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 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.

‘Progress,’ wrote C.S. Lewis, ‘means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.’

This is a phenomenally good way of looking at it, I think. Forward momentum, on an individual or social level, is not automatically good simply because it is forward momentum. Sometimes we push our lives in the wrong direction. Sometimes societies push themselves in the wrong direction. If we feel it is making ourselves unhappy, progress might mean doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road. But we must never feel – personally or as a culture – that only one version of the future is inevitable.

The future is ours to shape.

Space