Notes on a Nervous Planet Read online

  That was the feeling I had of the place. It was like a distillation of the things people need in life. And it strictly edited out the stuff that harmed the guests – the place was very strict about drink and drugs and so on. It had thought hard about what to let in and what to – literally – shut out.

  Although most of us are in a better place in life than the guests at the Joel Centre, its ethos is a good one to adopt. And deceptively simple. Accentuating the things that make you feel good, cutting back the things that make you feel bad, and letting people feel truly connected to the world around them.

  That is the biggest paradox, I think, about the modern world. We are all connected to each other but we often feel shut out. The increasing overload and complexity of modern life can be isolating.

  Added to that is the fact that we don’t always know precisely what makes us feel lonely or isolated. It can make it hard to see what the problems are. It’s like trying to open an iPhone to fix it yourself. It sometimes feels like society operates like Apple, as if it doesn’t want us to get a screwdriver and look inside to see what the problems are for ourselves. But that’s what we need to do. Because often identifying a problem, being mindful of it, becomes the solution itself.

  Lonely crowds

  THE PARADOX OF modern life is this: we have never been more connected and we have never been more alone. The car has replaced the bus. Working from home (or unemployment) has replaced the factory floor and, increasingly, the group office. TV has replaced the music hall. Netflix is becoming the new cinema. Social media the new meeting friends in the pub. Twitter has replaced the water cooler. And individualism has replaced collectivism and community. We have face-to-face conversations less and less, and more interactions with avatars.

  Human beings are social creatures. We are, in George Monbiot’s words, ‘the mammalian bee’. But our hives have fundamentally changed.

  I have noticed as the years pass that the number of my virtual friends is rising while the number of friends I see in real life is shrinking.

  I have decided to change this. I am making an effort to get out and socialise with friends at least once a week and I am feeling better for it.

  I’m not nostalgic about vinyl and compact discs but I am nostalgic about face-to-face contact. Not Facetime contact. Not Skype contact. But actually talking to someone, out in the elements, with nothing but air between you. At home, I am trying to put my laptop down and speak to my kids so they don’t grow up feeling they were behind a MacBook Pro in importance. I am trying not to cancel seeing friends out of sheer can’t-be-bothered-ness.

  And it is an effort. It’s so bloody hard. There are days when I’d find it easier to talk North Korea out of its nuclear weapons programme than to talk myself out of checking social media seventeen times before breakfast.

  Online socialising is easy. It is weather-proof. It never requires a taxi or an ironed shirt. And it’s sometimes wonderful. It’s often wonderful.

  But deep, deep down in the subterranean depths of my soul, I realise that the scent-free, artificially illuminated, digitised, divisive, corporate-owned environment can’t fulfil all my needs, any more than takeaway meals can replace the sheer pleasure of eating in a lovely restaurant. And I – someone whose anxiety once tipped into agoraphobia – am increasingly forcing myself to spend longer in that messy, windswept thing we sometimes still romantically call the real world.

  How to be lonely

  HAVE YOU EVER heard a parent moan about their kids’ need for constant entertainment?

  You know. ‘When I was young I could sit in the back of the car and stare out the window at clouds and grass for 17 hours and be perfectly happy. Now our little Misha can’t go five seconds in the car without watching Alvin and the Chipmunks 17 or playing game apps or taking selfies of herself as a unicorn . . .’

  That sort of thing.

  Well, there is an obvious truth to it. The more stimulation we have, the easier it is to feel bored.

  And this is another paradox.

  In theory, it has never been easier not to be lonely. There is always someone we can talk to online. If we are away from loved ones then we can Skype them. But loneliness is a feeling as much as anything. When I have had depression, I have been lucky enough to have people who love me all around me. But I had never felt more alone.

  I think the American writer Edith Wharton was the wisest person ever on loneliness. She believed the cure for it wasn’t always to have company, but to find a way to be happy with your own company. Not to be antisocial, but not to be scared of your own unaccompanied presence.

  She thought the cure to misery was to ‘decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone’.

  10

  PHONE FEARS

  A therapy session in the year 2049

  ROBOT THERAPIST: So, what is the problem?

  MY SON: Well, I think it goes back to my parents.

  ROBOT THERAPIST: Really?

  MY SON: My dad, specifically.

  ROBOT THERAPIST: What was the matter with him?

  MY SON: He used to be on his phone all the time. I used to feel like he cared about his phone more than me.

  ROBOT THERAPIST: I’m sure that’s not true. A lot of people from that generation didn’t know all the consequences of their phone use. They didn’t know how addictive they were. You have to remember, it was all relatively new back then. And everyone else was doing it, too.

  MY SON: Well, it gave me issues. I used to think, Why aren’t I as interesting to him as his Twitter feed? Why wasn’t I as good to look at as the screen of his phone? If only I didn’t feel like I had to distract him to get attention. This was in the days before the 2030 revolution, of course.

  ROBOT THERAPIST: Hmmm. Where’s your father now?

  MY SON: Oh, he died in 2027. He was run over by a driverless car while trying to find a funny gif.

  ROBOT THERAPIST: How sad. And what have you been doing since then?

  MY SON: I invested in a robot dad. I looked into all the hologram options but I wanted a dad I could hug. And I have programmed him never to check his notifications. He’s there when I want him.

  ROBOT THERAPIST: That is so wonderful to hear.

  How to own a smartphone and still be a functioning human being

  1.Don’t feel you always have to be there. In the not-so olden days of letters and landlines, contacting someone was slow and unreliable and an effort. In the age of WhatsApp and Messenger it’s free and easy and instant. The flipside of this ease is that we are expected to be there. To pick up the phone. To get back to the text. To answer the email. To update our social media. But we can choose not to feel that obligation. We can sometimes just let them wait. We can risk our social media getting stale. And if our friends are friends they will understand when we need some headspace. And if they aren’t friends, why bother getting back anyway?

  2.Turn off notifications. This is essential. This keeps me (just about) sane. All of them. All notifications. You don’t need any of them. Take back control.

  3.Have times of the day where you’re not beside your phone. Okay, I’m bad at this one. But I’m getting better. No one needs their phone all the time. We don’t need it by the bed. We don’t need it while we’re eating meals at home. We don’t need it when we go out for a run. Here’s something I do now: I go for a walk without my phone. I know it sounds ridiculous to present that as some big achievement, but for me it was. It’s like exercise. It takes effort.

  4.Don’t press the home button to check the screen every two minutes for texts. Practise feeling the urge to check and don’t.

  5.Don’t tie your anxiety levels to how much power you have left on your phone.

  6.Don’t swear at your phone. Don’t plead with your phone. Don’t bargain with your phone. Don’t throw your phone across the room. It is indifferent to your feelings. If the phone has no signal, or no
power, it is not because it hates you. It is because it is an inanimate object. It is, in short, a phone.

  7.Don’t put your phone by the bed. I’m not judging, by the way. Most people sleep with their phone by the bed because they’ve replaced alarm clocks. Most nights I have the phone by the bed. My parents have their phones by the bed. Everyone I know has their phones by their beds. Maybe one day our beds will be our phones. But I do seem to sleep better when my phone isn’t by my bed. You know, if it’s in another room, or even just another part of the room. I know it might be unrealistic. But it’s good to have an aspiration. A dream to work towards. To fantasise about the day when we’re strong enough never to need to have the phone by our beds. Like the olden days. The 1800s. The 1900s. 2006.

  8.Practise app minimalism. An overload of apps and options adds to the choice but also stress of phone use. We are given an almost infinite array of things we can add to our phones. But more choice leads to more decisions and more stress. You were born without any apps on your phone. Hey! Guess what? You were born without any phone at all. And life was still beautiful.

  9.Don’t try to multitask. We have phones that can do everything from map read to tune our guitars, and it’s tempting to imagine that we can do as many things, and all at once. For instance, while writing this one point alone I have had to consciously stop myself from checking my emails, checking my text messages, checking my social media. It took effort. According to neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, we aren’t really made for the kind of multitasking the internet age encourages us to do. ‘Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient,’ he writes, in The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction cycle, rewarding the brain for losing focus. It can also increase stress and lower IQ. ‘Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks,’ concludes Levitin.

  10.Accept uncertainty. The temptation to check your phone is down to uncertainty. That’s what makes it so addictive. You want someone to get back to your text but you don’t know if they have. You want to check. You want to see the promise and mystery of the three little circles, dancing with hope. You want to know how your photo or status update is going down. But why do we need to know right now? Why can’t it all wait till after your lie-in/meeting/walk/TV show/ meal/daydream? Do people really need to check their phones during meetings, or while attending funerals? Maybe if we understood that the checking is never fully satisfying we wouldn’t. Because there is no end to the uncertainty. There is no final checking of your phone. Think of all the times you checked your phone yesterday. Did you really need to so often? I certainly didn’t. I have definitely cut down, but still have a way to go. How many times do you touch your phone a day? Or look at it? It might be hard to keep count. The answer might be well in the hundreds. Imagine, I say to myself, if you just looked at your phone,say, five times a day. What catastrophe would occur?

  Glow

  I USED TO be obsessed with glowing windows and streetlamps when I was a kid. From the back of the car I would stare out and look at windows glowing pink through red curtains, like ET’s chest, and wonder about the life going on inside. There is something about the glow of artificial light that I find mesmerising. When I was eight years old – in 1983 – my parents had an old AA travel guide called Discover America and it had a double image of the Las Vegas Strip as seen at night. ‘I want to go there,’ I announced to my mum, to her distaste. She never took me.

  ‘It’s late,’ I say to Andrea.

  We read a little, then switch the lights off, always later than we should. Every time, I imagine the square light of our window turning black, to anyone walking by outside.

  ‘Night,’ Andrea says.

  ‘Night.’

  It will be some time after midnight and the room will be dark except for the glow of a phone.

  ‘Matt, are you going to go to sleep?’

  ‘I tried. My mind’s racing.’

  ‘You should put the phone down.’

  ‘It’s just my tinnitus is bad. This distracts me.’

  ‘Well, it’s stopping me going to sleep.’

  ‘Okay, sorry. I’m putting the phone down.’

  ‘You know what’ll happen if you have too many bad nights.’

  ‘I know. Night . . .’

  And I close my eyes, and my mind still races with a thousand worries, attracting attention like illuminated signs in Vegas, tainting my dreams and waiting to dissolve in daylight.

  How to get out of bed

  1.Wake up.

  2.Pick up phone.

  3.Stare at phone for 72 minutes.

  4.Sigh.

  5.Get out of bed.

  Alternatively, once in a while, try skipping stages two to four.

  A problem in your pocket

  WHILE WRITING THIS book, early in 2018, I was asked by The Observer to contribute to an article where lots of writers asked the novelist and essayist Zadie Smith questions. I took the opportunity, not least because I had seen Zadie Smith at a couple of literary parties when I was newly published and had been crippled and mute with anxiety and hadn’t dared to go over and talk to her.

  I had read about her social media scepticism and how she values her ‘right to be wrong’, and so I asked her, ‘Do you worry about what social media is doing to society?’

  She didn’t mince her words, and started with a critique of smartphones.

  ‘I can’t stand the phones and don’t want them in my life in any form. They make me feel anxious, depressed, dead inside, unhinged. But I fully support anyone who finds them delightful and a profound asset to their existence.’

  Although a self-described ‘Luddite abstainer’, Smith does think the time is right to look at how we’re using this technology. ‘What is this little device in your pocket doing to your intimate relationships with others?’ she asked. ‘To your behaviour as a citizen within a society? Maybe nothing! Maybe it’s all totally cool. But maybe not? . . . Do we need it resting by our pillows at night? Do our sevenyear-olds need phones? Do we wish to pass down our own dependency and obsession? It all has to be thought through. We can’t just let the tech companies decide for us.’

  I use my phone a lot more than Smith does but despite that – or maybe because of it – I share a lot of her anxieties. And there are signs that even those working for the tech companies are concerned, which means we should be even more worried about where those stupendously powerful companies are leading us. For instance, it’s been known – at least since The New York Times reported it in 2011 – that many Apple and Yahoo! employees choose to send their kids to schools which shun technology, such as the Waldorf School of the Peninsula in Los Altos.

  There are also many tech insiders who have come out to warn against the things they have had a hand in creating. There was the guy who invented the ‘Like’ button on Facebook, Justin Rosenstein, who has said that technology is so addictive his phone has a parent-control feature to stop him downloading apps and restrict his use of social media. And, as a side point, it is worth mentioning that the Facebook ‘like’ function is also what helps the data miners understand who we are. Our online likes reveal everything from our sexual orientation to our politics, and can be harvested to better influence us, as seen in the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, where reports suggested 50 million Facebook members had their data improperly accessed by the British firm that helps businesses and political groups ‘change audience behaviour’.

  ‘It is very common,’ Rosenstein told The Guardian in 2017, like a latter-day Dr Frankenstein, ‘for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences . . . Everyone is distracted, all the time.’

  And two of Twitter’s founders have expressed similar regrets. Ev Williams – who stepped down as CEO in 2010 – told The New York T
imes in 2017 that he was unhappy with the way Twitter had helped Donald Trump become president. ‘It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that.’

  Another Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has other regrets. He stated in an interview with Inc. that he thought the big wrong turn Twitter made was when it allowed strangers to tag people in their posts, as it created an environment rife for bullying. Another employee, according to Buzzfeed, has called Twitter a ‘honeypot for assholes’.

  And, in early 2018, Tim Cook – CEO of Apple – declared to a group of students in Essex, England, that he doesn’t think children (such as his nephew) should use a social network, or overuse technology at all, which shows that these aren’t simply ‘Luddite’ concerns.

  Indeed, a group of former tech employees have gone further, and set up the Center for Humane Technology, aimed at ‘realigning technology with humanity’s best interests’ and reversing the ‘digital attention crisis’.

  Now, at long last, there are many instances of tech people getting together to discuss concerns. For instance, at a 2018 conference in Washington called Truth About Tech, speakers included Google’s former ‘ethicist’ and now prominent tech whistleblower Tristan Harris and early investor of Facebook Roger McNamee, along with politicians and members of lobby groups such as Common Sense Media, who are trying to combat tech addiction in young people. A variety of concerns were raised, such as the way Google’s Gmail ‘hijacks’ minds, or how Snapchat exploits teenage friendships to fuel tech addiction via functions like ‘Snapchat streaks’ where users can see how many interactions they’ve had with friends per day. According to The Guardian, Harris compared the tech world to the Wild West in that the ethos is ‘build a casino wherever you want’ and McNamee compared it to the tobacco and food industries in the past, where cigarettes were promoted as healthy, or where manufacturers of ready meals failed to mention their products were loaded with salt. The difference being that with, say, an addiction to cigarettes, is that the cigarettes had no information about us. They didn’t collect our data. They couldn’t know us better than our own families. The internet, of course, can know everything about us. It can know who our friends are, it can know our taste in music, it can know our health concerns, our love life, and our politics – and internet companies can keep using this information to make their products ever more addictive. And at the moment, warn the tech insiders, there isn’t much regulation to stop them.