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.

Being scared is what anxiety is all about.

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 y...

I had always, since I was first suicidally ill in my twenties, understood that getting better involved a kind of life edit. A taking away.

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.

how can we live in a mad world without ourselves going mad?

CHRONIC LONELINESS IS A MODERN-DAY EPIDEMIC (Forbes)

WORKPLACE STRESS AFFECTS 73 PERCENT OF EMPLOYEES

The problem is that each age poses a unique and complex set of challenges. And while many things have improved, not all things have. Inequalities still remain. And some new problems have arisen. People often live in fear, or feel inadequate, or even suicidal, when they have— materially—more than ever.

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.

It sometimes feels as if we have temporarily solved the problem of scarcity and replaced it with the problem of excess.

But then I remembered that it is precisely not talking about problems that is itself a problem.

I am petrified of where my mind can go, because I know where it has already been.

Breakdown is an unspecific word, which might explain why medical professionals shy away from it these days, but at its root we understand what it conveys. The dictionary defines it as “1. A mechanical failure” and “2. A failure of a relationship or system.”

But we do know beyond doubt that in all kinds of ways—technologically, environmentally, politically—the world is changing. And fast. So we need, more than ever, to know how to edit the world, so it can never break us down.

We can access more information, more films, more books, more everything, than ever before.

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.