Notes on a Nervous Planet Read online

  When, back in the 1990s, Microsoft’s slogan asked, ‘Where do you want to go today?’ it was a rhetorical question. In the digital age, the answer is everywhere. Anxiety, to quote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, may be the ‘dizziness of freedom’, but all this freedom of choice really is a miracle.

  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.

  Invisible sharks

  ONE FRUSTRATION WITH anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it. There may be no visible threat and yet you can feel utterly terrified. It’s all intense suspense, no action. It’s like Jaws without the shark.

  But often there are sharks. Metaphorical, invisible sharks. Because even when we sometimes feel we are worried for no reason, the reasons are there.

  ‘You’re gonna need a bigger boat,’ said Chief Brody, in Jaws itself.

  And maybe that’s the problem for us, too. Not the metaphorical sharks but our metaphorical boats. Maybe we would cope with the world better if we knew where those sharks were, and what we need to navigate the waters of life unscathed.

  Crash

  I SOMETIMES FEEL like my head is a computer with too many windows open. Too much clutter on the desktop. There is a metaphorical spinning rainbow wheel inside me. Disabling me. And if only I could find a way to switch off some of the frames, if only I could drag some of the clutter into the trash, then I would be fine. But which frame would I choose, when they all seem so essential? How can I stop my mind being overloaded when the world is overloaded? We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up sometimes thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.

  Things that are faster than they used to be

  Mail.

  Cars.

  Olympic sprinters.

  News.

  Processing power.

  Photographs.

  Scenes in movies.

  Financial transactions.

  Journeys.

  World population growth.

  The deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.

  Navigation.

  Technological progress.

  Relationships.

  Political events.

  The thoughts in your head.

  24/7 catastrophe

  WORRY IS A small, sweet word that sounds like you could keep an eye on it. Yet worry about the future – the next ten minutes, the next ten years – is the chief obstacle I have to being able to live in and appreciate the present moment.

  I am a catastrophiser. I don’t simply worry. No. My worry has real ambition. My worry is limitless. My anxiety – even when I don’t have capital-A Anxiety – is big enough to go anywhere. I have always found it easy to think of the worst-case scenario and dwell on it.

  And I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. I have gone to the doctor many times, convinced of my imminent demise because of an illness I’ve googled myself into having. As a child, if my mum was late picking me up from primary school it would only take about a minute for me to convince myself she had probably died in a hideous car accident. That never happened, but it’s continual not-happening-ness never stopped the possibility that it could happen. Every moment my mother wasn’t there was a moment in which she might never be there again.

  The ability to imagine catastrophe in horrific detail, to picture the mangled metal and the spray of white-blue glass glittering on the road, occupied my mind far more than the rational idea that such a catastrophe was unlikely. If Andrea doesn’t pick up her phone I can’t help but think a likely scenario is that she has fallen down the stairs or maybe even spontaneously combusted. I worry that I upset people without meaning to. I worry that I don’t check my privilege enough. I worry about people being in prison for crimes they didn’t do. I worry about human rights abuses. I worry about prejudice and politics and pollution and the world my children and their entire generation are inheriting from us. I worry about all the species going extinct because of humans. I worry about my carbon footprint. I worry about all the pain in the world that I am not actively able to stop. I worry about how much I’m wrapped up in myself, which makes me even more wrapped up in myself.

  Years before I ever had actual sex I found it easy to imagine I had AIDS, so powerful were the British Government’s terrifying public awareness TV slots in the 1980s. If I eat food that tastes a little funny, I immediately imagine I will be hospitalised from food poisoning, even though I have only had food poisoning once in my life.

  I can’t be at an airport and not feel – and therefore act – suspicious.

  Every new lump or ulcer or mole is a potential cancer. Every memory lapse is early-onset Alzheimer’s. On and on and on. And all this is when I am feeling relatively okay. When I’m ill the catastrophising goes into overdrive.

  In fact, now I think about it, that is the chief characteristic of anxiety for me. The continual imagining of how things could get so much worse. And it is only recently that I have been understanding how much the world feeds into this. How our mental states – whether we are actually ill or just stressed out – are to a degree products of social states. And vice versa. I want to understand what it is about this nervous planet that gets in.

  There is a world of difference between feeling a bit stressed and being properly ill, but as with, say, hunger and starvation, the two are related in that what is bad for one (lack of food) is also bad for the other. And so, when I am well – but stressed – the things that make me feel a little bit worse are often the things that make me feel much worse when I am ill. What you learn when you are ill, about what hurts, can then be applied to the better times, too. Pain is one hell of a teacher.

  Some more worries on top of those mentioned in the last chapter (because there are always more worries)

  –The news.

  –Underground trains. When I am on the tube, I imagine all the things that could go wrong. The train could get trapped in the tunnel. There could be a fire. There could be a terrorist incident. I could have a heart attack. To be fair, I once did have a legitimately terrifying experience on an underground train. I stepped off the Paris Métro and into wispy mouth-burning clouds of tear gas. There was a battle going on above ground between union workers and police, and the police had set off some tear gas a bit too close to the Métro station. I didn’t know this at the time. At the time, covering my face with a scarf just to breathe, I thought it was a terrorist attack. It wasn’t. But simply thinking it was one was a kind of trauma. As Montaigne put it, ‘He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears.’

  –Suicide. Although I was suicidal when I was younger, and very nearly threw myself off a cliff, in more recent times my obsession with suicide became more a fear of doing it, rather than a will to do it.

  –Other health worries. Such as: sudden and total heart failure from a panic attack (a ludicrously improbable occurrence); a depression so annihilating I wouldn’t be able to move ever again and would be stuck there for ever, as though I had gazed on the face of Medusa; cancer; heart disease (I have high cholesterol, for hereditary reasons); dying too young; dying too old; mortality in general.

  –Looks. It is an outdated myth that men don’t worry about their looks. I have worried about my looks. I used to buy Men’s Health magazine religiously and follow the workouts in an attempt to look like the cover model. I have worried about my hair – the substance of it, the potential loss of it. I used to worry about the moles on my face. I used to stare for long periods in the mirror, as if I could convince it to change its mind. I still worry about the lines on my face,
but I am getting better. It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing.

  –Guilt. At times I have felt the guilt of being a less than perfect son, and husband, and citizen, and human organism. I feel guilt when I work too hard – and neglect my family – and guilt when I don’t work hard enough. The guilt doesn’t always have a cause, though. Sometimes it is just a feeling.

  –Inadequacy. I worry about a lack and I worry about how I can fill it. I often sense a metaphorical void inside me that I have at various times in my life tried to fill with all kinds of stuff – alcohol, partying, tweets, prescription drugs, recreational drugs, exercise, food, work, popularity, travel, spending money, earning more money, getting published – that of course haven’t fully worked. The things I have thrown in the hole have often just deepened the hole.

  – Nuclear weapons. If nuclear weapons have been on the news – which seems to happen on increasing amount these days – I can visualise mushroom clouds through every window. The words of former US general Omar Nelson Bradley offer a chilly echo today: ‘Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about killing than we know about living.’

  –Robots. I am only half joking. Our robotic future is a legitimate source of worry. I boycott self-service checkouts in a continual act of pro-human defiance. But the flip side is that thinking about robots sometimes makes me value the tantalising mystery of being alive.

  Five reasons to be happy you are a human and not a sentient robot

  1.William Shakespeare was not a robot. Emily Dickinson was not a robot. Neither was Aristotle. Or Euclid. Or Picasso. Or Mary Shelley (though she would be writing about them). Everyone you have ever loved and cared for was not a robot. Humans are amazing to other humans. And we are humans.

  2.We are mysterious. We don’t know why we are here. We have to craft our own meaning. A robot is designed for tasks or a set of tasks. We have been here for thousands of generations and we are still seeking answers. The mystery is tantalising.

  3.Your not-so-distant ancestors wrote poems and acted courageously in wars and fell in love and danced and gazed wistfully at sunsets. A future sentient robot’s ancestors will be a self-service checkout and a faulty vacuum cleaner.

  4.This list actually has only four things. Just to confuse the robots. Though I did ask some online friends why humans are better than robots, and they said all kinds of stuff: ‘self-deprecating humour’, ‘love’, ‘soft skin and orgasms’, ‘wonder’, ‘empathy’. And maybe a robot could one day develop these things, but right now it is a good reminder that humans are pretty special.

  Where does anxiety end and news begin?

  ALL THAT CATASTROPHISING is irrational, but it has an emotional power. And it isn’t just folk with anxiety who know this.

  Advertisers know it.

  Insurance sales people know it.

  Politicians know it.

  News editors know it.

  Political agitators know it.

  Terrorists know it.

  Sex isn’t really what sells. What sells is fear.

  And now we don’t just have to imagine the worst catastrophes. We can see them. Literally. The camera phone has made us all telejournalists. When something truly awful happens – a terrorist incident, a forest fire, a tsunami – people are always there to film it.

  We have more food for our nightmares. We don’t get our information, as people used to, from one carefully considered newspaper or TV news report. We get it from news sites and social media and email alerts. And besides, TV news itself isn’t what it used to be. Breaking news is continuous. And the more terrifying the news, the higher the ratings.

  That doesn’t mean all news people want bad news. Some do, judging from the divisive way they present it. But even the best news channels want high ratings, and over the years they work out what works and what doesn’t, and compete ever harder for attention, which is why watching news can feel like watching a continuous metaphor for generalised anxiety disorder. The various split screens and talking heads and rolling banners of incessant information are a visual representation of how anxiety feels. All that conflicting chatter and noise and sensationalist drama. We can feel stressed watching the news, even on a slow news day. Because, really, there is no longer such a thing as a slow news day.

  And when something truly terrible has happened the endless stream of eyewitness accounts and speculation and phone footage does not help anything. It is all sensation and no information. If you find the news severely exacerbates your state of mind, the thing to do is SWITCH IT OFF. Don’t let the terror into your mind. No good is done by being paralysed and powerless in front of non-stop rolling news.

  The news unconsciously mimics the way fear operates – focusing on the worst things, catastrophising, listening to an endless, repetitive stream of information on the same worrying topic. So, it can be hard to tell these days where your anxiety disorder ends and where actual news begins.

  So we have to remember:

  There is no shame in not watching news.

  There is no shame in not going on Twitter.

  There is no shame in disconnecting.

  2

  THE BIG PICTURE

  ‘We seldom realise, 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.’

  —Alan Watts, The Culture of Counter Culture: Edited Transcripts

  Life moves pretty fast

  OF COURSE, IN the cosmic perspective, the whole of human history has been fast.

  We haven’t been here long. The planet is around 4.6 billion years old. Our specific and wonderful and problematic species – Homo sapiens – has only been here for 200,000 years. And it was only in the last 50,000 years that things picked up a gear. When we started wearing clothes from animal skins. When we began burying our dead as a matter of practice. When our hunting methods became more advanced.

  The oldest known cave art is probably Indonesian and over 40,000 years old. In world terms that was a blink of an eye ago. But art is older than agriculture. Agriculture arrived basically yesterday.

  We’ve only had farms for 10,000 years. And writing has only been around, as far as we know, for a minuscule 5,000 years.

  Civilisation, which began in Mesopotamia (roughly Iraq and Syria on today’s map), is under 4,000 years old. And once civilisation began, things really began to speed up. It was time to fasten our collective seat belts. Money. The first alphabet. The first musical notation system. The pyramids. Buddhism and Hinduism and Christianity and Islam and Sikhism. Socratic philosophy. The concept of democracy. Glass. Swords. Warships. Canals. Roads. Bridges. Schools. Toilet paper. Clocks. Compasses. Bombs. Eyeglasses. Mines. Guns. Better guns. Newspapers. Telescopes. The first piano. Sewing machines. Morphine. Refrigerators. Transatlantic telegraph cables. Rechargeable batteries. Telephones. Cars. Aeroplanes. Ballpoint pens. Jazz. Quiz shows. Coca-Cola. Polyester. Thermonuclear weapons. Rockets to the moon. Personal computers. Video games. Bloody email. The world wide web. Nanotechnology.

  Whoosh.

  But this change – even within the last four millennia – is not a smooth, straight upward line. It is the kind of steepening curve that would intimidate a professional skateboarder. Change may be a constant, but the rate of change is not.

  How do you stay human in a world of change?

  WHEN LOOKING AT triggers for mental health problems, therapists often identify an intense change in someone’s life as a major factor. Change is frequently related to fear. Moving house, losing a job, getting married, an increase or decrease in income, a death in the family, a diagnosis of a health problem, turning 40, whatever. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter too much if the change is outwardly a ‘good’ one – having a baby, getting a promotion. The intensity of the change can be a shock to the system.

  What, though, when the change isn’t jus
t a personal one?

  What about when change affects everyone?

  What happens when whole societies – or a whole human population – undergo a period of profound change?

  What then?

  These questions are, of course, making an assumption. The assumption is that the world is changing. How is the world changing?

  Chiefly, and most measurably, the change is technological.

  Yes, there are other social and political and economic and environmental changes, but technology is related to all of them, and underlies them, so let’s start with that.

  Of course, as a species, we humans have always been shaped by technology. It underpins everything.

  Technology, in its baggiest sense, just means tools or methods. It could mean language. It could mean flints or dry sticks used to make fire. According to many anthropologists, technological progress is the most important factor driving human society.

  Inventions such as man-made fire, the wheel, the plough or the printing press weren’t just important for their immediate purpose but in terms of their overall impact on how societies developed.

  In the 19th century, the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan announced that technological inventions can lead to whole new eras of humanity. He saw three phases of social evolution – savagery, barbarism and civilisation – with each one leading to the next due to technological leaps forward. This seems a bit dodgy now, I think, because it implies an increasingly questionable moral advancement from ‘savages’ to the ‘civilised’.