Notes on a Nervous Planet(16)

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 tweet. 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.





How to stay sane on the internet: a list of utopian commandments I rarely follow, because they are so damn difficult

1.Practise abstinence. Social media abstinence, especially. Resist whatever unhealthy excesses you feel drawn towards. Strengthen those muscles of restraint.

2.Don’t type symptoms into Google unless you want to spend seven hours convinced you will be dead before dinner.

3.Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.

4.Understand that what seems real might not be. When the novelist William Gibson first imagined the idea of what he coined ‘cyberspace’ in 1982’s ‘Burning Chrome’, he pictured it as a ‘consensual hallucination’. I find this description useful when I am getting too caught up in technology. When it is affecting my non-digital life. The whole internet is one step removed from the physical world. The most powerful aspects of the internet are mirrors of the offline world, but replications of the external world aren’t the actual external world. It is the real internet, but that’s all it can be. Yes, you can make real friends on there. But non-digital reality is still a useful test for that friendship. As soon as you step away from the internet – for a minute, an hour, a day, a week – it is surprising how quickly it disappears from your mind.