Notes on a Nervous Planet(13)

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, calculated 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.

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.’