Notes on a Nervous Planet

In T.S. Eliot’s phrase from his Four Quartets, I was ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’.

Anxiety, to quote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, may be the ‘dizziness of freedom’, but all this freedom of choice really is a miracle.

As Montaigne put it, ‘He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.’

Just think. In the year 2000, no one knew what a selfie was. Google did just about exist but it was a long way from becoming a verb. There was no YouTube, no vlogging, no Wikipedia, no WhatsApp, no Snapchat, no Skype, no Spotify, no Siri, no Facebook, no bitcoin, no tweeted gifs, no Netflix, no iPads, no ‘lol’ or ‘ICYMI’, no crying-with-laughter emoji, almost no one had sat nav, you generally looked at photographs in albums, and the cloud was only ever a thing which produced rain.

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.

As Hamlet said to Rosencrantz, ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.

‘THE ONLY THING we have to fear is fear itself.’ That phrase, first uttered by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 during his inaugural speech as president,

‘I’d love to read more/learn a musical instrument/go to the gym/do some charity work/cook my own meals/grow strawberries/see my old school friends/ train for a marathon . . . if only I had the 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.

Tolstoy wrote, back in 1894, in The Kingdom of God Is Within You: The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become, which indeed is what we see actually taking place.

But also – more importantly – I wanted to find a way to stop other people’s view of me becoming my view of me. I wanted to create some emotional immunity. Social media, when you get too wrapped up in it, can make you feel like you are inside a stock exchange where you – or your online personality – is the stock. And when people start piling on, you feel your personal share price plummet. I wanted free of that. 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 realise 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.

Don’t play the ratings game. The internet loves ratings, whether it is reviews on Amazon and TripAdvisor and Rotten Tomatoes, or the ratings of photos and updates and tweets. Likes, favourites, 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.

How to be happy

1. Do not compare yourself to other people.

2. Do not compare yourself to other people.

3. Do not compare yourself to other people.

4. Do not compare yourself to other people.

5. Do not compare yourself to other people.

6. Do not compare yourself to other people.

7. Do not compare yourself to other people.

‘. . . this collision between one’s image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish.’

• James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’

— Sylvia Plath

I have learned that however strong the craving gets the guilt afterwards will be stronger.

It’s about how the pattern of addiction – dissatisfaction to temporary solution to increased dissatisfaction

‘Make no mistake,’ writes neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in his book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload: ‘Email, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.’ Each time we check social media ‘we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones’ telling us we have ‘accomplished something’. But as with all addiction, this feeling of reward is unreliable. As Levitin puts it: ‘it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex.’

As with living in Ibiza, or in a religious cult, it is hard to see the things we may have problems with if everyone has the same problems. If everyone is spending hour after hour on their phones, scrolling through texts and timelines, then that becomes normal behaviour. If everyone is getting out of bed too early to work 12-hour days in jobs they hate, then why question it? If everyone is worrying about their looks, then worrying about our looks is what we should be doing. If everyone is maxing out their credit cards to pay for things they don’t really need, then it can’t be a problem. If the whole planet is having a kind of collective breakdown, then unhealthy behaviour fits right in. When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence.

‘How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.’

— Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)

‘I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.’

— Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932)

Don’t think your work matters more than it does. As Bertrand Russell put it: ‘One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.’

Don’t do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It’s always best to live it as yourself.

‘Progress,’ wrote C.S. Lewis, ‘means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.’

It’s just a shame, I suppose, that it takes such major events in our lives, or in the lives of the people we love, for perspective to arrive. Imagine if we could keep hold of that perspective. If we could always have our priorities right, even during the good and healthy times. Imagine if we could always think of our loved ones the way we think of them when they are in a critical condition. If we could always keep that love – love that is always there – so close to the surface. Imagine if we could keep the kindness and soft gratitude towards life itself.

‘Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.’