Notes on a Nervous Planet Read online

  We all know that, even if we break the world record for speed reading, the number of books we read will only ever be a minuscule fraction of the books in existence. We are drowning in books just as we are drowning in TV shows. And yet we can only read one book – and watch one TV show – at a time. We have multiplied everything, but we are still individual selves. There is only one of us. And we are all smaller than an internet. To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can’t. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime.

  The world is having a panic attack

  PANIC IS A kind of overload.

  That is how my panic attacks used to feel. An excess of thought and fear. An overloaded mind reaches a breaking point and the panic floods in. Because that overload makes you feel trapped. Psychologically boxed in. That is why panic attacks often happen in over-stimulating environments. Supermarkets and nightclubs and theatres and overcrowded trains.

  But what happens when overload becomes a central characteristic of modern life? Consumer overload. Work overload. Environmental overload. News overload. Information overload.

  The challenge today, then, is not that life is necessarily worse than it once was. In many ways, human lives have the potential to be better and healthier and even happier than in eras past. The trouble is our lives are also cluttered. The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

  Places I have had panic attacks

  Supermarkets.

  The windowless basement floor of a department store.

  A packed music festival.

  At a nightclub.

  On an aeroplane.

  On the London underground.

  In a tapas bar in Seville.

  In the BBC News green room.

  On a train from London to York (it lasted most of the journey).

  In a cinema.

  In a theatre.

  At a corner shop.

  On a stage, feeling unnatural, with a thousand faces staring at me.

  Walking through Covent Garden.

  Watching the TV.

  At home, very late at night, after a busy day, with a streetlight glowing an ominous orange through the curtains.

  In a bank.

  In front of a computer screen.

  A nervous planet

  ‘IMAGINE IF THE world didn’t simply make people mad,’ a friend said to me recently, after I’d told him about the book I was trying to write. ‘Imagine if the world was itself mad. Or, you know, the bits of the world to do with us. Humans. I mean, what if it is literally mad. I think that’s what is happening. I think human society is breaking down.’

  ‘Yes. Like a patient having a nervous breakdown.’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, obviously the world isn’t a person. But it is increasingly connected, like you say – like a nervous system. Been like that a while, in fact. There was a guy I was reading about, in the 19th century. He said that all the telegraph cables were like a nervous system.’

  On further research, I found the man was called Charles Tilston Bright – the man in charge of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. He referred to the global telegraph network as ‘the world’s system of electrical nerves’.

  We no longer have telegraphs as such, as they didn’t prove too good at posting ninja cat videos and emojis. But the world’s nervous system has not gone away. It has evolved in scale and complexity to the extent that, since June 2017, over half the world’s population is connected to the internet, according to figures from the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (which, incidentally, used to be the International Telegraph Union).

  The number of internet users has been growing rapidly, year by year. It’s wild to think that back in 1995 comparatively no one was on the internet: 16 million people, just 0.4 per cent of the world population. A decade later, in 2005, it was up to a billion people, which meant 15 per cent of the world’s population was online. And by 2017 those digits flipped to 51 per cent.

  In that same year the number of active Facebook users – people who use Facebook at least once a month – reached 2.07 billion. At the start of this decade, back in 2010, there weren’t even that many people on the entire internet. This is a rapid amount of change. It has happened because many parts of the world have ‘modernised’ and have changed their infrastructure quickly to make way for broadband internet. The other factor is the rise of the smartphone, which has made accessing the internet far easier than it used to be.

  And it’s not just the amount of people who use the internet that is rising, the amount of time we spend online is rising too.

  Human beings are more connected via technology than ever before, and this radical change has happened in little over a decade. And, if nothing else, it’s leading to a lot of arguments online. As 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.

  And things are happening too quickly for us to take stock of it all. Certainly quicker than in Tolstoy’s time. All this falling out. All this information. All this technological connection. The world’s brain is a common but fitting metaphor. We are the nerve cells of the world’s brain, transmitting ourselves to all the other nerve cells. Sending the overload back and forth. Overloaded neurons on a nervous planet. Ready to crash.

  6

  INTERNET ANXIETIES

  ‘The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.’

  —Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google

  ‘A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today . . . I don’t know a more urgent problem than this . . . It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.’

  —Tristan Harris, former Google employee

  Things I love about the internet

  Collective action against social injustice.

  Watching old pop videos I had forgotten about.

  Watching movie trailers without having to be in a cinema.

  Wikipedia, Spotify, BBC Good Food recipes.

  The process of researching a trip away.

  Goodreads.

  Finding people who understand what you feel like when you are low.

  Talking to readers I would otherwise never talk to.

  Friendliness, which does happen quite a lot.

  Watching videos of animals doing incredible things (a gorilla dancing in a pool, an octopus opening a jar).

  Being able to go up to people via email or a message in a way I wouldn’t be able to in real life.

  Funny tweets.

  Staying in touch with old friends.

  The ability to test out ideas with people.

  Really good yoga instructors from Austin, Texas, whose practices I can follow without living in Austin, Texas.

  Equally good cool-down stretch running videos.

  Researching the downsides of the internet, via the internet.

  Things I should do less of on the internet

  Post about a meaningful experience, when I could be having an actual meaningful experience.

  Write tweets containing opinions that will win nobody over.

  Click on articles I don’t really want to read.

  Browse my Twitter feed when I should be eating breakfast.

  Read my Amazon reviews.

  C
ompare my life to the lives of other people.

  Stare at emails without answering them.

  Answer emails while I should be listening to my mum talk about her trip to see a doctor.

  Feel the empty joy of likes and favourites.

  Search my own name.

  Click off videos for songs I like on YouTube without waiting until the end, because I have seen another video I like.

  Google symptoms and self-diagnose (just because you are a hypochondriac it doesn’t mean you aren’t actually dying).

  Google things – any things (‘number of atoms in a human body’, ‘turmeric health benefits’, ‘cast of West Side Story’, ‘how to download photos from iCloud’) – after midnight.

  Check how a tweet/photo/status update is going down (and keep checking).

  Want to go offline, without going offline.

  The world is shrinking

  LIFE OVERLOAD IS a feeling that partly stems from how contracted and concentrated the world seems to have become. The human world has sped up and has effectively shrunk, too. It is becoming more connected, and as it becomes more connected, so are we. The ‘hive mind’ – first coined in a science fiction short story, ‘Second Night of Summer’ by James H. Schmitz, in 1950 – is now a reality. Our lives, information and emotions are connected in ways they have never been before. The internet is unifying even as it seems to divide.

  This shrinking of the world hasn’t been an overnight process. Humans have been communicating further than their voices allow for centuries. Using everything from smoke signals to drums to pigeons. A chain of signal beacons from Plymouth to London announced the arrival of the Spanish Armada.

  In the 19th century the electrical telegraph connected continents.

  Then the global nervous system evolved with the telephone, radio, television and, of course, the internet.

  These connections are, in many ways, making us ever closer. We can email or text or Skype or Facetime or play multiplayer online games in real time with people 10,000 miles away. Physical distance is increasingly irrelevant. Social media has enabled collective action like never before, from riots to revolutions to shock election results. The internet has enabled us to join together and make change happen. For better and for worse.

  The trouble is that if we are plugged in to a vast nervous system, our happiness – and misery – is more collective than ever. The group’s emotions become our own.

  Mass hysterics

  THERE ARE THOUSANDS of examples in history of individuals getting their emotions influenced by the crowd, from the Salem witch trials to Beatlemania.

  One of the most amusing/frightening examples is the case of the French convent in the 15th century where a nun began to miaow like a cat. Pretty soon, other nuns started to miaow, too. And within a few months the nearby villagers were startled to hear all the nuns miaowing for several hours a day in a loud cat chorus. They only stopped miaowing when the local authorities threatened to whip them.

  There are other odd examples. Such as the Dancing Plague of 1518, where, over the course of a month, 400 people in Strasbourg danced themselves to the point of collapse – and in some cases death – for no understandable reason. No music was even playing.

  Or during the Napoleonic Wars when, legend has it, the inhabitants of Hartlepool, England, collectively convinced themselves that a shipwrecked monkey was a French spy and hanged the poor, confused primate. Fake news has been around for a while.

  And now, of course, we have a technology – the internet – that makes collective group behaviour more possible and more likely. Different things – songs, tweets, cat videos – go viral on a daily, or hourly, basis. The word ‘viral’ is perfect at describing the contagious effect caused by the combination of human nature and technology. And, of course, it isn’t just videos and products and tweets that can be contagious. Emotions can be, too.

  A completely connected world has the potential to go mad, all at once.

  Baby steps

  IT WAS THE same again. ‘Matt, get off the internet.’

  Andrea was right, and she was only looking after me, but I didn’t want to hear it.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘It’s not fine. You’re having an argument with someone. You’re writing a book about how to cope with the stress of the internet and you’re getting stressed on the internet.’

  ‘That’s not really what it’s about. I’m trying to understand how our minds are affected by modernity. I’m writing about the world as a nervous planet. How our psychology is connected. I’m writing about all aspects of a—’

  She held up her palm. ‘Okay. I don’t want the TED talk.’

  I sighed. ‘I’m just getting back to an email.’

  ‘No. No, you aren’t.’

  ‘Okay. I’m on Twitter. But there’s one point I’ve just got to get across—’

  ‘Matt, it’s up to you. But I thought the whole idea was that you were doing all this to try to work out how not to get like this.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘So wrapped up in stuff you shouldn’t be wrapped up in. I just don’t want you ill. This is how you get ill. That’s all.’

  She left the room. I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn’t going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else’s life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watched each letter disappear.

  An ode to social media

  When anger trawls the internet,

  Looking for a hook;

  It’s time to disconnect,

  And go and read a book.

  Mirrors

  NEUROBIOLOGISTS HAVE IDENTIFIED ‘mirroring’ as one of the neural routes activated in the brains of primates – including us – during interaction with others.

  In a connected age, the mirrors get bigger.

  When people feel scared after a horrific event, that fear spreads like a digital wildfire.

  When people feel angry, that anger breeds.

  Even when people with contradictory opinions to us exhibit an emotion, we can feel a similar one. For instance, if someone is furious at you online for something, you are unlikely to adopt their opinion but it is quite likely you will catch their fury. You see it every day on social media: people arguing with each other, entrenching each other’s opposing view, yet also mirroring each other’s emotional state.

  I have done this many times, which is why Andrea was frustrated with me. I have become embroiled in some argument with someone who has called me a ‘snowflake’ or ‘libtard’ or who has tweet-shouted ‘LIBERALISM IS A MENTAL DISORDER’ at me. I kind of know that arguing with people online is not the most fulfilling way to spend our limited days on this earth and yet I have done it, without much control. I recognise this now. And I need to stop it.

  Anyway, my point is that while I am politically very different to the people I argue with, psychologically we are fuelling each other with the same feelings of anger. Political opposition but emotional mirroring.

  I once tweeted something silly in a state of anxiety.

  ‘Anxiety is my superpower,’ I said.

  I didn’t mean anxiety was a good thing. I meant that anxiety was ridiculously intense, that we people who have an excess of it walk through life like an anxious Clark Kent or a tormented Bruce Wayne knowing the secret of who we are. And that it can be a burden of racing uncontrollable thoughts and despair but one, just occasionally, that we can convince ourselves has a silver lining.

  For instance, personally I am thankful that it forced me to stop smoking, to get physically healthy, that it made me work out what was good for me, and who cared for me and who didn’t. I am thankful that it led me to trying to help some other people who experience it, and I am thankful that it led me – during good patches – to feel life more intensely.

  It was essentially what I had written in Reasons to Stay Alive. But I hadn’t expressed it very well in this twee
t. And then, suddenly, I was getting a lot of attention on Twitter.

  I decided to delete my tweet, but people had screengrabbed it and were rallying the ranks of the Twitter angry to direct their ire in my direction. ‘SUPERPOWER???? WTF!!!’ ‘@matthaig1 IS TOXIC’ ‘Delete your account’ ‘What a fucking idiot’ and so on. And you stay on, scared, watching this car crash of your own making, as your timeline fills with tens then hundreds of angry people, convinced that as they were touching a raw nerve they had a point. By the way, ‘touched a raw nerve’ is an irrelevant phrase if you have anxiety. Every nerve feels raw.

  The anger became contagious and I could feel it almost like a physical force radiating from the screen. My heart started to beat twice as fast. Everything felt like it was closing in. The air got thinner. I was backed into a corner. I began to feel a bit like reality was melting away. ‘Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.’ I lost myself in a brief panic attack. I felt an unhealthy fusion of guilt and fear and defensive anger, and became determined never to live-tweet my way out of anxiety again.

  Some things are best kept to yourself.

  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.