-00-0
- ebook 979-8-952870-02-4
The Operating System
The owner’s manual for your mind.
The hardware came with software. Nobody told you that either.
This volume is about the three pounds of electrified fat currently reading this sentence and quietly congratulating itself. What the mind is doing when it feels, remembers, pays attention, wants things, sleeps, tells itself stories, and occasionally crashes. The known bugs every human ships with. The unreliable storage. The scarcest resource, and everyone who is trying to buy it. The ancient code you inherited from ancestors who had excellent reasons to fear the dark. It ends with a user manual for your own mind, assembled from everything before it.
There is a reason you did that. It is in here.
Full details, excerpt and FPQs Read the opening (PDF)
Contents
- The Hard Problem: Welcome to Consciousness
- The Constructed World: How You Build Reality
- The Dashboard: Understanding Your Emotions
- The Known Bugs: Your Cognitive Biases
- Unreliable Storage: How Memory Works (And Doesn’t)
- The Scarcest Resource: Attention
- The Reward Circuit: Motivation, Habits, and the Wanting Machine
- The Depths: Your Unconscious Mind
- Sleep Mode: What Your Mind Does While You’re Away
- The Narrator: Your Inner Voice and the Self It Constructs
- When Software Crashes: Mental Health
- The Ancient Code: Trauma and Its Aftermath
- User Manual for Your Mind: Putting It All Together
- Appendices: The Emotional Vocabulary · When to Seek Help (and What Kind)
- ISBN
- paperback 979-8-952870-04-8
- hardcover 979-8-952870-03-1
- ebook 979-8-952870-05-5
The Passengers
The owner’s manual for other people.
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.
This volume is about everyone else. The original wiring that still runs in the background. The impossible art of communication. The drug called love. The first country you were ever a citizen of, which is your family. Friendship, boundaries, and the cost of caring, which is grief. Then the herd, the water of culture you cannot see, the predators who exploit social wiring on purpose, and the construction of relationships that actually work. Honest about what psychology has failed to replicate, and finished with scripts you can actually use.
Other people are a lot. Here is how they work.
Full details, excerpt and FPQs Read the opening (PDF)
Contents
- The Original Wiring: Other People and What to Do About Them
- The Impossible Art: Communication
- When Worlds Collide: Conflict
- The Drug: Love
- The Elephant in the Room: Sex
- The First Country: Family
- The Unpaid Relationship: Friendship
- The Invisible Fence: Boundaries, Self-Worth, and the Relationship You Have With Yourself
- The Cost of Caring: Grief, Loss, Forgiveness, and the Art of Letting Go
- The Herd: Group Dynamics, Belonging, and Why You Agree With People You Just Met
- The Water: Culture, Norms, and the Invisible Forces That Tell You How to Be a Person
- The Predators: Power, Manipulation, and the Weaponization of Your Social Instincts
- The Construction: How to Deliberately Build the Good Stuff
- The Bridge: From People to Systems
- Appendices: The Relationship Emergency Reference · “Is This Normal?” A Relationship Self-Assessment Guide
- ISBN
- paperback 979-8-952870-07-9
- hardcover 979-8-952870-06-2
- ebook 979-8-952870-08-6
The Map
The owner’s manual for the world you live in.
Volume 3 taught you how to navigate a room full of people. This one is about the building: who designed it, who profits from the floor plan, and why the fire exits are so hard to find.
How tribal instincts get reverse-engineered into political weapons. How power actually operates, and what it does to the brains of the people who hold it. How money works (a shared story backed by trust) and how inequality gets manufactured. The hall of mirrors that used to be the news. What the machine in your pocket is collecting. What artificial intelligence is and is not. Health systems, education systems, and the living planet all of it runs on. It ends with the citizen: given all of this, what can one person actually do? More than you would think. Less than the guilt suggests.
Wait, we built this? On purpose? Yes. Here is the blueprint.
Full details, excerpt and FPQs Read the opening (PDF)
Contents
- The Tribal Animal: Polarization and Manufactured Division
- The Invisible Force: Power
- The Rules We Made: Institutions and Governance
- The Scales: Economics, Inequality, and Justice
- The Wider View: The Global System
- The Hall of Mirrors: Media and the Information Landscape
- The Machine in Your Pocket: Surveillance, Data, and the Attention Economy
- The New Intelligence: AI and the Digital Transformation
- The Invisible Hand on the Scale: Health Systems
- The Sorting Machine: Education Systems
- The Living System: The Planetary Context
- The Citizen: Agency, Participation, and What You Can Do
- Appendices: The Citizen’s Quick Reference
- ISBN
- paperback 979-8-952870-10-9
- hardcover 979-8-952870-09-3
- ebook 979-8-952870-11-6
The Compass
The owner’s manual for a finite life.
You understand your body, your mind, the people around you, and the systems those people built. One question remains, and it is the one the whole series has been circling since page one: what is any of this for?
The fifth and final volume asks why a survival machine generates a being that wonders about meaning, then lays out the menu of answers humans have come up with, treating each with respect and none with deference. Values you actually hold rather than the ones you were issued. Ethics without a rulebook. Purpose, work, creativity, play, and awe. Then the weight: suffering, aging, and the fact that you are going to die, treated not as problems to be solved but as the conditions that make meaning urgent. Gentler than the earlier volumes. No less funny.
The questions are fine. You are supposed to have them. Here is some company.
Full details, excerpt and FPQs Read the opening (PDF)
Contents
- The Stage: Where You Are
- The Question: Why?
- The Menu: Frameworks for Meaning
- The Compass You Build: Values
- The Navigation: Ethics Without Dogma
- The Search: Purpose, Work & Vocation
- The Full Experience: Creativity, Play, Awe & Joy
- The Weight: Suffering, Mortality & What They Teach
- The Long View: Legacy, Aging & Being a Good Ancestor
- A Final Message: A Letter from the Manual
- Appendices: The Compass Quick Reference
- ISBN
- paperback 979-8-952870-13-0
- hardcover 979-8-952870-12-3
- ebook 979-8-952870-14-7
Frequently Panicked Questions
Every chapter of the books ends with a set of these. Here are the ones about the books themselves.
What is The Humanual?
The Humanual is a five-volume owner’s manual for being a human, published by Good Work Press on 30 September 2026. One volume each on the body, the mind, other people, the systems we live inside, and meaning. Every claim in it is checked against the evidence. It is also funny on purpose, because that is how people remember things.
Do I have to read the five volumes in order?
No. Each volume stands alone and carries its own quick reference. There is a logic to the order (you are issued a body before you are issued opinions), but plenty of readers will start with whichever part of their life is currently on fire. That is what it is for.
Who is it for?
Adults who suspect that none of this was properly explained to them, which is most adults. It assumes no background in medicine, psychology, economics or philosophy, introduces every technical term once with a plain-English translation, and never sets a test.
Is it a self-help book?
Not in the usual sense. It does not promise a new you. It explains the one you were issued: how it works, how it fails, what the evidence says about looking after it, and which pieces of popular advice are myths. The understanding is the help; the practical sections are the tools.
How was it fact-checked?
Every factual claim was run against primary sources and current guidelines before publication and rewritten wherever the evidence was thinner than the folklore. Where science has settled a question the book says so; where it hasn’t, the book says that too. Health, crisis and legal material is dated and kept current at the Toolkit.
Where can I buy it, and in which formats?
From 30 September 2026 in paperback ($19.99), hardcover ($29.99) and ebook ($9.99) at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Apple Books and Kobo. Any bookshop or library can order it by ISBN through Ingram; the ISBNs are listed under each volume on this page.
What is the Humanual Toolkit?
The practical layer of the books: every checklist, script, schedule, self-assessment and emergency card the volumes describe, kept online at goodworkmovement.org/toolkit so it stays current with the science and the hotlines. Free to read and print, with no email wall.
Who publishes it, and who wrote it?
Good Work Press, the imprint of The Good Work, a project about how people might treat one another and the world, based near Philadelphia. The author is Adam Blak, who also wrote The Good Work.
The Humanual Toolkit
Every checklist, script, schedule, and emergency card the five books describe lives online, kept current with the science, and prints to a clean sheet for the fridge. The books point at one address so it never goes stale.
Get the launch note
A single message on 30 September with the links, the first Toolkit pages, and nothing else. No sequence, no course, no “just checking in.”