Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig

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.

Robots and computers are taking people’s jobs. Employers are taking people’s weekends. Employment is becoming a dehumanizing process, as if humans existed to serve work, rather than work to serve humans.

Then there are other serious psychological concerns. To be constantly presenting ourselves, and packaging ourselves, like potatoes pretending to be chips. To be constantly seeing everyone else looking their best, doing fun things that we are not doing.

So, modern life is, basically, slowly killing the planet. Small wonder that such toxic societies can damage us, too.

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, marvelous 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. I am coming to realize how wrong many of my aspirations have been. How locked out of the present I have found myself. How I have always wanted more of whatever was in front of me. I need to find a way to stay still, in the present, and, as my nan used to say, be happy with what you have.

You will be happy to look okay. You will be happy to turn heads. You will be happy with smoother skin. You will be happy with a flat stomach. You will be happy with a six-pack. You will be happy with an eight-pack. You will be happy when every photo of yourself gets 10,000 likes on Instagram. You will be happy when you have transcended earthly woes. You will be happy when you are at one with the universe. You will be happy when you are the universe. You will be happy when you are a god. You will be happy when you are the god to rule all gods. You will be happy when you are Zeus. In the clouds above Mount Olympus, commanding the sky. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Maybe happiness is not about what we can get. Maybe happiness is about what we already have. Maybe happiness is about what we can give. Maybe happiness is not a butterfly we can catch with a net. Maybe there is no certain way to be happy. Maybe there are only maybes. If (as Emily Dickinson said) “Forever—is composed of Nows—,” maybe the nows are made of maybes. 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

Professor Pamela Keel of Florida State University has spent her career studying eating disorders and issues around female and male body image, and concludes that changing the way you look is never going to solve unhappiness about your looks. “What is really going to make you happier and healthier?” she wondered at the start of 2018, presenting her latest research findings. “Losing ten pounds or losing harmful attitudes about your body?” And when people feel less pressure about how their bodies look, it’s not just minds that benefit, but bodies, too. “When people feel good about their bodies, they are more likely to take better care of themselves rather than treating their bodies like an enemy, or even worse, an object. That’s a powerful reason to rethink the kind of New Year’s resolutions we make.”

This might explain why rates of obesity are themselves dangerously rising. If we were happier with our bodies, we’d be kinder to them.

“In nature,” wrote Alice Walker, “nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.” Our bodies will never be as firm and symmetrical and ageless as those of bionic sex robots, so we need quite quickly to learn how to be happy with not having society’s unrealistic version of the “best” body, and a bit happier with having our body, as it is, not least because being unhappy with our body doesn’t make us look any better. It just makes us feel a lot worse. We are infinitely better than the most perfect-looking bionic sex robots. We are humans. Let’s not be ashamed to look like them.

Even the other people on the beach don’t care about your body. They don’t. They are staring at the sea, or they are obsessed with their own appearance. And if they are thinking about you, why do you care? 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. Just be. Just beach.

It seems that worrying about growing old is a sign you are young. And the main reason to be optimistic about old age is that old people themselves are. Resilience seems to grow.

When there is nothing we can do about something, the point of worry begins to diminish. “Everybody dies,” wrote Nora Ephron.” There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day.”

The future isn’t real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.

You will regret the fear. In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware—a nurse who worked in palliative care—shared her experience of talking to those near the end of their lives. Far and away the biggest regret they had was fear. Many of Bronnie’s patients were in deep anguish that they had spent their whole lives worrying. Lives consumed by fear. Worrying what other people thought of them. A worry that had stopped them being true to themselves.

Embrace, don’t resist. The way to get rid of age anxiety might be the way you get rid of all anxiety. By acceptance, not denial. Don’t fight it, feel it. Maybe don’t inject yourself with Botox. Do some knifeless mental surgery instead. Reframe your idea of beauty. Be a rebel against marketing. Look forward to being the wise elder. Be the complex elegance of a melting candle. Be a map with 10,00...

Surely anyone who has ever had a smartphone or a Twitter account can relate to such compulsive behavior. Check, check, check, and once more, just to see. When the ability to check something turns into the compulsion to do so, we often find ourselves craving the time before, when there was no ability to check in the first place.

We have handed over our instincts to the hands of a clock. Increasingly, we serve time rather than time serving us. We fret about time. We wonder where time has gone. We are obsessed with time.

We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn’t help anything. The problem, clearly, isn’t that we have a shortage of time. It’s more that we have an overload of everything else.

Remember 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.

There is only one of us. And we are all smaller than an internet. To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can’t. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.

Things I should do less of on the internet Post about a meaningful experience, when I could be having an actual meaningful experience.

Compare my life to the lives of other people.

Answer emails while I should be listening to my mum talk about her trip to see a doctor. Feel the empty joy of likes and favorites.

Check how a tweet/photo/status update is going down (and keep checking). Want to go offline, without going offline.

The trouble is that if we are plugged in to a vast nervous system, our happiness—and misery—is more collective than ever. The group’s emotions become our own.

The word “viral” is perfect at describing the contagious effect caused by the combination of human nature and technology. And, of course, it isn’t just videos and products and tweets that can be contagious. Emotions can be, too. A completely connected world has the potential to go mad, all at once.

She left the room. I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn’t going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else’s life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watched each letter disappear.

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.

I once tweeted something silly in a state of anxiety. “Anxiety is my superpower,” I said. I didn’t mean anxiety was a good thing. I meant that anxiety was ridiculously intense, that we people who have an excess of it walk through life like an anxious Clark Kent or a tormented Bruce Wayne knowing the secret of who we are. And that it can be a burden of racing uncontrollable thoughts and despair but one, just occasionally, that we can convince ourselves has a silver lining. For instance, personally I am thankful that it forced me to stop smoking, to get physically healthy, that it made me work out what was good for me, and who cared for me and who didn’t. I am thankful that it led me to trying to help some other people who experience it, and I am thankful that it led me—during good patches—to feel life more intensely.

I wanted to psychologically disconnect myself. To be a self-sustaining market, psychologically speaking. To be comfortable with my own mistakes, knowing that every human is more than them. To allow myself to realize I know my inner workings better than a stranger does. To be able for other people to think I was a wanker, without me feeling I was one. To care about other people, but not about their misreadings of me within the opinion matrix of the internet. How to stay sane on the internet: a list of utopian commandments I rarely follow, because they are so damn difficult Practice abstinence. Social media abstinence, especially. Resist whatever unhealthy excesses you feel drawn toward. Strengthen those muscles of restraint.

Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.

The whole internet is one step removed from the physical world. The most powerful aspects of the internet are mirrors of the offline world, but replications of the external world aren’t the actual external world. It is the real internet, but that’s all it can be. Yes, you can make real friends on there. But nondigital reality is still a useful test for that friendship. As soon as you step away from the internet—for a minute, an hour, a day, a week—it is surprising how quickly it disappears from your mind.

Do not seek out stuff that makes you unhappy. Do not measure your own worth against other people. Do not seek to define yourself against. Define what you are for. And browse accordingly.

Likes, favorites, 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.

Don’t spend your life worrying about what you are missing out on. Not to be Buddhist about it—okay, to be a little Buddhist about it—life isn’t about being pleased with what you are doing, but about what you are being.

Don’t let anonymity turn you into someone you would be ashamed to be offline. Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know. Keep empathy alive. Break patterns. Resist robotic tendencies. Stay human.

“we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be.”

An online profile of your best friend is not your best friend. A status update about a day in the park is not a day in the park. And the desire to tell the world about how happy you are is not how happy you are.

How to be happy Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people. Do not compare yourself to other people.

A quote I heard recently: “Facebook is where everyone lies to their friends. Twitter is where they tell the truth to strangers.”

But I think it spotlights the best & more frequently the worst of humanity so that increases my anxiety.

I like seeing what my friends are up to. Interacting. But spend more than a few minutes . . . And I start to feel, increasingly, like an inadequate nobody.

How to be happy (2) Don’t compare your actual self to a hypothetical self. Don’t drown in a sea of “what if”s. Don’t clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes, where you made different decisions.

You are you. The past is the past. The only way to make a better life is from inside the present. To focus on regret does nothing but turn that very present into another thing you will wish you did differently. Accept your own reality. Be human enough to make mistakes. Be human enough not to dread the future. Be human enough to be, well, enough. Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.

“We don’t go into a state of shock when something big and bad happens,” she says. “It has to be something big and bad that we do not yet understand.”

At the bottom of the pit, I always had to force myself to find the beauty, the goodness, the love, however hard it was. It was hard to do. But I had to try. Change doesn’t just happen by focusing on the place you want to escape. It happens by focusing on where you want to reach. Boost the good guys, don’t just knock the bad guys. Find the hope that is already here and help it grow.

Human, human, human. Make ourselves see what we pretend to know. Remind ourselves that we are an animal united as a species existing on this tender blue speck in space, the only planet that we know of containing life. Bathe in the corny sentimental miracle of that. Define ourselves by the freakish luck of not only being alive, but being aware of that. That we are here, right now, on the most beautiful planet we’ll ever know. A planet where we can breathe and live and fall in love and eat peanut butter on toast and say hello to dogs and dance to music and read Bonjour Tristesse and binge-watch TV dramas and notice the sunlight accentuated by hard shadow on a building and feel the wind and the rain on our tender skin and look after each other and lose ourselves in daydreams and night dreams and dissolve into the sweet mystery of ourselves. A day where we are, essentially, precisely as human as one another.