Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig

The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.

But while choice is infinite, our lives have time spans. We can’t live every life. We can’t watch every film or read every book or visit every single place on this sweet earth. Rather than being blocked by it, we need to edit the choice in front of us. We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don’t need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.

We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.

‘Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about killing than we know about living.’

‘We seldom realise, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.’ —Alan Watts, The Culture of Counter Culture: Edited Transcripts

The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.

To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvellous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.

Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.

‘It’s such a weird thing for young people to look at distorted images of things they should be.’ —Daisy Ridley, on why she quit Instagram

Ageing is something we can’t do much about. We can eat healthily, exercise and live sensibly but we will still age. Our 80th birthday will still be on the same date. Sure, we can make it more likely we will reach 80, but we can’t stop the wheels of time. And the certainty is actually quite reassuring.

Feeling you have no time doesn’t mean you have no time. Feeling you are ugly doesn’t mean you are ugly. Feeling anxious doesn’t mean you need to be anxious. Feeling you haven’t achieved enough doesn’t mean you haven’t achieved enough. Feeling you lack things doesn’t make you less complete.

Tolstoy wrote, back in 1894, in The Kingdom of God Is Within You: The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become, which indeed is what we see actually taking place.

‘The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.’ —Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google

‘A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today . . . I don’t know a more urgent problem than this . . . It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.’ —Tristan Harris, former Google employee

An ode to social media When anger trawls the internet, Looking for a hook; It’s time to disconnect, And go and read a book.

When anger trawls the internet, Looking for a hook; It’s time to disconnect, And go and read a book.

Don’t play the ratings game. The internet loves ratings, whether it is reviews on Amazon and TripAdvisor and Rotten Tomatoes, or the ratings of photos and updates and tweets. Likes, favourites, retweets. Ignore it. Ratings are no sign of worth. Never judge yourself on them. To be liked by everyone you would have to be the blandest person ever. William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest writer of all time. He has a mediocre 3.7 average on Goodreads.

Milne wrote in Winnie-the-Pooh: ‘Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.’

She thought the cure to misery was to ‘decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone’.

‘Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’ —Sylvia Plath

WE ARE BEING sold unhappiness, because unhappiness is where the money is. Much of what is sold to us is the idea that we could be better than who we are if we tried to become something else

When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence.

‘How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.’ —Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

‘I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.’ —Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932)

8.Don’t think your work matters more than it does. As Bertrand Russell put it: ‘One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.’

it: ‘One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.’

‘Progress,’ wrote C.S. Lewis, ‘means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.’ This is a phenomenally good way of looking at it, I think. Forward momentum, on an individual or social level, is not automatically good simply because it is forward momentum. Sometimes we push our lives in the wrong direction. Sometimes societies push themselves in the wrong direction. If we feel it is making ourselves unhappy, progress might mean doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road. But we must never feel – personally or as a culture – that only one version of the future is inevitable. The future is ours to shape.

In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality, yes, but not an escape from truth. Quite the opposite. In the ‘real’ world, I used to struggle with fitting in. The codes you had to follow. The lies you had to tell. The laughs you had to fake. Fiction felt not like an escape from truth but a release into it. Even if it was a truth with monsters or talking bears, there was always some kind of truth there. A truth that could keep you sane, or at least keep you you. For me, reading was never an antisocial activity. It was deeply social. It was the most profound kind of socialising there was. A deep connection to the imagination of another human being. A way to connect without the many filters society normally demands. So often, reading is seen as important because of its social value. It is tied to education and the economy and so on. But that misses the whole point of reading. Reading isn’t important because it helps to get you a job. It’s important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape. Reading is love in action.

Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh writes in The Art of Power that while ‘many people think excitement is happiness’, actually ‘when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.’

Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.

Find a good book. And sit down and read it. There will be times in your life when you’ll feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. I want you to remember that. The more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.

38.It’s okay to cry. People cry. Women cry. And men cry. They have tear ducts and lachrymal glands just like other human beings. A man crying is no different from a woman crying. It’s natural. Social roles are toxic when they don’t allow an outlet for pain. Or sentimental emotion. Cry, human. Cry your heart out. 39.Allow yourself to fail. Allow yourself to doubt. Allow yourself to feel vulnerable. Allow yourself to change your mind. Allow yourself to be imperfect. Allow yourself to resist dynamism. Allow yourself not to shoot through life like an arrow speeding with purpose.