PANIC IS A kind of overload.

That is how my panic attacks used to feel. An excess of thought and fear. An overloaded mind reaches a breaking point and the panic floods in. Because that overload makes you feel trapped. Psychologically boxed in. That is why panic attacks often happen in over-stimulating environments. Supermarkets and nightclubs and theatres and overcrowded trains.

But what happens when overload becomes a central characteristic of modern life? Consumer overload. Work overload. Environmental overload. News overload. Information overload.

The challenge today, then, is not that life is necessarily worse than it once was. In many ways, human lives have the potential to be better and healthier and even happier than in eras past. The trouble is our lives are also cluttered. The challenge is to find who we are amid the crowd of ourselves.

Places I have had panic attacks Supermarkets.

The windowless basement floor of a department store.

A packed music festival.

At a nightclub.

On an aeroplane.

On the London underground.

In a tapas bar in Seville.

In the BBC News green room.

On a train from London to York (it lasted most of the journey).

In a cinema.

In a theatre.

At a corner shop.

On a stage, feeling unnatural, with a thousand faces staring at me.

Walking through Covent Garden.

Watching the TV.

At home, very late at night, after a busy day, with a streetlight glowing an ominous orange through the curtains.

In a bank.

In front of a computer screen.

A nervous planet

‘IMAGINE IF THE world didn’t simply make people mad,’ a friend said to me recently, after I’d told him about the book I was trying to write. ‘Imagine if the world was itself mad. Or, you know, the bits of the world to do with us. Humans. I mean, what if it is literally mad. I think that’s what is happening. I think human society is breaking down.’

‘Yes. Like a patient having a nervous breakdown.’

‘Yeah. I mean, obviously the world isn’t a person. But it is increasingly connected, like you say – like a nervous system. Been like that a while, in fact. There was a guy I was reading about, in the 19th century. He said that all the telegraph cables were like a nervous system.’

On further research, I found the man was called Charles Tilston Bright – the man in charge of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. He referred to the global telegraph network as ‘the world’s system of electrical nerves’.

We no longer have telegraphs as such, as they didn’t prove too good at posting ninja cat videos and emojis. But the world’s nervous system has not gone away. It has evolved in scale and complexity to the extent that, since June 2017, over half the world’s population is connected to the internet, according to figures from the United Nations International Telecommunications Union (which, incidentally, used to be the International Telegraph Union).

The number of internet users has been growing rapidly, year by year. It’s wild to think that back in 1995 comparatively no one was on the internet: 16 million people, just 0.4 per cent of the world population. A decade later, in 2005, it was up to a billion people, which meant 15 per cent of the world’s population was online. And by 2017 those digits flipped to 51 per cent.

In that same year the number of active Facebook users – people who use Facebook at least once a month – reached 2.07 billion. At the start of this decade, back in 2010, there weren’t even that many people on the entire internet. This is a rapid amount of change. It has happened because many parts of the world have ‘modernised’ and have changed their infrastructure quickly to make way for broadband internet. The other factor is the rise of the smartphone, which has made accessing the internet far easier than it used to be.

And it’s not just the amount of people who use the internet that is rising, the amount of time we spend online is rising too.

Human beings are more connected via technology than ever before, and this radical change has happened in little over a decade. And, if nothing else, it’s leading to a lot of arguments online. As Tolstoy wrote, back in 1894, in The Kingdom of God Is Within You:

The more men are freed from privation; the more telegraphs, telephones, books, papers, and journals there are; the more means there will be of diffusing inconsistent lies and hypocrisies, and the more disunited and consequently miserable will men become, which indeed is what we see actually taking place.

And things are happening too quickly for us to take stock of it all. Certainly quicker than in Tolstoy’s time. All this falling out. All this information. All this technological connection. The world’s brain is a common but fitting metaphor. We are the nerve cells of the world’s brain, transmitting ourselves to all the other nerve cells. Sending the overload back and forth. Overloaded neurons on a nervous planet. Ready to crash.

6

INTERNET ANXIETIES

‘The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.’

—Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google ‘A handful of people, working at a handful of technology companies, through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today . . . I don’t know a more urgent problem than this . . . It’s changing our democracy, and it’s changing our ability to have the conversations and relationships that we want with each other.’

—Tristan Harris, former Google employee

Things I love about the internet

Collective action against social injustice.

Watching old pop videos I had forgotten about.

Watching movie trailers without having to be in a cinema.

Wikipedia, Spotify, BBC Good Food recipes.

The process of researching a trip away.

Goodreads.

Finding people who understand what you feel like when you are low.

Talking to readers I would otherwise never talk to.

Friendliness, which does happen quite a lot.

Watching videos of animals doing incredible things (a gorilla dancing in a pool, an octopus opening a jar).

Being able to go up to people via email or a message in a way I wouldn’t be able to in real life.

Funny tweets.

Staying in touch with old friends.

The ability to test out ideas with people.

Really good yoga instructors from Austin, Texas, whose practices I can follow without living in Austin, Texas.

Equally good cool-down stretch running videos.

Researching the downsides of the internet, via the internet.

Things I should do less of on the internet

Post about a meaningful experience, when I could be having an actual meaningful experience.

Write tweets containing opinions that will win nobody over.

Click on articles I don’t really want to read.

Browse my Twitter feed when I should be eating breakfast.

Read my Amazon reviews.

Compare my life to the lives of other people.

Stare at emails without answering them.

Answer emails while I should be listening to my mum talk about her trip to see a doctor.

Feel the empty joy of likes and favourites.

Search my own name.

Click off videos for songs I like on YouTube without waiting until the end, because I have seen another video I like.

Google symptoms and self-diagnose (just because you are a hypochondriac it doesn’t mean you aren’t actually dying).

Google things – any things (‘number of atoms in a human body’, ‘turmeric health benefits’, ‘cast of West Side Story’, ‘how to download photos from iCloud’) – after midnight.

Check how a tweet/photo/status update is going down (and keep checking).

Want to go offline, without going offline.

The world is shrinking

LIFE OVERLOAD IS a feeling that partly stems from how contracted and concentrated the world seems to have become. The human world has sped up and has effectively shrunk, too. It is becoming more connected, and as it becomes more connected, so are we. The ‘hive mind’ – first coined in a science fiction short story, ‘Second Night of Summer’ by James H. Schmitz, in 1950 – is now a reality. Our lives, information and emotions are connected in ways they have never been before. The internet is unifying even as it seems to divide.

This shrinking of the world hasn’t been an overnight process. Humans have been communicating further than their voices allow for centuries. Using everything from smoke signals to drums to pigeons. A chain of signal beacons from Plymouth to London announced the arrival of the Spanish Armada.

In the 19th century the electrical telegraph connected continents.