Nature invented sex as a bribe. A biochemical cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters, carefully designed to make complex organisms do something profoundly inconvenient: find a partner, perform an elaborate and rather undignified act, and then deal with the consequences for the rest of their lives. It worked beautifully for a few billion years. Then humans came along and ruined everything.

In Why Bother with Sex: Nature’s Practical Joke, Boris Kriger traces the absurd journey of sexual reproduction from bacterial gene-swapping to dating apps, from the lioness who mates a hundred times a day to the millennial who would rather scroll through a phone. Along the way, he dismantles our illusions about love and desire, reveals how our own brains systematically sabotage our romantic decisions, explains why toxic relationships operate on the same mathematical principles as drug addiction, and asks the question nobody else dares to pose: if sex is nature’s way of motivating biological systems, what will be the equivalent of sex for artificial intelligence?

Part philosophical inquiry, part satirical essay, part confession of a former priest who discovered that helping strangers produces the same biochemical high as an orgasm, this book is for anyone who has ever wondered why the most important biological process on Earth requires two people to take their clothes off and hope for the best.

Nature conned us with pleasure. We conned nature with contraceptives. Now both sides are stuck. The question is: who blinks first?