Notes on a Nervous Planet Read online

  I once hated a mole on my face so much that, as a teenager, I took a toothbrush to it and tried to scrub it off. But the problem was never the mole. The problem was that I was viewing my own face through the prism of my insecurity. I like that mole now. I have no idea why it used to trouble me so much, why I would stare at it in the mirror, wishing it into non-existence.

  As Hamlet said to Rosencrantz, ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’. He was talking about Denmark. But it applies to our looks, too. People might be encouraged to feel inadequate, but they don’t have to, as soon as they realise that the feeling is separate from the thing they are worried about. So, while there is a lot of awareness about the dangers of obesity, there seems to be less awareness of the other kind of problems with our physical appearance. If we are feeling bad about our looks, sometimes the thing we need to address is the feeling, not our actual physical appearance.

  Professor Pamela Keel of Florida State University has spent her career studying eating disorders and issues around female and male body image, and concludes that changing the way you look is never going to solve unhappiness about your looks. ‘What is really going to make you happier and healthier?’ she wondered at the start of 2018, presenting her latest research findings. ‘Losing ten pounds or losing harmful attitudes about your body?’ And when people feel less pressure about how their bodies look, it’s not just minds that benefit, but bodies too. ‘When people feel good about their bodies, they are more likely to take better care of themselves rather than treating their bodies like an enemy, or even worse, an object. That’s a powerful reason to rethink the kind of New Year’s resolutions we make.’

  This might explain why rates of obesity are themselves dangerously rising. If we were happier with our bodies, we’d be kinder to them.

  Just as being overly anxious about money can paradoxically result in compulsive spending, so worrying about our bodies is no guarantee we’ll have better bodies.

  The pressure on people to worry about how they look, to eat ‘clean’, to consider things like thigh gaps, to have ‘beach ready’ bodies, has been traditionally very genderfocused, with advertisers putting much more pressure on women. And even now, as increasing numbers of men feel the pressure to look a way that is not how most men naturally look, to have gym-defined bodies, to be ashamed of their physical flaws, to look good in selfies, to worry about their hair going grey or falling out, the pressure on women to fret about their appearance has never been greater. Instead of trying to reduce women’s appearance-related anxiety, we are raising men’s appearance-related anxiety. In some areas, in some kind of distorted idea of equality, we seem to be trying to make everyone equally anxious, rather than equally free.

  Just a moment ago, as I looked at Twitter, I saw someone retweet an article from the New York Post captioned ‘Male sex dolls with bionic penises will be here before 2019’. There is a picture of these sex dolls – hairless and impossibly toned bodies, complete with hair that will never fall out and penises that will never fail to be erect. Of course, inevitably, bionic female sex robots are being advanced, too, with even greater zeal. Now, wanting to look like a photoshopped model on the cover of a magazine is one thing. But will the next stage be wanting to look as blandly perfect as an android or robot? We might as well try to catch rainbows.

  ‘In nature,’ wrote Alice Walker, ‘nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.’ Our bodies will never be as firm and symmetrical and ageless as those of bionic sex robots, so we need quite quickly to learn how to be happy with not having society’s unrealistic version of the ‘best’ body, and a bit happier with having our body, as it is, not least because being unhappy with our body doesn’t make us look any better. It just makes us feel a lot worse. We are infinitely better than the most perfect-looking bionic sex robots. We are humans. Let’s not be ashamed to look like them.

  A note from the beach

  Hello.

  I am the beach.

  I am created by waves and currents.

  I am made of eroded rocks.

  I exist next to the sea.

  I have been around for millions of years.

  I was around at the dawn of life itself.

  And I have to tell you something.

  I don’t care about your body.

  I am a beach.

  I literally don’t give a fuck.

  I am entirely indifferent to your body mass index.

  I am not impressed that your abdominal muscles are visible to the naked eye.

  I am oblivious.

  You are one of 200,000 generations of human beings.

  I have seen them all.

  I will see all the generations that come after you, too.

  It won’t be as many. I’m sorry.

  I hear the whispers the sea tells me.

  (The sea hates you. The poisoners. That’s what it calls you. A bit melodramatic, I know. But that’s the sea for you. All drama.)

  And I have to tell you something else.

  Even the other people on the beach don’t care about your body.

  They don’t.

  They are staring at the sea, or they are obsessed with their own appearance.

  And if they are thinking about you, why do you care? Why do you humans worry so much about a stranger’s opinion?

  Why don’t you do what I do? Let it wash all over you. Allow yourself just to be as you are.

  Just be.

  Just beach.

  How to stop worrying about ageing

  1. Understand that old people aren’t actually that worried about old age, according to numerous surveys. The most recent one I can find was undertaken by American research firm NORC in 2016. It polled over 3,000 adults and found that old people are more optimistic about growing old than younger adults: 46 per cent of thirtysomethings said they were optimistic about ageing, compared to 66 per cent for the seventy pluses. It seems that worrying about growing old is a sign you are young. And the main reason to be optimistic about old age is that old people themselves are. Resilience seems to grow.

  2. It happens. Ageing is something we can’t do much about. We can eat healthily, exercise and live sensibly but we will still age. Our 80th birthday will still be on the same date. Sure, we can make it more likely we will reach 80, but we can’t stop the wheels of time. And the certainty is actually quite reassuring. When there is nothing we can do about something, the point of worry begins to diminish. ‘Everybody dies,’ wrote Nora Ephron. ‘There’s nothing you can do about it. Whether or not you eat six almonds a day.’

  3. The problems you associate with old age might not be the problems you have. You aren’t Nostradamus. You don’t know what you will be like when you are old. You don’t know, for instance, if your mind will decline or if it will shine ever brighter, like Matisse, who produced some of his best works of art in his eighties.

  4. The future isn’t real. The future is abstract. The now is all we know. One now after another now. The now is where we must live. There are billions of different versions of an older you. There is one version of the present you. Focus on that.

  5. You will regret the fear. In The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, Bronnie Ware – a nurse who worked in palliative care – shared her experience of talking to those near the end of their lives. Far and away the biggest regret they had was fear. Many of Bronnie’s patients were in deep anguish that they had spent their whole lives worrying. Lives consumed by fear. Worrying what other people thought of them. A worry that had stopped them being true to themselves.

  6. Embrace, don’t resist. The way to get rid of age anxiety might be the way you get rid of all anxiety. By acceptance, not denial. Don’t fight it, feel it. Maybe don’t inject yourself with Botox. Do some knifeless mental surgery instead. Reframe your idea of beauty. Be a rebel against marketing. Look forward to being the wise elder. Be the complex elegance of a melting candle. Be a map with 10,000 roads. B
e the orange at sunset that outclasses the pink of sunrise. Be the self that dares to be true.

  4

  NOTES ON TIME

  Fear and time

  ‘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, is probably the one I have thought about most in my life. It used to taunt me, during my first bout of panic disorder. Fear is enough, I used to think. The words have also been in my mind while writing this book. Like ‘time heals’ and all the best clichés, it has become a cliché for good reason – it has the power of truth.

  When I think about my own fears, most of them are to do with time itself. I worry about ageing. I worry about our children ageing. I worry about the future. I worry about losing people. I worry I am late with my work. Even writing this book I worry I will fall behind deadline. I worry about the time I have spent unwisely. The time I have spent ill. And, while researching, I began to wonder about whether our concept of time is itself temporal. Has our attitude to time changed? Is the way to be free from fear to come to a new relationship with the tick-tock of minutes and hours and years? I feel if I can begin to understand the way my mind – and maybe your mind – reacts to the modern world, I need to look at time itself.

  Stop the clocks

  WE DIDN’T ALWAYS have clocks. For most of human history the concept of, say, ‘a quarter to five’ or ‘four forty-five’ would have been meaningless.

  No one has ever found a Neolithic cave painting of someone waking up stressed because they slept through their alarm and missed their nine o’clock management meeting. Once upon a time, there were really just two times. Day and night. Light and dark. Awake and asleep. Of course, there were other times, too. There were meal times and hunting times and times to fight and times to relax and times to play and times to kiss, but these times weren’t dictated artificially by clocks and their numbers and endless partitions.

  When time-keeping methods were first used they typically still kept this dual structure sacred. After all, when the Ancient Egyptians looked at the shadows from their time-telling obelisks, or when the Romans looked at their sundials, they could only do so in daylight. Even when mechanical clocks first appeared in Europe in the early 14th century, on things like churches, they were quite casual affairs. They generally didn’t have minute hands, for instance, and couldn’t be seen from most bedroom windows.

  Pocket watches first came about during the 16th century and, like so many consumer desirables, were exclusive status symbols to begin with – novelties for the nobility. A fancy pocket watch in the middle of that century cost in the region of £15, which was more than a farm labourer earned in a year. All that for a watch that didn’t even have a minute hand. It was, however, the pocket watch that seemed to make people become a bit antsier about time. Or, at least, antsier about checking the time.

  When the diarist Samuel Pepys first treated himself to a pocket watch – ‘a very fine [one] it is’ – in London in 1665 he quickly realised – like so many modern internet users – that having access to information gives you one kind of freedom at the expense of another. He wrote in his diary on 13 May:

  But, Lord! to see how much of my old folly and childishness hangs upon me still that I cannot forbear carrying my watch in my hand in the coach all this afternoon, and seeing what o’clock it is one hundred times; and am apt to think with myself, how could I be so long without one; though I remember since, I had one, and found it a trouble, and resolved to carry one no more about me while I lived.

  Surely anyone who has ever had a smartphone or a Twitter account can relate to such compulsive behaviour. Check, check, check, and once more, just to see. When the ability to check something turns into the compulsion to do so, we often find ourselves craving the time before, when there was no ability to check in the first place.

  The thing is, Pepys’ pocket watch wasn’t even very good. It wasn’t even quite good. It was a very crap piece of tech for a year’s salary. But no pocket watch in 1665 was good, at least not at telling the time. It wasn’t until a decade later with the invention of the hairspring, which controlled the speed of the watch’s balance wheel, that even vaguely accurate pocket watches were possible.

  Since then, of course, our ways of measuring time have become ever more advanced. We are now in the age of atomic clocks. These are incredibly, intimidatingly accurate clocks. For instance, in 2016, physicists in Germany built a clock so accurate that it won’t lose or gain a second for 15 billion years. German physicists now have no excuse for being late for anything ever again.

  We are too aware of numerical time and not aware enough of natural time. People for thousands of years may have woken up at seven in the morning. The difference with these last few centuries is that now we are waking up because it is seven in the morning. We go to school or college or work at a certain time of day, not because that feels the most natural time to do so, but because that is the time that has been given to us. 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.

  A phone call

  ‘MATTHEW?’ IT’S MY mum. She is the only one who ever calls me Matthew.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Were you listening to what I was saying?’

  ‘Um. Yeah. Something about going to the doctor . . .’

  Shamefully, I hadn’t been listening. I was staring at an email I was halfway through writing. So, I change strategy. I tell her the truth.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m just on the laptop. I’m very busy. I seem to have no time at all at the moment . . .’

  Mum sighs, and I hear the sigh instantaneously, even though she is 200 miles away. ‘I know the feeling.’

  We need the time we already have

  THE THING IS, we should have more time than ever. I mean, think about it. Life expectancy has more than doubled for people living in the developed world during the last century. And not only that, we have more time-saving devices and technologies than ever before existed.

  Emails are faster than letters. Electric heaters are faster than fires. Washing machines are speedier than handwashing over a sink or a river. Once laborious processes like waiting for your hair to dry or travelling ten miles or boiling water or searching through data now take next to no time at all. We have time- and effort-saving things like tractors and cars and washing machines and production lines and microwave ovens.

  And yet, for a lot of our lives we feel rushed off our feet. We say things like ‘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.

  5

  LIFE OVERLOAD

  An excess of everything

  THERE IS, IN the current world, an excess of everything.

  Think of just one single category of thing.

  Think, say, of the thing you are holding – a book.

  There are a lot of books. You have, for whatever reason, chosen to read this one, for which I sincerely thank you. But while you are reading this book you might also be painfully aware that you aren’t reading other books. And I don’t want to stress you out too much but there are a lot of other books. The website Mental Floss, relying heavily on data from Google, cal
culated there were – at a conservative estimate – 134,021,533 books in existence, but that was halfway through 2016. There are many millions more now. And anyway, 134,021,533 is still, technically, a lot.

  It wasn’t always like this.

  We didn’t always have so many books, and there was an obvious reason. Before printing presses books had to be made by hand, written on surfaces of clay, papyrus, wax or parchment.

  Even after the printing press was invented there wasn’t that much stuff to read. A book club in England in the early 16th century would have struggled as there were only around 40 different books published a year, according to figures from the British Library. An avid reader could therefore quite easily keep up with every book that was published.

  ‘So, what are ye all reading?’ a hypothetical member of the hypothetical book club would ask.

  ‘Whatever there is, Cedric,’ would be the reply.

  However, the situation changed quite quickly. By the year 1600 there were around 400 different titles being published per year in England – a tenfold increase on the previous century.

  Although it is said that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the last person who read everything, this is a technical impossibility as he died in 1834, when there were already millions of books in existence. However, what is interesting is that people of the time could believe it was possible to read everything. No one could believe such a thing now.