Notes on a Nervous Planet(19)
Hollie Newton @HollieNuisance
I like the ideas and the news and the colourful pictures. I like seeing what my friends are up to. Interacting. But spend more than a few minutes . . . And I start to feel, increasingly, like an inadequate nobody.
Cole Moreton @colemoreton
Not good. It agitates me, draws me into its angry argument, then I get repulsed and want to shut it all down. Then the cycle starts again.
Rachel Hawkins @ourrachblogs
Mixed. Instagram can leave me feeling jealous. Facebook makes me feel the rage and Twitter sometimes stresses me out.
Kat Brown @katbrown
Both. I get a lot from it (work, laughter, friends, contacts) but I know that my attention span has totally shifted. My focus is very often online. What’s about to happen? What COULD have happened? News and dopamine = argh.
Nigel Jay Cooper @nijay
There are times when it feels like being in a room full of people shouting at one another and not listening, so I have to step away from it . . . but there’s also the way it connects people, its supportive side and the sense of community. (1/2) I think the smartphone ‘always on’ part of the equation is the bigger thing for me. I have to create time when I put the phone down and focus on the real world around me instead of the virtual one. For me, managing that is the key to not being overwhelmed by social. (2/2)
How to be happy (2)
DON’T COMPARE YOUR actual self to a hypothetical self. Don’t drown in a sea of ‘what if’s. Don’t clutter your mind by imagining other versions of you, in parallel universes, where you made different decisions. The internet age encourages choice and comparison, but don’t do this to yourself. ‘Comparison is the thief of joy,’ said Theodore Roosevelt. You are you. The past is the past. The only way to make a better life is from inside the present. To focus on regret does nothing but turn that very present into another thing you will wish you did differently. Accept your own reality. Be human enough to make mistakes. Be human enough not to dread the future. Be human enough to be, well, enough. Accepting where you are in life makes it so much easier to be happy for other people without feeling terrible about yourself.
7
SHOCK OF THE NEWS
The multiplier effect
IT’S A NERVOUS planet with good reason. The world can be terrifying. Political polarisation, nationalism, the rise of actual Hitler-inspired Nazis, plutocratic elites, terrorism, climate change, governmental upheavals, racism, misogyny, the loss of privacy, ever-cleverer algorithms harvesting our personal data to gain our money or our votes, the rise of artificial intelligence and its implications, the renewed threat of nuclear war, human rights violations, the devastation of the planet. And it’s not just what happens. After all, the world has always had terrible things happening somewhere. The difference now is that – thanks to camera phones and breaking news and social media and our constant connection to the internet – we experience what is happening elsewhere in a more direct and visceral and intimate way than ever before. The experience is multiplied, and leaks out, from a thousand different angles.
Imagine, for instance, if there had been social media and camera phones during the Second World War. If people had seen, in full colour, on smartphones, the consequences of every bomb, or the reality of every concentration camp, or the bloodied and mutilated bodies of soldiers, then the collective psychological experience would have expanded the horror far beyond those who were experiencing it first-hand.
We would do well to remember that this feeling we have these days – that each year is worse than the one previously – is partly just that: a feeling. We are increasingly plugged in to the ongoing travesties and horrors of world news and so the effect is depressing. It’s a global sinking feeling. And the real worry is that all the increased fears we feel in themselves risk making the world worse.
If we see footage of a terrorist attack happening it becomes far easier to imagine another one happening, at any time, wherever we live. It doesn’t matter if, rationally, we know that we are far more likely to die from cancer or suicide or a traffic accident, the sensational terror we have seen on the news becomes the one that dominates our thoughts. And politicians exploit this, and ramp up the fears and create more division. Which leads to more instability and more opportunities for terrorists to do what they set out to do: cause terror. And then the politicians or political agitators ramp up the fear even higher.
It is like someone who is ill with a compulsive disorder continually underlining their fears – staying indoors, or washing their hands 200 times a day. They are actually doing more to hurt themselves, in the name of protecting themselves. But this time the disorder isn’t individual. It is social. It is global.
Shocks to the system
THE WORD ‘SHOCK’ crops up increasingly among political commentators on TV. You watch/read/scroll the news in the 21st century and it feels like a continual barrage of it. Of shock.
‘Oh crap, what now?’ That becomes the general reaction.
You click on your favourite news site in the morning and flinch.
Shock may be an unpleasant thing for an individual or a society to experience, but it can be a useful political tool. Ask anyone who has ever had a full-blown panic attack and they will tell you that it makes you think about nothing else but the fear. If you are shocked you are confused. You aren’t thinking straight. You become passive. You go where the people tell you to go.