Notes on a Nervous Planet

by Matt Haig

The values that cause us to want more than we have. To worship work above play. To compare the worst bits of ourselves with the best bits of other people. To feel like we always lack something.

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.

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

We are too aware of numerical time and not aware enough of natural time.

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.

Because often identifying a problem, being mindful of it, becomes the solution itself.

Aim not to get more stuff done. Aim to have less stuff to do.

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.

To be comfortable with yourself, to know yourself, requires creating some inner space where you can find yourself, away from a world that often encourages you to lose yourself.

Try to do good right now, without drowning in whatever bad you might once have done.

Don’t value yourself in line with other people’s valuation of yourself.

The act of wanting things we don’t need makes us feel a lack we didn’t have.