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.

5.Understand people are more than a social media post. Think how many conflicting thoughts you have in a day. Think of the different contradictory positions you have held in your life. Respond to online opinions but never let one rushed opinion define a whole human being. ‘Every one of us,’ said the physicist Carl Sagan, ‘is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.’

6.Don’t hate-follow people. This has been my promise to myself since New Year’s Day, 2018, and so far it is working. Hate-following doesn’t give your righteous anger a focus. It fuels it. In a weird way, it also reinforces your echo chamber by making you feel like the only other opinions are extreme ones. Do not seek out stuff that makes you unhappy. Do not measure your own worth against other people. Do not seek to define yourself against. Define what you are for. And browse accordingly.

7.Don’t play the ratings game. The internet loves ratings, whether it is reviews on Amazon and TripAdvisor and Rotten Tomatoes, or the ratings of photos and updates and tweets. Likes, favourites, retweets. Ignore it. Ratings are no sign of worth. Never judge yourself on them. To be liked by everyone you would have to be the blandest person ever. William Shakespeare is arguably the greatest writer of all time. He has a mediocre 3.7 average on Goodreads.

8.Don’t spend your life worrying about what you are missing out on. Not to be Buddhist about it – okay, to be a little Buddhist about it – life isn’t about being pleased with what you are doing, but about what you are being.

9.Never delay a meal, or sleep, for the sake of the internet.

10.Stay human. Resist the algorithms. Don’t be steered towards being a caricature of yourself. Switch off the pop-up ads. Step out of your echo chamber. Don’t let anonymity turn you into someone you would be ashamed to be offline. Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know. Keep empathy alive. Break patterns. Resist robotic tendencies. Stay human.

Never let go

OF THE CHALLENGES we face over the next century, as we begin to merge in more and more complex ways with technology, one of the most interesting might be this: how do we stay human in a digital landscape? How do we keep hold of ourselves and never let go?

Be careful who you pretend to be

KURT VONNEGUT SAID, decades before anyone had an Instagram account, that ‘we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful who we pretend to be’. This seems especially true for the social media age. We have always presented ourselves to the world – chosen which band T-shirt to wear and which words to say and which body parts to shave – but on social media the act of presenting is heightened a stage further. We are eternally one step removed from our online selves. We become walking merchandise. Our profiles are Star Wars figures of ourselves.

A picture of a pipe is not a pipe, as Magritte told us. There is a permanent gap between the signifier and the thing signified. An online profile of your best friend is not your best friend. A status update about a day in the park is not a day in the park. And the desire to tell the world about how happy you are, is not how happy you are.

How to be happy

1.Do not compare yourself to other people.

2.Do not compare yourself to other people.

3.Do not compare yourself to other people.

4.Do not compare yourself to other people.

5.Do not compare yourself to other people.

6.Do not compare yourself to other people.

7.Do not compare yourself to other people.

One more click IF A RAT presses a lever and gets a treat every time, it will keep pressing. But not as often as the rat who presses the lever and gets mixed results – sometimes a treat, sometimes nothing at all.

I used to think social media was harmless. I used to think I was on it because I enjoyed it. But then I was still on it even when I wasn’t enjoying it. I remembered that feeling. It was the feeling you get at three in the morning in a bar after your friends have gone home.

Algorithms eat empathy

NOW, THANKS TO clever algorithms, when we do our shopping we are presented with lots of other things that we might like. Things that people like us would buy.

If we are on Spotify or YouTube listening to music, they present us with a list of music that is almost exactly like the music we are already listening to.

If we are on Amazon, we are shown the books that people who bought this book also bought.

If we are on social media, we are told to follow more people like the people we already follow. More like us.

We are encouraged to stay in our zone and play it safe, because the internet companies know that on average most people generally like to listen and read and watch and eat and wear the kind of stuff they have already listened to and read and watched and eaten and worn. But all through history we weren’t able to do that. We had to go out and compromise and deal with people who weren’t like us. With things that weren’t like the things we liked. And it was horrid.

But now it might be even worse.

Now we might end up utterly hating anyone who doesn’t think like us. Politicians might end up never trying to reach out to the other side. Difference becomes something to fear, and sneer at, not celebrate. People with similar views end up falling out, unable to stomach even the slightest difference of opinion, until they are trapped in a little echo chamber of one, reading a million versions of the same book, listening to the same song, and retweeting their own opinions until the end of time.

But we are humans. We can resist this. We can resist being confined to a little digital tribe. We can embrace life at its full bandwidth. We are finding ways to do so all the time. Yes, we might be a mess. But our strength is our messiness. We don’t do things simply because they make sense. The internet can be our ally, not our enemy, in this. The internet contains a whole world. The internet can be what we want it to be. The internet can lead us anywhere we choose. We just have to make sure that we – not the technology, not the designers and engineers able to manipulate our every mood – are the ones doing the choosing.

What people on social media think of social media

IN MY QUEST to insulate my mind from the nervous planet I began to imagine what I would feel like if I abandoned social media altogether. So, while imagining what life would be like without social media I, um, went to social media to try to find out. I decided to ask some of my Twitter followers a big, simple question: ‘Is social media good or bad for your mental wellbeing?’ The question hit a nerve. I received over 2,000 answers. They offer, of course, a complicated picture. Although, considering that these are people who are active and regular users of social media, the picture is quite negative. I mean, if you imagine asking regular book readers or cinemagoers or horse riders or hill walkers the same thing, it would be unlikely you would get such a mixed response. Anyway, here is a representative selection: April Joy @AprilWaterson

It’s both a coping mechanism and a cause for anxiety. When I’ve been anxious it’s nice to mindlessly scroll and read for distraction. But at the same time, the incessant need to post things that are 100% guaranteed to be judged by people isn’t exactly a calming thought.

Dean Smith @deansmith7

Bad. I can find myself comparing my behind-the-scenes footage (loneliness, anxiety etc) to people’s highlights reel (socialising, success etc). I know it’s not a true reflection of their lives but it can still get to me.

Miss R! @Fabteachertips

I find when I’m feeling at my lowest, I can easily lose hours to scrolling through my social media feeds in bed alone. I really don’t know why I do it, there are so many more productive things I could be doing. It doesn’t make me feel better, that’s for sure!