Author John Green Fights Existential Dread by Rating Things

For John Green, every person is their own planet with a unique atmosphere colored by one's personal experiences. The tragedy is that each of us is marooned on these solar systems of the self with zero chance of escape.

Terrifying, huh? Welcome to John Green's world.

"You spend your whole life stuck inside of one body with one consciousness which is very weird," Green tells New Times. "I have no idea what it's like to be you, and that's very strange and troubling to me in some ways. Like sometimes I feel being inside of my body is this thing that I can't escape."

There is, however, the opportunity of visiting another person's planet. On Thursday, March 23, the best-selling author invites guests to set foot on Planet Green for the paperback launch of The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet.

"I really enjoy writing The Anthropocene Reviewed because it was a way of saying to myself, 'OK, you can't escape this body that you're in, and you can't escape these challenges and joys and the limits of your consciousness and whatever else, but you can explore it,'" Green explains. "You can dig deep and try to understand what you're actually thinking about and what you're actually feeling and how you would articulate that to yourself and others."

Think of The Anthropocene Reviewed as Yelp for aliens: a catalogue of Earth through the eyes of one of its human customers.

Green adapted what began as a podcast into a book of essays in 2021, where the objective was for Green to review different facets of life on Earth using a five-star rating system. Anthropocene refers to the scientific term used to describe the period in which humans began to leave a demonstrable impact on the geology and ecosystems of the Earth.

For example, climate change is a product of the Anthropocene. But so are air conditioning, cholera, and diet Dr. Pepper, all of which Green has rated using the five-star system. It is a rating system that Green finds equally baffling as it is practical.

"This is an absurd thing that we've let take over qualitative discourse in the United States, but also, it's useful," he says. "Like if I want to know which of the restrooms at the 86th Street C train in Manhattan are the least reprehensible — I absolutely want to know that. So there is a point to the five-star system."

Regardless of the usefulness of the rating system, Green uses The Anthropocene Reviewed to explore its inherent absurdity.

"Anytime you're distilling a really complicated idea down into a single data point, you're doing that to help machines, not to help each other," Green adds. "Maybe it makes it easier but in a superficial way."

Green has questioned the efficacy of the five-star rating system on several occasions. One notable example was driving through Badlands National Park in South Dakota with his sibling and Vlogbrothers cohost Hank Green. He remembers checking the park's Google reviews and being struck by a review that read "not enough mountain."

Green's body of work has contributed to his skepticism of the rating system. He recalls being struck by the discovery that his debut novel, Looking for Alaska, holds a slightly higher user rating on Goodreads than F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

"I like my first novel, but I don't think it's as good as Gatsby," Green explains.

Green does not celebrate this kind of one-upmanship, especially through arbitrary means such as a rating system. However, he does appreciate the readers who put him in such a situation.

Such appreciation is one of the reasons that informed Green's decision to launch The Anthropocene Reviewed paperback in Miami. He recalls a mishap back in 2014 at a fan event organized for the movie adaptation of his young-adult novel The Fault in Our Stars at Dolphin Mall, where the film's stars, Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, were present.

"It was really overrun, and the security got overrun really fast, and through no fault of anybody really except for not understanding how big the event was going to be. It ended up having to shut down early," Green remembers. "It didn't go as well as I would have wanted, and since then, I've promised myself I would go to Miami as often as possible and make up for that."

The incident is worth looking up on YouTube, one of Green's digital stomping grounds. It's a testament to his influence on the zeitgeist: hundreds of youths screaming at the top of their lungs, the kind of fanfare reserved for boy bands or Marvel movies.

It's been nearly a decade since Green took the YA fiction world by storm. Many of the tweens and teenagers who showed up at Dolphin Mall in 2014 have matured into mild-mannered adults. This time, if they purchase a ticket to Green's paperback launch, they'll witness the author pull the curtain back on his writing process.

"We're gonna write a live review together as I try to explain the process through which I think about what to think about. I think so much of life is trying to figure out what is worth pursuing or how it's worth pursuing," Green says. "We're going to pick a topic together and kind of investigate it together, and I'll also be reading and answering questions, but there will be a variety of fun stuff going on."

Green recalls one instance in which he and an audience wrote a review for ghost fishing, which arises when crab pots are abandoned by the fishermen who set them.

"Fish are drawn in to eat the dead crabs, and then crabs are drawn in to eat the dead fish, and fish are drawn in to eat the dead crabs, and so this endless cycle of fishing happens that we can never stop once we lose track of that crab pot," he explains. "Lots of people in the audience were bringing in their own experiences, their own tangents related to that, and we were able at the end. It's not a formal review at the end. It's not like a formal review at the end, but we get how we would approach the topic."

It's an apt metaphor to explain Green's longevity. He shows unbridled interest in a niche topic and then shines a light on it.

"I don't know how to interact with the world without writing," he says. "I don't even know what I'm thinking about unless I'm writing."

To read his books or watch one of his YouTube videos is to inhabit Planet Green, even if it's for a little while. Lately, Green has found himself both obsessed with and trying to inform the public about the rise of tuberculosis.

"Every time I talk to one of my friends about it, my friends will be like, 'Is that still a thing?'" Green says. "And I'm like, 'Yeah, it's still a thing.' It's actually the leading cause of infectious-disease death other than COVID in the world. I don't think that's their fault or anybody's fault because they don't know much about TB because we just aren't taught that much about it."

If he can get the public excited about ghost fishing or air conditioning, perhaps he could do the same for the long-forgotten disease. Green has read somewhere between 30 to 40 books on the subject, along with an array of medical journals, historical diaries, and memoirs of those who lived and eventually succumbed to TB.

"It is very much a relic of the past in many rich countries, many rich communities within rich countries, but 1.6 million people are going to die of tuberculosis this year, and every single one of those deaths is unnecessary, and that's pretty infuriating," Green adds.

Welcome to Planet Green. It's a place where the native language is empathy, diet Dr. Pepper is a four-and-a-half-star experience, and The Great Gatsby probably deserves higher than a 3.9 on Goodreads.

"It's a somewhat melancholic position to be in — consciousness, but at the same time, it's full of hope for me," Green says. "I don't think that mere despair is the right response to the human condition. I think that being a person is a lot more complicated, and despair distills it into something simple."

Books & Books and Miami Book Fair Present an Evening with John Green. 7 p.m. Thursday, March 23, at the Chapman Conference Center at Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus, 254 NE Fourth St., Building 3, Second Floor, Miami; booksandbooks.com. Tickets cost $18 via eventbrite.com.