Notes on a Nervous Planet(39)
3.Set boundaries. Have times of the day and week that are work-free, email-free, hassle-free.
4.Don’t stress about deadlines. This book is already behind deadline, but you’re still reading it.
5.Know that your inbox will never be empty. Accept that.
6.Try to work, where possible, in a way that makes the world a little better. The world shapes us. Making the world better makes us better.
7.Be kind to yourself. If the negatives of the work outweigh the positives of the money, don’t do it. If someone is using their power to bully or harass you, don’t stand for it. If you hate your job, and can get away with walking out on your lunch break, walk out on your lunch break. And never go back.
8.Don’t think your work matters more than it does. As Bertrand Russell put it: ‘One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.’
9.Don’t do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It’s always best to live it as yourself.
10.Don’t be a perfectionist. Humans are imperfect. Human work is imperfect. Be less robot, more human. Be more imperfect. Evolution happens through mistakes.
16
SHAPING THE FUTURE
Progress
IT WOULD BE seen as crazily reactionary and conservative to say that technological progress is a uniformly bad thing.
Almost none of us would trade the technology we have now, to live a hundred years ago. Who would give up a world of cars and sat nav and smartphones and laptops and washing machines and Skype and social media and video games and Spotify and X-rays and artificial hearts and cash machines and online shopping? Not me, for sure.
In writing this book I have tried to look at the human psychological cost of the world by looking at the only psychology I truly know – my own. I have written about how we as individuals can try to stay sane within a maddening world. 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.
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.