Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig

Matt Haig is a novelist; I read one of his books long ago - The Dead Fathers Club, a riff on Hamlet that I liked a lot, offered in the SFBC, and still remember fondly - and re-encountered his name a year or two ago. He's someone I think I should read more of: his books sound like they're mostly fantastika, of the not-in-a-commercial-genre type, maybe mostly Big Ideas that appeal to non-genre readers, but that can be just fine.

But, since I'm a middle-aged man, the next Matt Haig book I managed to run my eyeballs over was Notes on a Nervous Planet, a non-fiction book that is somewhere between a memoir of his panic attacks and a book of affirmations of how to live in the modern world. (Yes: the kind of book I reflexively make fun of and have avoided for decades - we saw metric fucktons of such books in my days in book publishing, along with similar yardgoods, and I got very cynical very young, and have never shaken that mindset.)

Look: Haig is positive and thoughtful and interesting. He has a personal perspective and history that gives him some weight to talk about the distracting affects of modern life in general and "our phones" in particular. [1] I think he's right. I think this book is a good thing, and it's both short and pleasant to read. It is uplifting. It probably will, or already has, helped a lot of people navigate their own lives.

But it's still in a genre I look on with scorn, for inadequate historical reasons, so I think all of my praise will sound faint and "yeah but."

This is from 2018, so things have only gotten worse: when Haig wrote, Twitter was a time-stealing nexus of smart, interesting people and not a hellscape of right-wing assholes, for one thing.

And it's very much Notes: Haig has clusters of short chapters - some of them just lists, or quick affirmations, or similar mediations - that are organized loosely into a sequence of larger meta-chapters. There's a through-line about mental health, there's a lot of research about health and the effects of the Internet, there's a fair bit about Haig's history with panic attacks and some other quick glimpses into his life. But it's a loose book on a big, expansive topic: the point is to be positive, to circle all sides of the issue, and to give readers positive vibes and some tools to handle the endless spewing pipe of modern life and a sense that they can and should set up sensible boundaries for themselves.

All of that is good, and Haig is an engaging writer. It's also a zippy book, shorter than it seems due to a slightly truncated page-size and all of those short chapters. It reads quickly, it goes down easily, it make the reader feel happier and more empowered.

And the cover is friendly, too. People probably won't judge you if you read it on mass transit. (Mass transit still exists, right? I got forcibly made permanent WFH a few years back and got out of that world entirely.)

Look: I can't think of a single negative thing to say about this book, and yet I feel like I'm being vaguely dismissive here. I liked it. I think it was helpful to me, and will be more helpful to others. How's that, sirs?

[1] I tend to think that the kind of people who carried a book everywhere before smartphones were a thing don't get addicted to phones; we knew what we wanted to spend our attention on, went out of our ways to keep that with us, and gave it our attention. But we were always a minority.