Books on human nature, evolution, and how to live well
as the animal you actually are.
A series on the machinery inside you
An Odyssey
He dismantled the world’s largest surveillance network. Then he vanished. A propulsive modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey set in the age of algorithmic control — three intertwined journeys: a wife who refuses to surrender, a son who crosses continents, and a man navigating digital surveillance to get back to a blue door in Brooklyn.
Why Evolution Built Your Emotions, and How to Make Them Work for You
You are a hunter-gatherer in a glass tower, running ancient software finalised for a world that ended about a minute ago. This book is the manual you were never handed — a complete evolutionary account of every important feeling you have, where each one misfires in modern life, and what to do about it.
Leading People the Way Evolution Intended
Your employees are running stone-age software. If you manage in alignment with how that software works, you get loyalty, engagement, and performance. If you manage against it, you get resentment, quiet quitting, and turnover. A practical guide to managing real people in real organisations, built on evolutionary psychology and thirty years of experience.
What Evolution Actually Built Your Joy For
Happiness is a signal, not a destination. A fuel gauge, not the fuel. This book picks up where Designed to Feel left off and walks the full path from insight to practice — what the Three Currencies of wellbeing actually are, how to earn them, and how to stop counterfeiting them.
When to Trust Yourself and When to Trust the Machine
In a world racing to automate everything, one thing remains stubbornly, gloriously human: your instinct. Part neuroscience, part leadership manual, part manifesto — the essential guide for anyone who refuses to be replaced by the algorithm.
The Evolutionary Roots of Alcohol and Drug Addiction, and How to Break Free
A drug skips the trigger and pours chemistry straight onto the reward — the purest case of evolved machinery turned against the person carrying it. A compassionate field guide to a trap older than any of us, for the person caught in it and for everyone who loves them.
Understand Your Child’s Emotions — and Parent With Less Frustration
Your child isn’t a small adult — they’re a small human running very old software, and every tantrum, fear, and flat refusal is that software doing exactly what it was built to do. A Designed to Feel companion for parents: what each of your child’s emotions is actually for, where modern life makes it misfire, and how seeing that turns the daily battles into something you can meet with far less frustration.
What Evolution Tells You About Your Child’s Emotions
Your child’s emotions are not the problem. They are the operating system. From the carry-species instinct that makes your infant scream when set down, to the social-status machinery that makes your twelve-year-old cruel — every feeling your child has is traced to the survival problem it was built to solve. This book is the manual you were never given.
Writer • Governance Practitioner • Observer of Human Nature
Peter Burchardt is a writer whose lifelong subject is the strange experience of being a modern human in an ancient body.
Designed to Feelbegan as a private letter to his two sons, an attempt to hand them the manual he was never given when he set out into adulthood. As the letters grew, so did the realisation that almost every piece of practical wisdom he had earned — about love, work, food, sleep, money, and meaning — made far deeper sense once read through the lens of human evolution.
With more than thirty years of experience spanning Europe, the Gulf Cooperation Council, North America, and Asia, Peter has served as CFO, CEO, non-executive director, and board chair across listed and unlisted companies in multiple sectors. He brings not academic credentials to these subjects, but pattern recognition — decades of watching human behaviour up close, his own very much included, and mapping those observations against what the science actually says.
He writes about emotion, biology, leadership, and how to live well as the animal you actually are. He is based in Dubai, UAE.
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