Category: It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way: Essay Collection

So last year, I published a collection of essays (free for now) with commentary. They’re clustered around why are world is, in many ways, shit, and what a better world would look like.

I haven’t pushed it much at all, but there are a lot of new readers, and if you enjoy my writing, well, I’ve been writing online for 17 years or so, and these are my picks for some of the most important essays. There are also two essays never published anywhere else, one of which concerns how to evaluate your risk from climate change and the collapse of neoliberalism. (Said collapse having sped up since the book was published.)

Get “It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way” here.

The book is about how we made choices, as a species, which have led us into a very bad situation; what we can do as individuals to cope with the mess coming down the line, and how to create a society that wouldn’t make such huge mistakes.

In my 2017 fundraiser (there was no 2018 fundraiser), I promised a collection of 16 essays with commentary on each article, and two new essays.

It wasn’t possible to get the full scope of the argument with sixteen articles. I wound up with 31 essays, two long new essays and two shorter introductory and concluding pieces.

The first new essay is on how to create a good, stable government and the second on how to evaluate one’s personal risk during the catastrophes to come. These two essays are not available anywhere but in this collection.

There are two versions.

The PDF version of “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way” is the definitive version.

An EPUB version of “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way: The Collected Essays of Ian Welsh” is also available. The formatting is not as clean, so I offer it as an alternative. You will also need an EPUB reader, in a web browser it looks awful.

In the future, there will be a cleaner EPUB version and a Kindle version as well. I’ll let you know when those are available.

Both versions of “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way” can also be downloaded on the book page. Both are free for now (and will always be free to those who gave during the 2017 fundraiser, or had a subscription then).

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy “It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.” Even if you’re a long time reader, putting articles in an order that makes sense and reading them as a group with commentary should make the ideas much clearer. Blogs, as wonderful as they can be, tend to atomize ideas and leave out context.

So, please read, enjoy, and let me and others know what you think.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.