by Matt Haig
If you were already good enough what on earth would you spend your money on?
HAPPINESS IS NOT good for the economy.
We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves.
Our bodies are too fat, or too thin, or too saggy.
Our skin is expected to have the right ‘sun-kissed glow’, or the right shade of lightness. Depressingly, the global skin lightening industry is a multi-billion-dollar one that is growing year by year.
This is a particularly troubling example, but this central idea of not feeling good enough is one that businesses try to exploit almost everywhere. Indeed, it can sometimes seem as though the whole purpose of marketing itself is to make us feel bad about ourselves.
For instance, listen to Robert Rosenthal, author of Optimarketing: Marketing Optimization to Electrify Your Business. Back in 2014 he wrote in Fast Company magazine that to be successful marketers need to think in terms of the benefits of the product, rather than the product’s features. Sounds innocent, enough, right?
But he adds that benefits often have a ‘psychological component’. ‘Fear, uncertainty, and doubt, or FUD, is often used legitimately by businesses and organizations to make consumers stop, think, and change their behaviour. FUD is so powerful that it’s capable of nuking the competition.’
The success of the campaign is all, for the marketing gurus. The ends justify the means. Let’s not think about the wider consequences of making millions of human beings more anxious than they need to be.
But even when an advertising campaign isn’t overtly trying to conjure fear, it can still be bad for our psychology. If we are being sold the idea of cool via a pair of trousers, we subconsciously feel a pressure to obtain and maintain that coolness. And all too often, when we have spent a lot of money on a desired item, we have a sinking feeling. The craving for the thing is rarely met by the satisfaction of getting it. And so we crave more. And the cycle repeats. We are encouraged to want what will only make us want more.
We are, in short, encouraged to be addicts.
Never enough
NOTHING IS EVER enough.
I have always been addicted to something. That something changes but the sense of need doesn’t.
Drink used to be my thing. I could drink and drink and drink.
When I used to work in an office block, doing a media sales job under the bleak skies of Croydon, I just dreamed of escape. The three pints I drank each night, followed by a vodka Coke, softened the blow of the evening only to harden it again when I woke up the next morning.
Some years after I broke down, I found it suddenly easy to stop drinking. And smoking. And everything. I stopped all stimulants. Even coffee and tea and Coca-Cola. I was in a state of continual panic and pain and would have done anything to take my mind off my mind but by now I knew alcohol wouldn’t work. And I thought drugs wouldn’t work. I was convinced, by then, that though they clearly worked for other people I was one of the unlucky ones for whom they wouldn’t. I was also convinced that I had once had addictive tendencies. It was more difficult to realise I still had them, but that I was now finding ‘positive’ addictions. Running, for instance, like my dad advised. Yoga. Meditation. Work. Success.
Then, years later, when I felt comparatively better I started drinking again. I wouldn’t drink every day, or even every week, but when I did drink I drank irresponsibly. The difference was that this time I could see how alcohol affected my mind. I could see the cycle that happened. I would feel a bit bad – not panic disorder bad, just a general low-level depression – and drink and feel better. Then I would feel hungover and guilty. And this feeling would linger and lower my self-esteem, which would then create more need for distraction. For drink. For eight pints and a gin cocktail. But it was dangerous. It was impossible to be a good husband or father or a good writer when you were that hungover, and the irony was that the feeling of inadequacy and self-loathing made future hangovers more likely. I have learned that however strong the craving gets the guilt afterwards will be stronger. But it’s hard. And I have immense sympathy for those who have sought to drown their relentless despair in a sea of booze. And get judged for it in the process by those who have never had that painful yearning to escape themselves.
When people talk about mental health stigma getting better they may be right about an improvement in conditions for people suffering from depression or panic attacks. They probably aren’t talking about alcoholism, or selfharm, or psychosis, or Borderline Personality Disorder, or eating disorders, or compulsive behaviours, or drug addiction. Those things can test the open minds of even the best of us. That’s the problem with mental illness. It’s easy not to judge people for having an illness; it’s a lot harder not to judge people for how the illness occasionally causes them to behave. Because people can’t see the reasons.
I can remember going to see the unique, rare genius that was Amy Winehouse in concert and having tears in my eyes at how the crowd – largely drunk themselves – laughed and jeered as she slurred her words between songs and desperately struggled, inebriated, to compose herself. It made me burn with a kind of anger and shame. I tried – ludicrously, embarrassingly – to send silent telepathic messages to her. It’s okay. You’ll be okay. They just don’t understand.
Right now, writing this, with the sun outside the window, I am fantasising about a Caipirinha. Brazil’s national cocktail. Cachaça, lime, sugar. Heaven in a glass. I have memories of drinking it in shady Spanish squares, and the craving is in part a craving to return back to being carefree and 21 again. But I know that would be a bad idea. I have to remind myself why I want it and what might happen. I have to remember that there wouldn’t just be one glass. I have to remember a craving for an innocent drink has previously – after a perfectly respectable afternoon work meeting – ended up with a phone call home from Victoria station at six in the morning after losing my wallet. I have to remember the subsequent spiral into a furious relapse of depression and anxiety – the kind where you end up crying as you stare at your sock drawer and where the sight of grey clouds or a magazine cover prompts feelings of infinite despair. Doing all that remembering, being mindful of causes and consequences, makes it a lot easier to resist. An evening of heaven in a glass doesn’t outweigh a month of hell in a cage.
My point here isn’t specifically about alcohol. It’s about how the pattern of addiction – dissatisfaction to temporary solution to increased dissatisfaction – is the model for most of consumer culture. It is also the model for a lot of our relationships with technology. The dangers of excessive technological use are becoming clearer than ever. In 2018, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, began to talk about the overuse of technology.
‘I don’t believe in overuse. I’m not a person that says we’ve achieved success if you’re using it all the time. I don’t subscribe to that at all.’
The trouble is, not overusing technology is sometimes easier said than done.
‘Make no mistake,’ writes neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in his book The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload: ‘Email, Facebook, and Twitter checking constitute a neural addiction.’ Each time we check social media ‘we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones’ telling us we have ‘accomplished something’. But as with all addiction, this feeling of reward is unreliable. As Levitin puts it: ‘it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex.’
As with living in Ibiza, or in a religious cult, it is hard to see the things we may have problems with if everyone has the same problems. If everyone is spending hour after hour on their phones, scrolling through texts and timelines, then that becomes normal behaviour. If everyone is getting out of bed too early to work 12-hour days in jobs they hate, then why question it? If everyone
is worrying about their looks, then worrying about our looks is what we should be doing. If everyone is maxing out their credit cards to pay for things they don’t really need, then it can’t be a problem. If the whole planet is having a kind of collective breakdown, then unhealthy behaviour fits right in. When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence.
A paradox
THERE’S A PARADOX about modern hi-tech consumer societies. They seem to encourage individualism while not encouraging us – actually forbidding us – to think as individuals. They discourage us from standing back from their distractions, like serious addicts have to if they want their life back, and asking: what am I doing? And why do I keep doing it if it doesn’t make me happy? In a weird way, this is easier if you choose a socially unacceptable compulsion like heroin addiction than if you have a socially acceptable one like compulsive dieting or tweeting or shopping or working. If the madness is collective and the illness is cultural it can be hard to diagnose, let alone treat.
Even when the tide of society is pulling us in one direction it has to be possible – if that direction makes and keeps us unhappy – to learn how to swim another way. To swim towards the truth of ourselves, a truth our distractions might be hiding. Our very lives might depend on it.
You are more than a consumer
DON’T LET ANYONE or anything make you feel you aren’t enough. Don’t feel you have to achieve more just to be accepted. Be happy with your own self, minus upgrades. Stop dreaming of imaginary goals and finishing lines. Accept what marketing doesn’t want you to: you are fine. You lack nothing.
15
TWO LISTS ABOUT WORK
‘How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away.’
—Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2011)
‘I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.’
—Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1932)
Work is toxic
1.We have become detached from the historic way of working. We, as individuals, rarely consume what we make. People often can’t get the work for which they are qualified. Slowly, human work is being taken on by machines. Self-service checkouts. Assembly-line robots. Automated phone operators.
2.Also, the world economy is unfair. Yes, some progress is being made. The numbers of people in extreme poverty is falling year by year, according to figures from the World Bank. But other inequalities are rising. The world’s eight richest billionaires own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world, according to a 2017 report from Oxfam. The Western middle classes are shrinking, according to research from Credit Suisse, while the extremes of rich and poor are getting greater. Meritocracy is a hard myth to cling on to.
3.Workplace bullying is rife. The competitive nature of many work environments fuels aggressive rivalry that can easily tip over into manipulation and bullying. According to research conducted by the University of Phoenix, 75 per cent of workers in America have been affected by workplace bullying, either as a target or a witness. But the targets aren’t always who you think. According to the Workplace Bullying Institute, rather than the targets being weaker members of a team, they can often be more skilled and proficient than the bullies – workplace veterans who might be a threat. And research from the TUC in collaboration with the Everyday Sexism Project found that 52 per cent of women said that they had been sexually harassed at work.
4.In extreme cases, workplace stress can be fatal. For instance, between 2008 and 2009 and again in 2014 the French telecoms company Orange reported waves of employee suicides. After the first wave, where 35 employees killed themselves in a matter of months, the boss dismissed it as a ‘fashion’ although an official report quoted in The Guardian blamed a climate of ‘management harassment’ that had ‘psychologically weakened staff and attacked their physical and mental health’.
5.Assessment culture is toxic. The Belgian professor of psychoanalysis, Paul Verhaeghe, believes that the way work is now set up in our societies, with supervisors supervising supervisors and everyone being watched and marked and continually assessed, is toxic. Even people who aren’t in work suffer the same equivalent endless rounds of tests and monitoring. As our schoolchildren are also discovering, all this testing and evaluating makes us stress about the future rather than be comfortable with the present.
6.Work culture can lead to low self-esteem. We are encouraged to believe that success is the result of hard work, that it is down to the individual. So, it is no surprise that when we feel as if we are failing – which is almost continually in an aspirational culture that thrives on raising the bar of our happiness – we take it personally. And think it is down to ourselves. We aren’t encouraged to see the context.
7.We like to work. It gives us purpose. But work can also be bad for physical health. In 2015, the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health published a study – the largest ever of its kind – looking at the link between overwork and alcohol. They compiled a dataset of over 333,000 workers across 14 different countries and found, conclusively, that the longer our working hours, the more alcohol we drink.
8.It is hard to challenge our cultural obsession with work. Politicians and business leaders keep up the idea of relentless work as a moral virtue. They talk with misty-eyed sentiment and a dose of sycophancy about ‘decent ordinary working people’ and ‘hard-working families’. We accept the five-day working week as if it was a law of nature. We are often made to feel guilty when we aren’t working. We say to ourselves, like Benjamin Franklin did, that ‘time is money’, forgetting that money is also luck. A lot of people who work very long hours have far less money than people who have never worked in their life.
9.People work ever longer hours, but these extra hours do not guarantee extra productivity. When a Swedish trial experimented with a six-hour working day for nurses in Gothenburg, the results showed that the nurses felt happier and more energised than when they worked for eight hours. They ended up taking fewer sick days, had less physical complaints like back and neck pain, and had an increase of productivity during the hours worked.
10.Our working culture is often dehumanising. We need to assess whether our work is making us ill, or unhappy, and if it is what we can do about it. How much pressure are we actually putting on ourselves, simply because the way we work makes us feel continually behind? Like life is a race that we are losing? And in our struggle to keep up we don’t dare to stop and think what might be good for us.
Ten ways to work without breaking down
1.Try to do something you enjoy. If you enjoy work you will be better at it. If you enjoy work it won’t feel like work. Try to think of work as productive play.
2.Aim not to get more stuff done. Aim to have less stuff to do. Be a work minimalist. Minimalism is about doing more with less. So much of working life seems to be about doing less with more. Activity isn’t always the same as achievement.
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 possibl
e, 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.