And, in early 2018, Tim Cook – CEO of Apple – declared to a group of students in Essex, England, that he doesn’t think children (such as his nephew) should use a social network, or overuse technology at all, which shows that these aren’t simply ‘Luddite’ concerns.

Indeed, a group of former tech employees have gone further, and set up the Center for Humane Technology, aimed at ‘realigning technology with humanity’s best interests’ and reversing the ‘digital attention crisis’.

Now, at long last, there are many instances of tech people getting together to discuss concerns. For instance, at a 2018 conference in Washington called Truth About Tech, speakers included Google’s former ‘ethicist’ and now prominent tech whistleblower Tristan Harris and early investor of Facebook Roger McNamee, along with politicians and members of lobby groups such as Common Sense Media, who are trying to combat tech addiction in young people. A variety of concerns were raised, such as the way Google’s Gmail ‘hijacks’ minds, or how Snapchat exploits teenage friendships to fuel tech addiction via functions like ‘Snapchat streaks’ where users can see how many interactions they’ve had with friends per day. According to The Guardian, Harris compared the tech world to the Wild West in that the ethos is ‘build a casino wherever you want’ and McNamee compared it to the tobacco and food industries in the past, where cigarettes were promoted as healthy, or where manufacturers of ready meals failed to mention their products were loaded with salt. The difference being that with, say, an addiction to cigarettes, is that the cigarettes had no information about us. They didn’t collect our data. They couldn’t know us better than our own families. The internet, of course, can know everything about us. It can know who our friends are, it can know our taste in music, it can know our health concerns, our love life, and our politics – and internet companies can keep using this information to make their products ever more addictive. And at the moment, warn the tech insiders, there isn’t much regulation to stop them.

An increasing amount of research reinforces their concerns. For example, studies that show how technology contributes to a state of ‘continual partial attention’ and how it can be addictive. One 2017 study from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas concluded that the mere presence of your smartphone can reduce ‘cognitive capacity’.

At the time of writing, there is still no official recognition that ‘smartphone addiction’ or ‘social media addiction’ are psychological disorders, although the fact that the World Health Organization now classifies video game addiction as an official mental disorder suggests that there is a growing understanding of how seriously technology can affect our mental health. But that understanding still has a long way to go, and clearly lags behind the disorientating speed of technological change.

Though pressure is rising. In 2018, for instance, CNN reported that the mighty Unilever threatened to pull its advertising from Facebook and Google unless they combat toxic problems – including privacy concerns, objectionable content and a lack of protections for children – which are ‘eroding social trust, harming users and undermining democracies’. There is a growing awareness that the great power of internet companies must come, Spiderman-style, with a great sense of responsibility. However, it is debatable as to how much responsibility they will develop without real social and financial pressure of the kind we are only beginning to see. As with fast food or cigarettes or the gun industry, the companies making a profit from something might be the most reluctant to see the potential problems. So when the people on the inside are among those raising the alarm, we should really listen.

11

THE DETECTIVE OF DESPAIR

‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’

—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Awareness WHEN I FIRST became ill, at the age of 24 – when I ‘broke down’ – the world became sharper. Painfully so. Shadows had sudden weight, clouds became greyer, music became louder. I became more alert to everything I had been numb to. I noticed the things that made me feel worse about the modern world. Things that probably make many of us feel worse. I felt the wearying pressure of advertising, the frantic madness of crowds and traffic, the suffocating nature of social expectation.

Illness has a lot to teach wellness.

But when I am well I forget these things. The trick is to keep hold of that knowledge. To turn recovery into prevention. To live how I live when I am ill, without being ill.

Hope

THERE ARE SOME factors affecting our mental health that are genetic, and down to an individual’s wiring or brain chemistry. But we can’t do much about the things handed down to us in our genetic code. What is more interesting are the transient aspects, the triggers that change with time and societies. These are the things we can do stuff about.

Other eras have had their own particular mental health crises of course. But the fact that every age has struggled with its own particular problems should not make us complacent about our own culture.

And the great thing about this – the liberating thing – is that if our anxiety is in part a product of culture, it can also be something we can change by changing our reaction to that culture. In fact, we don’t even need to consciously change at all. The change can happen simply by being aware.

When it comes to our minds, awareness is very often the solution itself.

The detective of despair

I THINK THE world is always going to be a mess. And I am always going to be a mess. Maybe you’re a mess, too. But – and this bit is everything for me – I believe it’s possible to be a happy mess. Or, at least, a less miserable mess. A mess who can cope.

‘In all chaos there is a cosmos,’ said Carl Jung, ‘in all disorder a secret order.’

Mess is actually okay. As you will be aware by now, I am trying to write about the messiness of the world and the messiness of minds by writing a deliberately messy book. That’s my excuse, anyway. Fragments that I hope together make a kind of whole. I hope it all makes sense. Or if it doesn’t make sense, I hope it makes nonsense in ways that might get you thinking.

The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise. We are given the idea that we have control. That we can go anywhere and be anything. That, because of free will in a world of choice, we should be able to choose not just where to go online or what to watch on TV or which recipe to follow of the billion online recipes, but also what to feel. And so when we don’t feel what we want or expect to feel, it becomes confusing and disheartening. Why can’t I be happy when I have so much choice? And why do I feel sad and worried when I don’t really have anything to be sad and worried about?

And the truth is that when I first became ill, at the very beginning, I didn’t even know what I had, let alone what might be triggering it. I had no understanding of the hell I wanted to escape, I just wanted to escape it. If your leg is on fire you don’t know the temperature of the flames. You just know that you’re in pain.

Later, doctors would offer labels. ‘Panic disorder’, ‘generalised anxiety disorder’ and ‘depression’. These labels were worrying, but also important, because they gave me something to work with. They stopped me feeling like an alien. I was a human being with human illnesses, which other humans have had – millions and millions of humans – and most of them had either overcome their illnesses or had somehow managed to live with them.

Even after I knew the names of the illnesses I had, I believed they were all stemming from inside me. They were just there, the way the Grand Canyon was just there,a fixed feature of my psychic geography which I could do nothing about.

I would never be able to enjoy music again. Or food. Or books. Or conversation. Or sunlight. Or cinema. Or a holiday. Or anything. I was rotten now, to my core, like a, like a, like a (there are never enough metaphors for depression), like a diseased tree. A diseased tree whose girlfriend and parents say, over and over, ‘You’ll get better. We’ll find a way and we will get you better.’