Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.

Because there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You’re supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you’re supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives

simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we’re normal, that we’re reasonably well educated, that we understand ‘amortization levels’ and ‘inflation rates’.

Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time.

At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.

it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.’

that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.

We lie to those we love.

hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer.

the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely

nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tyres on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of ‘Don’t Forget!’s and ‘Remember!’s over us. We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow.

Not that this is in any way a defence of bank robbers, but they can have bad days at work, too. Hand on heart, which of us hasn’t wanted to pull a gun after talking to a twenty-year-old?

It was called a crisis in the financial markets, a bank crash, even though the only ones who crash are people.

You probably have someone in your life whom you’d do something stupid for.

Falling in love is magical, after all, romantic, breathtaking … but falling in love and love are different. Aren’t they?

‘For something to cling on to. Something to fight for. Something to look forward to.’

The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.’

We’re just strangers passing each other, your anxieties briefly brushing against mine as the fibres of our coats touch momentarily on a crowded pavement somewhere.

Roger has many faults and failings, Anna-Lena knows people think that, but Anna-Lena is always reminded that he loves her in IKEA. When you’ve been together for a very long time, it’s the little things that matter.