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 everything was difficult. Even choosing what to wear in the morning could make me cry. It didn’t matter that I had felt like this before. A sore throat doesn’t become less sore simply because you’ve felt it before.

But the question now was not: why should I stay alive? The question this time was a broader one: how can we live in a mad world without ourselves going mad?

If the modern world is making us feel bad, then it doesn’t matter what else we have going for us, because feeling bad sucks. And feeling bad when we are told there is no reason to, well, that sucks even more.

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.

Every moment my mother wasn’t there was a moment in which she might never be there again.

Every new lump or ulcer or mole is a potential cancer. Every memory lapse is early-onset Alzheimer’s. On and on and on. And all this is when I am feeling relatively okay. When I’m ill the catastrophizing goes into overdrive.

As Montaigne put it, “He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.”

dying too young; dying too old; mortality in general.

Your not-so-distant ancestors wrote poems and acted courageously in wars and fell in love and danced and gazed wistfully at sunsets.

We are not encouraged to live in the present. We are trained to live somewhere else: the future.

More where do you see yourself in a few years’ time? More what career path would you like to pursue? More think very carefully about your future. More it will all pay off in the long run.

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

The pursuit of looking young accentuates the fear of growing old.

Why do you humans worry so much about a stranger’s opinion? Why don’t you do what I do? Let it wash all over you. Allow yourself just to be as you are.

“for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences . . . Everyone is distracted, all the time.”

“Look at my head. It’s tiny. My brain-to-body-mass ratio is embarrassing. But it doesn’t matter, you see. If you take life carefully, you can focus. You can be how you need to be. You can have an amphibious approach to life. You can be at one with the rhythms of the whole earth. The wet and the dry. You can tune in to the wind and the water. You can tune in to yourself. It’s rather wonderful, you know, being a turtle.”

“When I let go of what I am,” said the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, “I become what I might be.”

Knowing the things that are unhealthy makes it a lot easier to protect yourself.

There are seven billion versions of the world. The aim is to find the one that suits you best.

Everything special about humans—our capacity for love and art and friendship and stories and all

the rest—is not a product of modern life, it is a product of being a human.

and listen to the quiet stillness of being. And realize that we don’t need to distract ourselves from ourselves.