Notes on a Nervous Planet
by Matt Haig (Canongate, £12.99 )
Peter Hegarty
The author of Reasons to Stay Alive describes himself as having once been a ‘terrified young man ‘who was ‘suicidally ill’. His struggles with depression and anxiety inform his writing and journalism: ‘The fact that I have had mental illness, though a nightmare in reality, has educated me on the various triggers and torments of the modern world.’
We like to think of ourselves as adaptable, but we’re not: biologically we have barely changed in the last 50,000 years. Our bodies and brains are those of the people who left the African savannah to wander the world. Our organs evolve slowly while the world around us changes rapidly. More information is available to us than ever before. Our brains are taking in more than they can process, and are ‘overloaded’ and ‘overstimulated’.
Since our bodies and brains cannot adapt at the same pace as technology, Haig suggests that we adapt technology to suit us. He considers sleep. We are a sleep-deprived species. Since the invention of the electric light bulb in 1878 we have been sitting up longer in the evenings and not sleeping as much as we need to.
Why not turn the lights out early? An extra hour in bed would leave us better able to cope with the stresses of modern life, and even save us a few quid: sleep “is an enemy of consumerism”.
Putting our phones to one side for extended periods would do us no harm either. If you are continually jabbing at a device, you are not concentrating on the job at hand. We are not natural multi-taskers: our brains function best when they concentrate on one thing at a time.
When we’re poking needlessly at a device we’re often missing out on something else. Once we killed time waiting for a bus looking at the people around us, wondering who they were, where they were going, how they could walk out the door dressed like that. Nowadays it’s not uncommon to see everyone at a crowded bus stop gazing into their phones.
Haig doesn’t warn us off social media completely, but he does urge us to use it in a more focused way.
Social media – indeed the modern world in general – are eroding our innate ability to accept what we are and have, to be content with our lives. The more we learn about how other people live and look, the deeper our senses of inadequacy and dissatisfaction become and the more willing we are to shell out money to transcend our miserable situation: ‘happiness is not good for the economy’.
One of the great paradoxes of modern life is that we are becoming less connected to other people as we become more connected to them. We are a social species, we value and need the society of others, and yet millions of us now text more than we converse.
That silent group of people poking at their phones at the bus shelter is a possible future society in microcosm.