Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig

A sore throat doesn’t become less sore simply because you’ve felt it before.

That never happened, but it’s continual not-happening-ness never stopped the possibility that it could happen.

“We seldom realize, 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.”

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.

“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.”