by Matt Haig
The thing I really struggle with, though, is what we can do as a society. We can’t reverse the clock. We can’t suddenly become non-technological, and wouldn’t want to. So how do we – the collective we – make a better world for ourselves?
One of the best people to answer this is Yuval Noah Harari, the history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem whose ground-breaking books Sapiens and Homo Deus question what makes us human, and how technology is not only reshaping our world but also redefining humanity itself. He has written about the nightmarish scenario of a future world where humans could be surpassed by the machines they create and concludes, bleakly, that ‘Homo sapiens as we know them will disappear in a century or so’.
After reading Harari’s work I wondered why humans are so wilfully ushering in a future that will slowly make themselves redundant. It made me think of another work that had inspired me when I was younger – Straw Dogs by the philosopher John Gray – which quite brutally explored the idea that human societal progress is a dangerous myth. After all, we are the only animals that are – as far as we know – obsessed with the idea of progress. If there are turtle historians congratulating previous turtles on their creation of a more enlightened turtle society we don’t know about them.
In a piece for The Observer, I asked Harari if we should try to resist the idea of the future as one of inevitable technological advancement. Should we try to create a different kind of futurism?
‘You can’t just stop technological progress,’ he said. ‘Even if one country stops researching artificial intelligence, some other countries will continue to do it. The real question is what to do with the technology. You can use exactly the same technology for very different social and political purposes.’
The internet, of course, would be the obvious case in point in the present. But it is also an example – in the case of what used to be known as the ‘world wide web’ – of things which started with utopian ideals soon becoming dystopian.
‘If you look at the 20th century,’ Yuval continued, ‘we see that with the same technology of electricity and trains you could create a communist dictatorship or a liberal democracy. And it’s the same with artificial intelligence and bioengineering. So, I think people shouldn’t be focused on the question of how to stop technological progress because this is impossible. Instead the question should be what kind of usage to make of the new technology. And here we still have quite a lot of power to influence the direction it’s taking.’
So, like many things, the answer to fixing the problem seems first to be aware of the problem. In other words: the answer to making our minds and our planet healthier and happier is essentially the same one. When Harari said that you can use the same technology for very different purposes, that is of course as true on the micro level of the individual as it is on the macro level of society. Being mindful of how our own use of technology affects us is indirectly being mindful of how technology affects the planet. The planet doesn’t simply shape us. We shape the planet by how we choose to live our lives.
And sometimes, when we – and our societies – are heading in unhealthy directions we have to do the bravest and most difficult thing of all. We have to change.
That change can take different forms. It can mean using technology to help our minds, by getting an app that limits our social media use, or getting a dimmer switch, or walking more, or being more considerate to people online, or choosing a car less likely to contaminate the air. Being kind to ourselves and being kind to the planet is, ultimately, the same thing.
‘Progress,’ wrote C.S. Lewis, ‘means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.’
This is a phenomenally good way of looking at it, I think. Forward momentum, on an individual or social level, is not automatically good simply because it is forward momentum. Sometimes we push our lives in the wrong direction. Sometimes societies push themselves in the wrong direction. If we feel it is making ourselves unhappy, progress might mean doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road. But we must never feel – personally or as a culture – that only one version of the future is inevitable.
The future is ours to shape.
Space
IN TERMS OF shaping our own future, spaces are key. We need to make sure there are spaces to be free. To be ourselves. Literal spaces, psychological spaces.
Increasingly, our towns and cities are places which want us there primarily as consumers, rather than people. Which makes it all the more important that we value those threatened spaces where economically irrelevant being is still allowed. Forests, parks, state-funded museums and galleries, libraries.
Libraries, for instance, are wonderful places currently at risk. Many people in power dismiss them as irrelevant in the age of the internet. This really misses the point. Many libraries are using the internet in innovative ways, enabling access to books and the internet itself. And besides, libraries aren’t just about books. They are one of the few public spaces we have left which don’t like our wallets more than us.
But there are other spaces which are threatened, too.
Non-physical spaces. Spaces of time. Digital spaces. Some online companies increasingly want to infringe on our selfhood, seeing us as less of a human being and more as an organism full of data to be mined, or sold on.
There are spaces in the day and week that are being continually devoured in the name of work or other responsibilities.
There are even spaces of the mind that are under threat. The space to think freely, or at least calmly, seems to be harder to find. Which might explain the rise not only in anxiety disorders but also of counterbalancing habits such as yoga and meditation.
People are craving not just physical space but the space to be mentally free. A space from unwanted distracted thoughts that clutter our heads like pop-up advertising of the mind in an already frantic world. And that space is still there to be found. It’s just that we can’t rely on it. We have to consciously seek it out. We might have to set time to read or do some yoga or have a long bath or cook a favourite meal or go for a walk. We might have to switch our phone off. We might have to close the laptop. We might have to unplug ourselves, to find a kind of stripped-back acoustic version of us.
Fiction is freedom
BOOKS MIGHT BE one way to recover some space. Stories. Fiction.
When I was eleven, friendless, struggling to fit in at school, I read The Outsiders and Rumble Fish and Tex by S.E. Hinton, and I suddenly had friends again. Her books were friends. The characters were friends. And real ones, too, because they helped me out. Just as at other times Winnie-the-Pooh and Scout Finch and Pip and Bonjour Tristesse’s Cécile were friends. And the stories they inhabited could be places I could hide inside. And feel safe.
In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality, yes, but not an escape from truth. Quite the opposite. In the ‘real’ world, I used to struggle with fitting in. The codes you had to follow. The lies you had to tell. The laughs you had to fake. Fiction felt not like an escape from truth but a release into it. Even if it was a truth with monsters or talking bears, there was always some kind of truth there. A truth that could keep you sane, or at least keep you you.
For me, reading was never an antisocial activity. It was deeply social. It was the most profound kind of socialising there was. A deep connection to the imagination of another human being. A way to connect without the many filters society normally demands.
So often, reading is seen as important because of its social value. It is tied to education and the economy and so on. But that misses the whole point of reading.
Reading isn’t important because it helps to get you a job. It’s important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you’re given. It is how humans merge. How minds connect. Dreams. Empathy. Understanding. Escape.
; Reading is love in action.
It doesn’t need to be books. But we do need to find that space.
We are frequently encouraged to want the most extreme and exciting experiences. To act on a heady impulse for action. To ‘Just Do It’ as Nike always used to bark at us, like a self-help drill instructor. As if the very point of life is found via winning a gold medal or climbing Mount Everest or headlining Glastonbury or having a full-body orgasm while sky-diving over the Niagara Falls. And I used to feel the same. I used to want to lose myself in the most intense experiences, as if life was simply a tequila to be slammed. But most of life can’t be lived like this. To have a chance of lasting happiness, you have to calm down. You have to just be it as well as just do it.
We crowd our lives with activity because in the West we often feel happiness and satisfaction are achieved by acquisition, by ‘seizing’ the day, or by going out and ‘grabbing’ life by the horns. We might sometimes do better to replace life as something to be grabbed at, or reached for, with something we already have. If we clear out the mental clutter we can surely enjoy it more.
The Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh writes in The Art of Power that while ‘many people think excitement is happiness’, actually ‘when you are excited you are not peaceful. True happiness is based on peace.’
Personally, I wouldn’t want a life of total neutral inner peace. I’d want to occasionally experience some wild intensity and exhilaration. That is part of me. But I crave that peace and acceptance more than ever.
To be comfortable with yourself, to know yourself, requires creating some inner space where you can find yourself, away from a world that often encourages you to lose yourself.
We need to carve out a place in time for ourselves, whether it is via books or meditation or appreciating the view out of a window. A place where we are not craving, or yearning, or working, or worrying, or over-thinking. A place where we might not even be hoping. A place where we are set to neutral. Where we can just breathe, just be, just bathe in the simple animal contentment of being, and not crave anything except what we already have: life itself.
Aim
TO FEEL EVERY moment, to ignore tomorrow, to unlearn all the worries and regrets and fear caused by the concept of time. To be able to walk around and think of nothing but the walking. To lie in bed, not asleep, and not worry about sleep. But just be there, in sweet horizontal happiness, unflustered by past and future concerns.
17
THE SONG OF YOU
Sycamore trees
DURING THE WRITING of this book, my mum had to have a major operation. She had open heart surgery to remove and replace a damaged aortic valve. The operation went well, and she recovered, but her week in intensive care was a bit of a rollercoaster, with doctors and nurses needing to keep a close eye on the levels of oxygen in her blood. They reached worrying lows.
Andrea and I went up and stayed in a hotel near the hospital. I sat by her bedside with my dad as Mum slid in and out of sleep. I helped spoon-feed her hospital meals and brought in carrier bags full of shop-bought smoothies, and the occasional newspaper for Dad. My worry about Mum stripped everything else away. I felt incredible guilt about having hardly listened when she had told me about her initial visits to the doctor.
Now, I didn’t care about any urgent emails I hadn’t got back to. I didn’t have any temptation to check social media. Even world news seemed like a background irrelevance when you were sitting in an intensive care unit hearing the wails of grief coming from beyond a thin hospital curtain as the patient in the next bed passes away.
Intensive care units are bleak places, sometimes, but those sterile rooms full of people perched between life and death can also be hopeful ones. And the nurses and doctors were an inspiration.
It’s just a shame, I suppose, that it takes such major events in our lives, or in the lives of the people we love, for perspective to arrive. Imagine if we could keep hold of that perspective. If we could always have our priorities right, even during the good and healthy times. Imagine if we could always think of our loved ones the way we think of them when they are in a critical condition. If we could always keep that love – love that is always there – so close to the surface. Imagine if we could keep the kindness and soft gratitude towards life itself.
I am trying now, when my life gets too packed with unnecessary stressful junk, to remember that room in the hospital. Where patients were thankful just to look at the view out of a window. Some sunshine and sycamore trees.
And where life, on its own, was everything.
Love
Only love will save us.
Minus psychograms (things that make you feel lighter)
Imagine that, as well as psychograms, there could be things that make your mind feel lighter. We could call these minus psychograms, or -pg.
The sun appearing unexpectedly from behind a cloud
57-pg
The all-clear from a doctor
320-pg
Being on holiday somewhere with no wi-fi (after the initial panic)
638-pg
Walking the dog
125-pg
A yoga session
487-pg
Being lost in a good book
732-pg
Arriving home after a terrible train journey
398-pg
Being surrounded by nature
1,291-pg
Dancing
1,350-pg
A close relative recovering from an operation
3,982-pg
And so on.
Sri Lanka
I HAD BEEN asked to visit the beautiful fort city of Galle, on the southwest coast of Sri Lanka, to attend the literature festival there and give a talk on mental health. The event was quite special, as Sri Lanka is still a place where talking about mental illness can be taboo. And it was emotional, hearing stories of anxiety and depression and OCD and suicidal tendencies and bipolar disorder and schizophrenia in a context where they aren’t normally publicly aired. It was like you could feel stigma evaporating in real time.
But it wasn’t the event I remember, it was the day after. On Hikkiduwa beach, alongside locals and backpackers, feeding giant sea turtles seaweed straight from my hand. Andrea and the children were there. It was the kind of moment I never believed I would have when I was an agoraphobic twentysomething convinced I wouldn’t live to reach 30, having pushed everyone I loved away. Then, at 40, in the Southern Hemisphere, there I was with people I loved, on an idyllic beach, close up to these large ancient reptiles. They seemed so calm and wise in their longevity. I wondered what secret wisdom they had. And wished there was a way for a human to ask a turtle questions.
So, when depression slugs over me I close my eyes and enter the bank of good days and think of sunshine and laughter and turtles. And I try to remember how possible the impossible can sometimes be.
An amphibious approach to life
‘Hello, turtle.’
‘Oh. Hi there.’
‘Any advice on life?’
‘Why are you asking me?’
‘Because you’re a turtle.’
‘And?’
‘Turtles have survived for millions of years. You’ve been around for 157 million years. That’s more than 700 hundred times as long as Homo sapiens have been around. You must know some things, as a species.’
‘You’re conflating length of existence with breadth of knowledge.’
‘It’s just humans who have made a mess of the world. Turtles don’t seem to.’
‘I know. We are near extinction because of you.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I was using “you” in the plural sense. But also, yes, you.’
‘I know. I’m a human. I share the blame.’
‘Yes. You do.’
‘Yes.’
‘Anyway, if you really want to know, the advice I would give is stop it.’
‘Stop what?’
‘It. The rushing after nothing. Humans seem
in such a rush to escape where they are. Why? Is it the air? Does it not hold you up well enough? Maybe you need more time in the sea. I would say: stop it. Don’t just take your time, be your time. Move fast or slow, but be aware you will always take yourself with you. Be happy to paddle in the water of existence.’
‘Right.’
‘Look at my head. It’s tiny. My brain-to-body-mass ratio is embarrassing. But it doesn’t matter, you see. If you take life carefully, you can focus. You can be how you need to be. You can have an amphibious approach to life. You can be at one with the rhythms of the whole earth. The wet and the dry. You can tune in to the wind and the water. You can tune in to yourself. It’s rather wonderful, you know, being a turtle.’
‘I bet. Thanks, turtle.’
‘Now, may I have some more seaweed?’
Reversing the loop
ANXIETY IS SELF-PERPETUATING. When you have it in its illness form it is a feedback loop of despair. The only way out is to stop the meta-worry, to stop worrying about the worrying, which is near impossible. Sometimes the trick is to find a reverse kind of loop. I do this by accepting that I am in this state of non-acceptance. By being comfortable with being uncomfortable. By accepting I don’t have control.
A cliché but true: you can’t get to where you want to be without first accepting where you are. The world tries to tell us not to accept ourselves. It makes us want to be richer, prettier, thinner, happier. To want more. When we are ill, this becomes doubly true, and yet this is when we most need to accept ourselves, accept the moment of pain, in order to release it. Slowly release it, into the world from which it came.
