#1 Non-Fiction Book in Australia
I Eat the Stars
How to Live Fully
and Beautifully in
a Collapsing World
Why I Wrote This Book
I always feel I need to explain why I write a book.
I wrote this one because I wanted to understand what was happening to the world.
I was feeling like we’d entered an entirely new, darkly disintegrating age that didn’t make sense anymore. I also wanted to understand what was happening to us. We’d become less understanding, trusting and caring of each other.
I was scared and confused, but strangely, I was also feeling an urgent love for “it all” and for all the humans. I knew that this is not where the wonderful experiment that is the human species should wind up.
It was incredibly disorienting, and none of the old explainers were stacking up. I felt like I was bobbing for apples.
I didn’t know how to reconcile so much dissonance; this book is my attempt to do so, for myself and the people around me feeling the same stunned overwhelm.
Buy the Book
What People Are Saying
"It is difficult to provide philosophical guidance through rupture while it is still tearing the fabric of the world apart. But this is what Sarah Wilson manages to do, with exactly the kind of tenderness and wild-spiritedness that we are going to need—and want—going forward."
"A book for dark times that is filled with light and hope. Thoughtful, sometimes unsettling, but always brave."
"This book feels like a raw conversation with the friend who can capture where we are as a collective. There are some people I do not want to ever leave this planet. If we can keep Sarah Wilson and David Attenborough forever, there will always be beacons of possibility to guide us."
"A chilling and important book about the chaos and complexity of what’s happening in the world—and how to understand it at a human level."
What My Publisher Wrote
It’s hard to escape the feeling that something is deeply wrong . . . that life has become precariously off-balance. We are hit hourly with headlines about catastrophic wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record heat waves, collapsing democracies, AI and nuclear threat, rising economic inequality, widespread unrest, and more. In I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson argues we are undergoing what every complex civilization before us has—systemic collapse.
The questions at the heart of this book
Should we be having kids?
How do we make financial decisions?
Should we be prepping?
How do we avoid succumbing to doom and despair?
In I Eat the Stars, Sarah Wilson delves into these pressing questions. Drawing on many years of research and wisdom gained from more than 200 conversations with philosophers, poets, game theorists, and spiritual leaders, Wilson takes readers on an intimate journey as she lays out a path for living fully, meaningfully, and beautifully through these troubled times. Our predicament, she argues, is ultimately an urgent call to us all to relish what is valuable to us—to eat the stars—and to return to our humanity once again.
“We are undergoing what every complex civilisation before us has—systemic collapse.”
I Eat the Stars empowers readers to move beyond panic, doom, and despair. With her warm, incisively intelligent, wise, and down-to-earth voice, Wilson creates a space for readers to confront their fears and anxieties about an uncertain future, guiding them toward one rooted in truth, hope, justice, creativity, community, and to step up as “warriors” and meet the moment.
We are in what we were warned about for decades.
But from a crisis comes stunning possibility.
Some granular details
Why is the book called I EAT THE STARS?
It’s from a poem by NASA astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson who died at 39 from non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.It appears in her book of poetry, Responsibility to Awe (a thoroughly awesome title), which she wrote as she faced her own bodily collapse. It starts,
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
The full poem is here.
Elson died in 1999. I read her poem a decade later and it sang to me as I wrote this book. The line “I eat the stars” encapsulates what I want to share with you. The world has shifted off its axis, and things are going to become increasingly fearful and existential. What is left now is an invite to really live, to eat up life, to fully feel and breathe in the sacred gift of this universe. Now.
Did this book begin as a Substack series?
Many challenging or unconventional books—War and Peace, Lolita, much of Virginia Woolf’s work—were first published as serialisations.
I began writing in real time, trying to make sense of the “everythingness” unfolding around us. Tens of thousands of readers joined me week by week, responding, questioning, and shaping the direction of the work as it evolved.
This book is a refined and expanded version of that process. I’ve included some of the community’s questions and reflections, as I hope they might help you navigate your own—and feel a little less alone in them.
How much research sits behind these ideas?
Yes.
The book draws on more than 200 interviews with global thinkers, including William MacAskill, Holden Karnofsky, Tomas Björkman, Jonathan Rowson, Gaya Herrington, Frances Haugen, Nate Hagens, Margaret Atwood, and Douglas Rushkoff, among others.
I also attended conferences, travelled extensively, and had a range of unexpected encounters along the way—from policy makers to public figures, from activists to spiritual teachers.
