Adulting - #95 Philosophy, Self Acceptance and Coping with Adversity with Matt Haig

Episode Date: March 21, 2021

Hello Podulters, It’s been a very long time no speak🥲. I’m so pleased to be back with season 10 👀of Adulting! Wow! It was the three year anniversary of the podcast the other day, and it’s so exciting to see how far we’ve come. In fact, I think today’s conversation with Matt Haig is quite reflective of that. We start to push back a little against the pervasive and negative aspects of ‘woke culture’ - for want of a better phrase - and that’s looking like a recurring theme this season. This is interesting to me, because of course Adulting as a podcast is all about becoming more knowledgeable, more understanding and less ignorant. But I do wonder if maybe we have lost sight of that goal more broadly, especially when using the term 'woke'? I’m still asking people what three things they wish they had been taught in school, and Matt’s are Philosophy, coping with adversity and self acceptance. His book, The Midnight Library, which I absolutely loved, is now out in paperback... incase you were looking for your next read. I really hope you enjoy listening and I’m so glad to be back! Xx Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Or visit connectsontario.ca. Select games only. Guarantee void if platform or game outages occur. Guarantee requires play by at least one customer until jackpot is awarded. Or 11 p.m. Eastern. Restrictions apply. See full terms at canada.casino.fandu.com. Please play responsibly. Hello, poddlters. How are you doing? It's been a very long time, no speak, but I'm so pleased to be back with season 10 of Adelting. Wow. It was the three-year anniversary of the podcast the other day, and it's really exciting how far we've come.

In fact, I think today's conversation with Matt Haig is quite reflective of that. We sort of start to push back a little against the pervasiveness and negative aspects of woke culture, for want of a better phrase. And that's certainly a theme this season, which is interesting to reflect on because I guess this podcast is all about becoming more knowledgeable and less ignorant.

But I wonder if more broadly as a society and on social media, if maybe we're losing sight of that very important goal, and it's kind of turned into something else. So this season, I'm still asking people what three things they wish they've been taught in school and Matt's are philosophy, coping with adversity and self-acceptance. I should say as well, his book, The Midnight Library, which I absolutely loved, is also now out in paperback in case you're looking for your next read. I really hope you enjoy listening and I am so glad to be Bye. Hello and welcome to Adulting. Today I'm joined by Matt Haig. Hello, it's very nice to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to have you on. When I emailed you I told you this, but I very recently read The Midnight Library and it was just one of the most uplifting things I could have done

at such a difficult time. So thank you so much for writing such an incredible book. I loved it. Oh, well, that's very, very kind of you to say. And thank you. Yes, it was. Yes, I never really know what I'm very bad at dealing with compliments, but that's very very very nice to hear. So how are you doing anyway I mean we just had the news that we know when things are maybe going to finally start opening up so how are you feeling at the minute it's a bit of change in shift of gear I guess. Yes I'm feeling optimistic which is a rare feeling these days I'm feeling quite good I mean it might just be because the sun is shining we were again speaking about, but the sun is shining in Brighton

and it probably shouldn't be as it's February, but it's a very glorious day. And yeah, I've got a feeling of optimism, which isn't the normal feeling these days. I'm feeling quite good about the world and everything. And yeah, all is sort of, well, I still feel like we're in the tunnel, but I feel like I can cope with things so long as I've got a sense of the future being a bit better.

And I think for once we've got a sense of that. It may be a false sense, but at the moment things seem to be heading back to, if not normality, then some kind of better place. Definitely it definitely feels like we've got something to look forward to at least which as you say is not what we've been feeling more recently but I'm sure everyone will already know who you are but if people don't could you give us an introduction to Matt Haig who you are and what you do? I'm primarily a writer I've written lots of things I've written a fiction like The Midnight Library, which you just mentioned, but also nonfiction. I wrote a book about my own experience of mental health, depression, anxiety, panic disorder, the whole smorgasbord of my mental illness. I wrote in a book called Reasons to Stay Alive five or six years ago. And I've written another book about mental health called Notes on a Nervous Planet.

I've got another one coming out called The Comfort Book, which isn't really about mental health, but more sort of philosophical. And I've written lots of children's books, like A Boy Called Christmas. And I've written lots of other novels, like How to Stop Time and Humans. So I spend most of my life writing. I'm occasionally, sometimes I'm introduced as like mental health advocate, but I don't really see myself as an advocate, partly

because I feel a bit too lazy and disorganized to be an advocate or an ambassador for any particular cause. But I do spend a lot of my time, I mean, even Midnight Library refers to mental health a lot, and it covers topics like suicide and depression and stuff. But I don't really see myself as an advocate. I'm just someone who writes about it, because think about it a lot because I have my own experiences of mental health so I always stick to the description of writer really though often that's broadened into something else but I feel comfortable just being myself on a laptop writing what is in my head and that's my sort of comfort place. I know that Reasons to Stay Alive has been an absolutely roaring success and

I think everyone that I know brings it up at some point and talks about it as this book that really is life-changing and I'm sure it's had such a big impact. I know you said you hate compliments but how did that feel I guess when you took something so personal, so traumatic and I guess so vulnerable and then turned it into this piece of work which now has gone on to have a life of its own. Would you ever have imagined that to have come from that? It's kind of amazing in lots of ways. Well, no, definitely not. And for lots of reasons.

It was a very surprising book, Reasons to Stay Alive, because, well, firstly, I very nearly didn't write it. It was the only book I ever wrote, but I'd been asked to write. This was like book number 10, but the first nonfiction book I'd ever written. And it's because a friend who'd read a blog of mine, I did this one-off blog called Reasons to Stay Alive, which was the first time ever on the internet or publicly I'd spoken about my own experience with mental health.

I wrote this sort of tiny 200 word piece or 400 word piece called Reasons to Stay Alive. And she said, oh, you should turn that into a book. You should do a book about alpha. You know, I didn't know. I didn't have a clue how to do that. And she said, oh, I've got this good, you know, contact with publisher. He'd be right for it it which we didn't end up going with i went with my sort of normal publisher in the end but my normal publisher they weren't that excited about it they said turn it into a novel i said now i think it needs to be if i'm going to write about mental health and my story i'd rather not fictionalize it i'd rather do it as me because

that'll have more of an impact with people who are in a similar situation because they all feel like they can relate to it and someone else has been through it so I had to hold my ground but and they said okay that's fine you know we won't give you as much money as um the last book or if you were writing a novel but yes you know we'll publish it and then I had to work out how I'm writing it and whether it's a memoir whether it was a self-help book so I had to kind of invent a kind of new kind of book that I wanted to just put everything into and um so it was a lot a series of sort of accidents and little left turns um that led to it happening but no there was definitely no expectation from even me or the publisher that it would be what, you know, became up to that point my biggest book that would sort of resonate with people that would find, you know, because I felt like I was writing

for a very small readership of people who are very much in an equivalent place. But what was the surprising thing about Reasons to Stay Alive is a lot of the people, if not most of the people who read that book, weren't people who had been suicidal. They were just people who either had gone through something themselves or who knew someone and they wanted to understand that person better, whether it was their son or daughter or sibling or partner or friend. They wanted to actually know what that feeling is like behind that invisible facade. So, yeah, it was a surprise is what I'm saying. And it happened very organically. It happened very naturally.

It was a real kind of slow burn, word of mouth thing. You know, I had a few lucky media breaks with radio and stuff but nothing spectacular there wasn't much telly or anything but it just became this sort of word of mouth um thing which was really quite lovely but also quite um intimidating in a way because obviously as a struggling writer you want to be you want to have your big break for you you want you have your number one bestseller and stuff but because it was that book um i suddenly felt incredibly exposed and i was like no i'm a novelist i write novels and then you know this was my side project my side project had become a main project and then suddenly as i was talking earlier about being called mental health ambassador and

i was called that i never called myself it but i'd written this book called mental health ambassador and advocate. I was called that. I never called myself it, but I'd written this book about mental health. So I inevitably got called it and people would contact me as if I was a Samaritans and hear from kind of ill people a lot or vulnerable people a lot. And I struggled with that side of it very much for a while. There was even a period where I would have actually pressed the button

to not have written it because I didn't feel like I could cope with the responsibility I felt like I from that point on I had to act a certain way or represent a cause in a certain way which I didn't feel up to and it took me a long time really to actually get to the point where I accepted it and I accepted my own imperfections and the book's own imperfections and I could just sort of deal with it but yeah I mean now speaking now I'm actually very glad I wrote it and you know I don't think it's my best book but it's probably the book that I'm most proud of in some ways because it's been useful to people so yeah. It's amazing in seeing how much general discourse and conversation around mental

health has happened and changed in those last five years especially this understanding that as you're saying the people reading reasons stay alive may not be someone who suffers with a diagnosed mental illness but there's been this real recognition of everyone having mental health and people who suffer from mental illness and those things kind of coexisting all the time and i guess in this moment as well with covid we're really starting to get an even better understanding perhaps the fact that no matter who you are no matter what your starting point is with your mental health there's always room for deviation and I guess the reason so many people would have wanted to come and speak to you is at that time when Reason Stayed Live came out just people

weren't speaking about it and I can imagine how easy it would be for people to go, oh, he's the mental illness guy now, because there was so not, there's really so few voices, but there just wasn't enough normalization of it. And how do you feel that's changed? I guess now, do you feel like there's so much more room for people to kind of dip in and out of talking about mental health without without it becoming their entire identity yeah it's massively changed obviously we're still in the midst of a mental health crisis so there's not been any magic wand wave um we're only just beginning to start to realize how these last this last year plus has impacted our mental health in terms of COVID and lockdowns and all the stuff that came with that. So we are definitely not out of the woods in terms of a mental health crisis. But in terms of recognizing the problem, recognizing the problem has improved massively in the last

five years or so. And it was great to be part of that conversation what's interesting though is how quickly things have shifted like now for instance now it it really depends because i think like there's a lot of people out there and i'm thinking now possibly more about male people than female people i don't know but there's still people out there who still find it very hard to talk about their own mental health. So I think there's a risk sometimes in saying, yes, you know, we're all having a mental health conversation. Because obviously, if you sort of in any kind of media world, or if you're on social media a lot it feels like everyone's talking about mental health but you know for the reality of i don't know a taxi driver in glasgow who's 50

year old and or whatever but there's there's definite large swathes of society that are still where we kind of always were i mean for instance you only have to look at like the suicide figures to realize that most people who died by suicide i mean i'm not being gender specific here it's like across the board most people who died by suicide haven't actually um contacted anyone professional about their mental health and so i see that statistic and I see a lot of potentially preventable deaths that are caused by silence and a stigma, but still there. So I feel like, yes, in one sense, we're definitely having the conversation, but it's how we're having that conversation, who's involved with the conversation and, you know, how inclusive in the very broadest sense we're being about that. So I'm always a little bit where we

we definitely are it's definitely mental health talks about a lot celebrities talk about a lot it's used a lot in magazines and we see it a lot on instagram but i feel like a lot of people still have an issue with articulating their own mental health experience or you know just me and often we'll be talking about mental health while at the same time stigmatising it. For instance, like a magazine we'll talk about. I can remember being on a train a year or so ago and Closer magazine, well, it must have been over a year ago because I haven't been on a train since 2019,

but I was on a train and there was a copy of Closer magazine and Closer magazine, I know it's Closer magazine, so you don't expect, you know. But anyway, they had an article about, I think it was something like Geordie Shore Confessions. And the Confessions was just two people from Geordie Shore who were talking about that they once had panic attacks and depression.

It's like, you know, that, you know, it shouldn't be a scandalous thing. It shouldn't be a confession that you're talking about. You once had a panic attack. So I think, you know, it was talking about it and talking about it in a way that's actually meaningful and decently. Yeah, you're so right. Also, I've got such a bad habit of thinking about everything in terms of what happens on Twitter. And I think it's definitely exacerbated because we're in the pandemic

where we're not actually out and about. And I actually need to get out of my Twitter social media brain and into the reality of the world because, God, it's not helpful. But, yeah, I think you're right. Oh, sorry. No, I was going to say I had a really rough time on Twitter, partly my own fault in January. And again, I was being judged because I was like,

people see me as mental health ambassador and I don't necessarily. So I do something and then got into a pickle. And now I've actually, the thing I've done in that context was I'd used the word psychotic in the wrong context. And a Twitter storm happened. I felt like the whole world was sort of caving in on me. And obviously it's not. It was just a Twitter thing for that day.

And then I just decided I'm never going to have an opinion on Twitter again. I'm just not going to put any opinion on there. So I don't, I've literally stepped away from Twitter, apart from, you know, I'll obviously announce when my paperback comes out, or this, that, and the other comes out. But other than a promotional tool, I don't use Twitter as a sort of normal person now, because it was impacting my mental health. Because you get to a point and you get to, especially if you have quite a few followers, where it just becomes, it just makes you so neurotic. And I find it so ironic, really, that people, you know, who would

claim to be sort of caring and onside about mental health, have no hesitation at all about instigating pylons or this i mean i thought there must be a better way to progress as a human species than just by shaming people or you know there's a i won't i won't um bombard you with uh old quotes but there's a i think it was plato one of those ancient greek philosophers said um know, for progress to happen, you need to debate ideas, not people. So, you know, you don't attack the person, you attack something that they represent. But I feel like we're now in the opposite world where it's always just about shaming someone or whatever. And I just find that mentally, personally unhealthy. But I think it's unhealthy for us as a society so I've stepped I've stepped back a bit from Twitter I know Instagram has its problems

too but I feel like I'm more of an Instagram person these days yeah it's it's awful and so many people are having to step away from these platforms now and I think there's this weird thing I think I think part of it is lockdown I do think there's this really heightened sense of urgency with this kind of people really kind of going for it like kind of baying for blood online when they really want they want kind of some result or resolution from something someone's done but it leaves no room for error and I agree with what you're saying about audiences and following I think there's this idea of kind of punching up and punching down and once you become someone of certain fame or you

have a certain amount of followers I do think people start to think you're kind of invincible and in that sense you then are you kind of susceptible to being ridiculed or whatever and as you say like often if obviously someone's saying really abhorrent things if it's like Katie Hopkins I mean like she's kind of yeah it's what she's saying is awful but I do I do completely agree like when someone says something where it's quite obviously you might have got it slightly wrong we've just got no space to go oh did you know that actually I wouldn't have said that if I were you could put it this way it turns into kind of like not only virtue singing but I think we all want to be seen as doing the right thing so some of that is actually a response of fear of thinking, crap, if I don't call this out, will I get called

out? And it's turned into a really weird, like you said, it's definitely neuroses online. It's weird. Yes, I think that there's a lot of fear and a lot of anger and a lot of confusion and a lot of people who get frustrated. Like, for instance, what I've noticed is if you became someone's idea of representing a thing. So say someone saw me, for instance, as representing mental health or a certain way of talking about mental health or the mental health debate. Any issues they have with that topic then become channeled towards you as an individual person. And so they're not really seeing you as an individual. They're seeing you as representing or signifying something about the issue i see it online with say covid you know so you get um an expert versus expert in public health in edinburgh who who's been quite pro

lockdown and she gets um devy sidra is her name and she gets all kinds of abuse and it's obviously not personal i mean it is to her because they're being personal about her but it's about their frustrations with lockdown or frustrations with covid i mean if you're the person who's stuck your head over the parapet you get all of that you get all the tomatoes smashed in your face like you're in the public stuff but what i find interesting about mental health when people do it about mental health or so you're talking it's like well if you're someone who's who's sharing your own mental health experience because you experience mental illness sometimes and one of the symptoms of mental illness is you're

not always quite acting like your best self you know so so it's okay you saying you're absolutely brilliant with mental health and you want this stigma-free world for mental health. Yet anyone who deviates their behavior from like the perfect finishing school of Twitter where you know how to act and you know which causes to support at which time and you never get a hashtag wrong and you do everything perfectly. Well, that's just not real life. That's just not humanity. And that's certainly not real life that's not just not humanity and that's certainly not mental illness you know the thing about mental illness is you sometimes do stuff because your esteem is so low or you you tweet something wrong or you you say something wrong but you're not necessarily deeply thinking about you're just sort of i don't know you're just sort of lost in the

maze so i i feel like there needs to be more forgiveness all around. And I include myself in this because I've been terribly judgmental online before, you know, especially on political things. I always used to say, well, you know, if it's a politician, they're kind of in the firing line anyway. But I'm even wondering now if that's really a justification

because there's always got to be a cleverer way to advance a cause than to just go after attacking a person. Because what I feel that does is it just entrenches both sides. And I feel a lot of people online, certainly on Twitter, and it's not everybody, but I see it a lot. There's a lot of performative outrage where someone will go after someone, not to win anyone on the other side over at all, not to bring on anyone new in, but merely to sort of get the applause and the likes

from their own side of the argument. And I don't get the point of that. It just seems that seems deliberately divisive and performative and more about Twitter approval than it is about advancing any social cause well i think the fundamental issue is because oh sorry that was a great rant and i completely agree especially about attacking the individual i've had the same kind of realization um and i think that i think the problem fundamentally is because everything is online

we've forgotten what it means to kind of rally together and to get people on side and so it does just become this kind of like how how woke can I be I guess um and with no kind of real end and also going back to what you're saying about the mental health thing which I think is really interesting um in terms of what you're saying before about you know certain members of the public or certain people in society not having this deep understanding mental health it's because the mental health representation that we do get maybe will be about anxiety or depression and it will be about people that are presented as not the victims of their illness but are really like disadvantaged by it was it some obviously sometimes mental illness presents in really horrible behavior or things that we don't want to champion and so people might not recognize that their negative traits actually stem from something which they could perhaps try and deal with

do you know what i mean i don't know if i'm wording that right yeah no totally i feel like you know it we're okay about mental illness as a topic but as a reality if it you know you know, we're okay about mental illness as a topic, but as a reality, if, you know, things like self-harm, and I'm not just talking about physical health harm, self-sabotage that can happen, which can happen in ugly ways. There's alcoholism, there's addiction that's related to mental health issues. There is, you know, certain conditions, certain types of depression, even straightforward depression, you know, straightforward depression is never straightforward, but even depression and anxiety themselves, you can often act in ways which confuse or trouble other people. You know, I lost a lot of friends through my depression years

because I wasn't explaining what I was feeling, but I was acting in ways that were just confusing or I didn't want to see them. I couldn't go to the pub. I couldn't do this because I was feeling agoraphobic. I couldn't go out to a nightclub in Nottingham or whatever it was. So I lost a lot of people that way. So I feel a hell of a lot of online stuff,

but maybe real life stuff as well, is just misunderstanding. And yeah, in terms of mental health, I feel like there's a lot, you know, we all know that we're meant to be on, I suppose it's like any issue like environmentalism or racism or anything. We all know what we're meant to say and what we're meant to think and how to say it. But actually in reality of how we change things or make things better, I think that's what we're still struggling with.

Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And I think that, I mean, whether or not, once we emerge from this kind of enforced lockdown, whether or not that will strengthen community bonds and if it will actually make some of this kind of internet created polarisation that we were talking about earlier, whether that will strengthen community bonds and if it will actually make some of this kind of internet created um polarization that we're talking about earlier whether that will actually change once we've realized now the importance of kind of real life community and conversation i don't know if that will have some kind of i'd love for it to have some kind of

incredible impact on the way that we learn to kind of relate to each other but i don't know if that's gonna happen yeah i mean i think there's reasons to be optimistic and reasons for pessimistic about that i swing between the two i think i feel in some ways it has i mean there's nothing um you know a virus it it literally shows how humans are connected you know it's so easy in our sort of privileged Western societies to feel like, have an individualistic sense of the world. And even a lot of our self-help talk is very individualistic about self-acceptance and self-empowerment.

But we really see how connected we are to other selves in a pandemic for good and for bad. And, you know, that can lead to a lot of falling out you know where you get maskers versus anti-maskers or pro-vaccination people who are against anti-vaxxers or whatever it is there's a lot of divisiveness there but there's also I think at a deep level a sense that we are a species we are human beings together facing this threat which crosses gender lines which crosses nationalities crosses races you know we're we may not be all in the same boat obviously but we are facing this same storm and so in that deep sense I think um it has

psychologically forced us to um think of ourselves as fellow human beings a bit more. I love that because that actually leads on very well to the first thing you were taught in school, which is you wish that you've been taught philosophy. And I feel like that was a very philosophical take on this moment in time. When did you first come across philosophy as a topic? Did you learn anything about it in school or is it something you came across later in life? Yeah, I mean, I know there is such a thing as like a philosophy GCSE and philosophy A-level, but I never took them

and was never in my sort of ordinary state school in the Midlands. No, it wasn't on the curriculum. It wasn't on the menu to do philosophy. The first time I came across philosophy was actually when I was doing an English and history degree at Hull University. No, it wasn't my degree. I did a master's degree in English at was, it's just the most obscure sort of modern, postmodern philosophy, lots of French philosophers talking in very difficult language.

And it put me totally off the idea of philosophy. And it was really when I was after university as a writer, reading up on stuff for books and things, I got seriously into philosophy and philosophy has particularly helped me during lockdown and during this sort of pandemic era I've been listening to lots of philosophy podcasts and reading a lot about ancient Greek philosophy eastern philosophy Buddhism which is as well as a religion, it's also a philosophy too. And yeah, I feel like a more philosophical approach to life, a more thoughtful approach to

life would lead to a bit of a calmer world. Obviously, there's different types of philosophy and stuff like that. But I feel like we've lost the art of thinking about stuff. We're always arguing about stuff, we're always debating stuff. But it's from I feel like we've lost the art of thinking about stuff. We're always arguing about stuff. We're always debating stuff. But it's from a position which we've already arrived at. And I feel like we don't actually keep our minds open enough because the ancient Greeks loved the idea of debate and dialogues. In fact, like when Plato Plato famous Greek philosopher Plato was writing his um works of philosophy they always took the form of dialogue so they were like twitter conversations essentially but unlike twitter conversations it was two people reasoning and out reasoning with each other not

insulting each other but trying to sort of work out and progress ideas forward and we've sort of we've seen that any i i think i feel like people now are sometimes don't know how to handle any um and i include myself again in this you know we're challenged when any person with a different view comes along we even think well you're either on our side or you're against our side. And of course, that's not the nature of reality. And human beings, you know, always progress ideas and they never think what human beings thought a century previously. But right now, we always feel like we've got to arrive at the end of morality and we know exactly what the good thing is and the bad thing is and it's this. And I think a bit more of ambiguity and a bit more critical thinking and a bit more a bit more doubt you know philosophy is almost like

the opposite of religion or faith because philosophy is totally open it's about putting a question mark after everything it's about you know questioning your own thoughts and it can be very therapeutic too, because if say you're stuck with depression, depression gives you loads of bleak certainty. Whereas if you sort of become a bit more mindful about it, a bit more philosophical about it, you'll realize that everything's unstable

and actually open to interpretation. And as soon as you realize that, you realize that you could have a new interpretation of yourself or of what you're going through. And I feel like we need it. And also in terms of like progress, like we love the idea of progress as humans, and we always think we're progressing.

But so often that means technological progress because, you know, we're in this world now where, you know, an Xbox becomes 10 times more powerful in terms of processing power every 10 years, where social media is advancing ever more. You know, we've got all these great apps which can do all these sort of clever things and increasingly clever things. We're heading towards a world of sort of permanent virtuality. But we're not actually a world of sort of permanent virtuality but we're not actually changing as human beings we're just our technology and our world around us is changing so i feel like philosophy we need more philosophy and more thought about what all this is doing to us because so

often we'll be engaged in like a political squabble or i don't know whatever sort of discourse online without actually taking a deep step back of how we're arriving at our things and how much say for instance in an argument on twitter i very rarely see people step back and say actually is twitter making us have this row we're rowing on twitter this is this is twitter's service and we're just being the twitter product um by having around so i think like we definitely need more deep thinking about um where we are and i think one of the problem is is people think philosophy is this big abstract difficult subject because it sort of became that towards the end of 20th century but if you go back to like socrates pl Plato, ancient Greeks, ancient Stoics like Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, all these guys, they spoke in very simple aphorisms and sentences about life.

And they have a lot to say about us now. For instance, cognitive behavioral therapy, which has only been around since the 1970s, really, 1960s was first sort of come up with. Cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the most mainstream type of talk therapy you would get, say, on the NHS in the UK, cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, that started because of an ancient Greek guy called Epictetus, because the founders of CBT, whose names are forgotten, but the psychologists who founded CBT, they were inspired by the ancient Greek Stoic philosophers like Epictetus, who himself was a slave, who was in pain a lot of his life but his whole approach was you know it's not uh we have no control over external events but what we do control is our responses to the external events so that's a very simple thought and it's a thought that's lasted for nearly 3 000 years

through philosophy into modern day therapy and so, you know, philosophy is like root therapy. It's like the core essence of thought and ideas and how we can sort of change and keep our minds open. So yeah, more philosophy. That's so fascinating to think about. As you're talking about it, it's something I've been thinking about more. I think we really police our thoughts

because we're so scared again of this mob mentality of getting it wrong. So there was a period of time but I wouldn't even read an article or like a piece of work if I thought that the person might have like different political views from me as if it was gonna what like corrupt me I don't know it was like a weird thing where I couldn't even possibly read this piece because it was in the times I don't know I'm trying to think of an example and now I'm like how pathetic is that like what good does that do us if we can't think on our own and I used to find myself as well I would form an opinion and then I'd wait and see if the other

people that I kind of agree with or look up to agreed and then once they kind of signaled that they did I'd be like yeah me too it's like god we've actually lost the ability to just kind of go do you know what this is what I think because Because we are, I think, like you said earlier, it's that fear of, you know, being cancelled or whatever it is. I don't know. But it's not helpful. No, it's not helpful. I noticed it the other day.

Obviously, I'm a writer, so I have to expect bad reviews and that's part of the territory. I saw an interesting one the other day where they said, I really liked this book when i first read it but after reading reviews online which chimes with my experience i've decided i don't like the book because i was like are you being that led by you know that distrusting of your own opinion that you've got to take so many social cues from other people so actually so i thought that was interesting but um yeah i feel i feel like that

i and i also feel like it actually weakens our position rather than strengthens it because it's kind of like resistance training you you need to test your ideas out your ideas don't actually become weaker if they're good ideas they don't become weaker when they're challenged or when you surround yourself with other thoughts, they become stronger. When Karl Marx was writing Das Kapital and stuff, he was surrounding himself in the works of capitalism like Adam Smith and stuff and getting a lot of stuff out of that and getting a lot of information about that to formulate his views.

Ideas don't live in isolation you know just as people don't live in isolation and we need to read other stuff even stuff you don't agree with and you know um when i was for a pre-file i was a wannabe screenwriter and i was told don't just read good scripts don't just read scripts of films you like read scripts of films that you don't like and work out what is wrong with those scripts work out why that didn't work and I feel like we don't always have to read stuff but we're totally fans of or in line because yes there's a comfort to that because it helps helps us feel like we've got an identity and a tribe and all of that but it doesn't actually help the ideas we have themselves um at all because they're never challenged and you need that you need that resistance challenge you need to sort of pick up that weight and still

still hold it and yeah we've lost we've lost a bit of that and I I'll agree I have as well and I think part of it is because we're so swamped with information that you know we can't get through all the information we want to read let alone the stuff we don't want to read but I feel like it is you know it's important for instance when you're getting the news like I used to just always get my news solely from The Guardian. And now, much as I like The Guardian, it's got a clear political objective. Not every writer for The Guardian thinks the same things, but editorially there's a type of news it focuses on

and a type of news it doesn't focus on. And even something as superficially objective as the BBC still has a kind of editorial agenda so it helps to just have a you know I'll dip into the telegraph or wherever to and it won't be stuff I necessarily agree with but it's important to know what the other side's saying because occasionally you know not most people most intelligent people aren't wrong 100% of the time there's normally some value you can get from someone who doesn't think exactly of you or even if it even if you're disagreeing with them you might be disagreeing with them in a new way so there's always something you can get out out of um

out of reading or listening to other people. And I do that with podcasts sometimes. Like sometimes there'll be someone who I'm quite, well, I dare say there might be someone listening to this who's annoyed by me, but I sometimes listen to something thinking, well, I don't really like this person, but I'd be still quite interested to see

why I don't like this person or how I don't like this person. So yeah feel like we we need to um have a bit more open ears to different things basically yeah no I agree I feel like there's this weird almost like puritanical sense to those of us that maybe would consider us to be quite liberal where we're kind of self-censoring and it feels quite religious in an odd way to feel oh my god i can't i can't touch this piece of whatever it is and i i it's only like recently i think because the like polarization everything is getting so heightened that actually it's getting to this point of it's been thrown into such a sharp relief that you're starting to think wow

this discourse or whatever it is is getting so far the other way that we're obviously going about something wrong like as you said earlier about it it stopped becoming how do we engage people on the other side or create change or get together and it's just become sort of like ego stroking and I don't even know what else and what I find annoying as well is where you can't criticize your own sides you can't criticize your own position or your own side without people thinking you're of the other side. And that's just silly.

That's just sort of immature. You know, that's just not the way the world works. So like, for instance, you have like a debate online about, say, cancel culture. You'll have one side say, well, cancel culture obviously never exists because, you know, all these sort of, I don't know, privileged people who've got columns in newspapers talking

about council culture. Well, obviously council culture doesn't exist. And you've got the other side saying council culture dominates everything. You can't say anything anymore in any university or have any opinion without people discrediting you for life. And, you know, I'm more on the side that cancel culture doesn't really exist in a material way. But the desire to cancel people, I think, definitely exists and to sort of treat people as these sort of, you know, we've got too many people in our lives anyway nowadays in social media.

So the desire to sort of call someone out or to say they're cancelled definitely does exist, even if we don't think the actual effects of cancel culture but there's no room for like uh nuance or middle ground you know but the word centrist has become such an insult because the i you've got to have your sort of extreme position somewhere and the idea of compromise is so unfashionable you know and actually you know relationships life work exists on compromise that's how human beings haven't quite killed each other totally yet because we understand that other humans who don't think like us who've got a different religion to us who have different values to us, they're just as, you know, they've got just as much right to exist

and to think as we have. And we've got to, while we're reacting against something, we've got to just make sure the pendulum doesn't, you know, it's not going at such a velocity. We lose all sense of reason. We become a new type of moralist, a new type of Puritan that has these ridiculous standards that human beings wouldn't be able to meet and where you stop seeing someone as human, you know,

however it is, I struggle with it all the time. You know, I struggle, like if I'm seeing, say, a tweet by, I don't know, a Republican like Ted Cruz or something, I have to actually mentally be mindful and take a distance to actually see well this is a person who's actually of your species so they may have abhorrent views that totally need challenging but don't there's a line where you can cross where you're actually putting something out that even though you're challenging a horrible thing you're not actually helping challenging because you you are reducing it to a personal issue or a personal assault,

or you're saying something about their looks. You're saying something that's not an actual argument. It's just, you know, I used to do it all the time about, say in 2016, I'd tweet about, I don't know, something rubbish like Donald Trump's hair or something. It's like, well, you know, stick, I always think stick, stick to what you really, what is the world you're wanting and how is this helping get to that place?

Because is it a world where you're just ridiculing people's looks? I mean, what? So, and also the mental health thing, going back to mental health. And again, I haven't been immune to this myself, but where you will attack someone who's being, I don't know, dodgy white supremacist on one grounds, but the way you'll say something like that. And I see that all the time. So one foot being progressive

and one foot being stigmatizing or, you know, anti-looks or, you know, I don't know. So yeah, I'm just saying we need a bit more patience, a little bit less of throwing in our sort of glass house, throwing stones in glass houses and to actually realize that we're all flawed human beings. And most of us, even the people we disagree with, I genuinely believe most people feel that they want to be good people.

It's just what happens when you get people who want to be good but have a totally different system of how to get there that that's when all the trouble happens but it doesn't make them evil people it just means they've got a different roadmap fandu casino daily jackpots guaranteed to hit by 11 p.m with your chance at the number one feeling winning which beats even the 27th best feeling saying saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do. Daily Jackpots. A chance to win with every spin and a guaranteed winner by 11pm every day. 19 plus and physically located in Ontario.

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on everything this is something that i'm trying to stop doing especially because online people encourage and i'm sure you get this all the time a bit like you're saying earlier people want you to speak on things so you kind of feel this obligation to form an opinion and say it right and sometimes a I either don't have an opinion or I don't have the energy to have an opinion on something or also my voice isn't actually the best place to have it and I think that we need to get better at being like some conversations might take years yeah come to fruition exactly I think it's actually dangerous to feel like you have to have an opinion uh instantly a sort of ready to go

big mac happy meal opinion that's just there at the moment it's like and also there are so many issues in the world there are so many important life and death issues and if you focus on one issue it's very easy to think everyone should be focused on that issue because so you know i suppose aside from mental health i'm i'm very like i get very upset and very involved with thinking about the environment thinking about environmentalism and there are times when i'll i'll you know you almost want to shake people and say why isn't everyone you know caring about this issue which affects us all but then someone else who's thinking about police brutality and they get they they're you know reading article

article article after that they're following expert after expert they're reading book after book about that issue then they'll think why isn't everybody just focused on this right now? And then there'll be another issue about, I don't know, concentration camps in China. And they say, we need to wake the world up and talk about concentration camps in China. You know, people talk about the Nazis, but concentration camps exist now. Why aren't they caring about that? And it's like, you know, it's literally physically impossible for the human brain to be a perfect advocate about every single important issue going on in the world at one time. And I noticed that, and you probably get it a bit too, when you've got any kind of profile,

if someone's got an issue, they almost try and guilt you or pressure you into talking about this issue. Am I the best person to talk about this issue? Am I the best person? I've got literally no knowledge on this issue. Also, will it actually do a cause any good if lots of people are talking about said cause without actually caring about it, but they're talking about it because it's like a moral tax where they feel like they have to pay it to look good and play lip service. I think it's much better where people are sincerely passionate about an issue and a cause that means a lot to them

and they know about it and they've got a legitimate opinion on it than to just feel like you have to go through a list of causes that you have to tick a box and say right oh I've done my post about this I've done my post about that and you know I've done my I've done I've done my hashtags for the week and I'm fine it's better I think it's better advocacy to actually really get philosophical and think about an issue and think about why you care about something and to try and see how you can actually change things, whether it's, I don't know, sharing petitions or marching in the street or whatever it is, than to just feel like you've got to have an opinion

on every single issue. And it's not to belittle those issues. It's not to even say those issues are less important than the one i'm talking about it's just like i'm in a better place to talk about this issue than that now obviously there are a few things which become moments you know um you know australian uh bushfires or whatever where you know they dominate schedules and it instinctively just happens that you kind of do have an opinion about this issue, even if it's not your issue,

because it's there and it's a thing to talk about. But I do also feel like there's a certain pressure that people want you to always talk about their issue, even if it's not your issue. And I feel like we need to understand that there are so many issues in 21st century life and we can't be advocates um for all of them in any effective way I know I completely agree and and it's definitely something that I think I don't know how we get to that place where

we try to understand each other in the sense that like whilst it there's it's this morality idea that people aren't good if they're not sharing something that's going on and we put so much pressure on people as you say to share at any one moment in time there might be a million traumas and tragedies going on but like as a human we can't even comprehend those things happening while you're sat in your house in Brighton or whatever it might be so I think it's that exactly going back and kind of looking actually sitting back and kind of looking actually sitting back and trying to see things as they are rather than there's definitely a sense of desperation and really high emotion going on when these things happen but it is hard to kind of contextualize

it in a way that will be that creates any positive um change I don't know if I've just butchered that you said it much better than me I don't know I'm trying to explain it um your second thing that you said that you've been wish you taught in school which I think is a really good one and I guess kind of actually leads on from that one is how to cope with adversity uh I think this is something we probably all could have done with learning a bit more but how are you coping with the adversity now and is there any hot takeaways you can give for us well yeah I mean at school I I had a tough time at school really and I feel like there was nothing nothing to equip me um well through the school years but also like when I was in my 20s and when I had my

breakdown um to equip me for dealing with the stuff of life you know we every single life you you can think of the happiest person you know and still in that life there's going to be grief there's going to be suffering there's going to be bad stuff happen and so much of our life is spent trying to suppress that or trying to avoid that or deny that and not think about death not think about aging not think about this and we suppress all these things and they come out in other obsessions so you might be like someone might be obsessed with sort of looking super young because they don't want to think about mortality or looking and i feel like if we just could accept adversity a bit more as part of life rather than something we shield children from we'd actually not end up unhappier we'd end up happier in a way because we'd be able to cope with things you know

there's a famous comparison people make with Mexico where they have the day of the dead and they go out into the streets and they you know dress up as skeletons and stuff and they celebrate and they cry and they howl in the streets about people they've lost in the last year and it's a day of celebration and it's a day of mourning and it's a day of intense human emotion but we don't have any equivalence of that so we have these sort of like quiet quiet funerals and we don't like to think too much about um wills or planning and so i i feel like you know and it's not just a case of death obviously adversity but i feel like we're bad at um facing head-on the dark parts of life and i feel very much that in my own experience of mental health

part of the reason i became depressed depressed and had panic disorder and became suicidal was because I was running away from stuff and running away from suffering and running away from adversity and running away from my own mind. And so I would have said I was a happy person, but I wasn't really a happy person before I was ill. I was someone, you know, I was there. I became ill in Ibiza, for instance, I was there, like, to party, to take drugs, to drink, to smoke, to forget, to listen to loud music, to dance at four in the morning. And I'm not being judgmental about any of that. But I'm just saying in my own experience, that was because I couldn't stand to be in my own head, I couldn't stand to think about dark stuff, I couldn't stand to be in my own head.

I couldn't stand to think about dark stuff. I couldn't stand to think about the sort of depression that was actually building inside me. And so I made it all a lot worse and had a bigger breakdown than I would have done otherwise because I wasn't facing up to adversity or dealing with it in any way. And now we're in this age of like eternal distraction.

So it's less about, often it's less about drinking drugs, but it's always about, you know, we're just placating ourselves with TV or social media or whatever. And I feel like often it's just like pacifying ourselves and not actually, you know, often putting off problems or issues that we should deal with. So I feel like we should be given more of a toolkit about how to recognise problems.

And this is a mental health issue, but it's not just a mental health issue. And how to think about stuff and think about the sort of help we need and to understand the nature of things. Like I didn't know when I first had my breakdown that I was experiencing depression or anxiety. I didn't actually know what I was feeling. It felt like I was in this sort of alien body. I was so confused about all this negativity that I had no knowledge of how to get better because, you know, I hadn't ever thought about my own issues. And so, yeah, I feel like it's getting a bit more emotionally articulate and to actually not to realize that we're not meant to be. We're not meant to be happy all the time. That might sound bleak, but we're not meant to be happy all the time.

And if we try and be happy all the time, we'll bleak but we're not meant to be happy all the time and if we try and be happy all the time we'll actually end up being depressed you know if you try and you know be happy and drink tequila all the time and dance till the morning sun comes up then you'll get ill and that's what happened to me and I feel like you know if we accepted as the eastern philosophers and you know buddhism and taoism and those sort of things they emphasize that life is actually part of life is suffering and it's not to say that life is meant to be this miserable experience and it's absolutely terrible it's more that saying that the good stuff we have in life, the happiness, the love we have in life, intrinsically part of that is the bad stuff. And when you try and separate bad and good from each other, something quite nuclear and negative happens. And actually, we're meant to actually experience all

things. We're not meant to be happy all the time. We're not meant to be joyful all the time, but we're not meant to be miserable all the time either. And we wouldn't actually know as much happiness as we do if we didn't know suffering and the dark stuff. And I relate this to my own life because I'm actually happier this side of being ill than I ever was before. And I'm happier because of my depression and because of my recovery and because of that gratitude that gave me and that appreciation of life in neutral rather than as a sort of intense experience that's so lovely to hear and I guess it sounds like to me instead of kind of trying to numb yourself from the realities of whether that's the highs and the lows it's just kind of letting them happen as it were which is

probably easier said than done but um I had a really similar conversation actually I don't know if you know Shona Virtue who's an amazing like fitness coach and does psychology and things and when she came on she also taught her three things were like meditation um philosophy and I can't remember the other thing she said a lot of similar things to what you're saying and actually I came over for that conversation feeling a bit like I do now like god I fill so much time with distraction so whether that's constantly listening to podcasts constantly reading it's like I might not be doing loads of drugs and dancing Ibiza but I'm certainly not letting myself be in my own head very much of the time as like a distraction technique and I realized it yeah yeah well we're always distracted by distraction and i i feel like um yeah and now

of course we've got we've got um these forces are like social media companies that are their whole business model is based around our distraction it's based around us um continually clicking and scrolling and liking and sharing and um you know i i do genuinely like a lot of aspects about social media i think that's i think it's great to be able to uh contact a wide variety of people to find like-minded people that you wouldn't have been able to find in your physical community around you i think that's brilliant i think it's great um as a writer being able to connect with readers and stuff like that it's great um as a writer being able to connect with readers and stuff like that it's great for rallying people around issues and stuff but i think but it

is kind of um i i think there's something that's fundamentally addictive about social media that is prevents us from seeing the truth of ourselves sometimes. And also the tendency to always present ourselves or to perform a version of ourselves online. I think that can mess with the truth of yourself sometimes. Even if you're doing it, even if you're overtly, and I do this a lot, I'll sometimes reveal something flawed about myself or an experience of depression I'm feeling. But it still won't quite be the truth.

There's still an element of performance about it. You know, there's obviously the performance of like trying to take a really good looking photo of yourself and put that online for likes. But there's another more subtle type of social media use where you're like being superficially honest about your flaws. You know, they're real flaws and stuff, but there's still a performance aspect. It kind of like saying look at me how brave i am talking about my problem with alcohol or this and the other and this is i'm just talking about stuff that i've done i'm not judging anyone else for doing this but um yeah i i i wonder sometimes if it's actually a barrier to being totally open about your relationship with yourself. And I certainly find it interesting when people, again,

I'm including me in this, talk about former problems with addiction while doing that on social media in their seventh post of the day. And it's just like, have you just switched your addiction to talking about your addiction? so yeah i mean obviously there are healthier addictions and i'm someone who's going to be you know i would always i i'd struggle to find an argument to say that instagram is unhealthier than cocaine but that said it's there still might be something that's um there is a kind of health impact that we're only just starting to wake up to i think with uh social media and a lot of it has to do with us being

being distracted away from ourselves like we're sort of losing ourselves a little bit i think and i think one of the reasons why things like meditation are so trendy uh is because we're kind of needing that in the west we're kind of needing that in the west we're kind of needing that sense of still stillness it's kind of a counterbalance to all the other stuff that's going on i think you're right about i guess it's like performing vulnerability and i think that's because it's kind of i guess in response to this backlash we've had about the perfect side of social media like we're very clever I don't I think a lot of it's subconscious because I definitely do this as well where I kind of it's a true vulnerability but I've kind of stored it up and packaged it and then I'm putting it online

so it's not like it's not instantaneous so there has to be as you said some level of pre-meditation about the fact that it's being shared yeah no and that's totally understandable because it would be an absolute mess if we just if we just literally sort of did our primal scream cells like when we're literally like blubbering in the bathroom and just like a total mess and oh god you hate me and it's just yeah but obviously that'd just be that'd just be toxic to put all that out there so we all do it but it's just when you when you when you when it gets to a point where you're doing it quite a lot like you know and i was doing it certainly after reasons to stay alive a lot where i'd be revealing all i'd get a kind of thrill out of

revealing stuff and it would be for impact value and i i i sort of wonder you know but i there's no clear answer to this because obviously it's good. It's good to be honest. And I think part of human beings' problems is that we're a very clandestine species. You know, like famously, we're one of the only species that has sex behind closed doors. We go to the toilet behind closed doors. As animals go, we're kind of like a secretive species. We're very self-conscious. We're one of few animals that blush. We're very coy.

We wear clothes and we're not a normal kind of animal in that sense. But I feel like anything that breaks through that and reveals stuff, that's kind of true, helps other people accept their own flaws and accept their own issues they have around stuff. And that's kind of true for helps other people accept their own flaws and accept their own issues they have around stuff and that's all good but i feel like on a personal level when it's you putting that stuff out there a lot um there's a risk that of of becoming becoming a brand of your own flaws becoming a brand like i like in my case becoming like mr depression and everything becoming like oh oh you are the depression person and this and then it can come become defining uh in a in an unhealthy way because the key thing that helped me like in recovery was becoming completely open in a way

that i hadn't been before being prepared to become a slightly different type of person being a kind of man who's okay about being a bit thin-skinned or a bit weak or a bit this that and the other whereas you know as a young man I've been like oh yeah you know my thing was that I could drink lots of alcohol and not be drunk and I was used to be really proud about as a young man it sounds so pathetic to admit it but that was my thing I was like you know being a man was taking a lot and just not showing it that was what being a man was and then I had to radically change my personality in a way I had to be open to a new version of me and I suppose what I'm saying is social media can make you become a brand of yourself, whatever level you are, whatever platform you can have, like

50 Facebook friends, whatever scale, we're all become kind of like magazines of ourselves, where you're putting out a version which you think other people expect of you. And obviously, that was always the case. You know, human beings have always dressed up have always spoken a certain way to certain people that's not new but i think social media the way um exploits that for these businesses um can be a bit unhealthy because like sometimes i'll think you know people like i i know it's on instagram now people expect a certain type of message from your output and then you'll see it yourself because you think oh when i say this sort of thing that's more popular if i if i if i reveal this side of me that's more popular than when i reveal this other side of me

so there's a risk that you end up if you spend a lot of time on social media suppressing one entire side quite important side of your personality to just focus on this other side of your personality and um there's a risk then that you you're not quite being a true self and then when that other personality is yourself people but what's got what's up with him why is why is he saying that what's that and it's just like well that's all part of my you know my thing and um yeah i try and actively when i'm on social media now I sometimes try and say something that's deliberately not what's expected of me you know to almost rebel against that instinct but I mean it's still a different kind of performance but yeah I don't

know the answer but I feel basically we're probably all spending too much time on social media and I certainly am but I am a lot happier about Twitter that's one one thing I've scientifically worked out about my brain I think you're right in what you're saying then it's so flattening I definitely experience this and it is because of that concept of branding and marketing and it's like you're so much more easily packageable if Matt Haig is just the depression man great next do you know what I mean like that that's perfect for capitalism in terms of how people can wrap you up and buy you and it's really frustrating to have to think oh god they're actually really complex human being who might have a different view of me about this but um this actually goes on quite well to your

very last thing you wish you'd been taught in school which is self-acceptance and I I mean that's a really difficult one but how how are you getting on with that now um yeah I still struggle with it I'm I'm a total work in progress on this um self-acceptance you know for instance I I mean I'm I'm I'm a man obviously but I I used to really struggle with looks issues and what I look like when I was a young person I'm going I mean I'm a I'm a middle-aged person I'm 45 like when I was a young person I'm going I mean I'm a middle-aged person I'm 45 but when I was a young teenager and 20 something person to give you an example I used to well I still have a mole on my face but I don't even notice the mole on my face now but when I was a kid I was was this girl I fancied at school and she says oh she said to me on on school playing

field and should have forgotten it that same evening but she said oh yeah don't sit next to me I don't like that mole on your face and like um that just stuck in my head for so long and I went home that night and I took a toothbrush and I tried to create a scar on my face by trying to rub out the mole on my face and because I thought well a scar would at least look tough and obviously there's no science behind that you can't rub out a mole on your face but then um and I used to have all kinds of like things that I'm just so I feel so sorry for my younger self when I was so bothered I thought I was so ugly and you look back at photos of that time as everyone does and think what was I what was my. I thought I was so ugly. And you look back at photos of that time,

as everyone does, and think, what was my issue with myself? I looked great then. And, you know, and all of that. And I just wish, you know, going back to school, I wish there'd been someone or some teacher who could have explained to me about self-acceptance and about how ridiculous it is.

And, you know, even going into adulthood, and I know this is a pressure women have faced historically far more, and even in the present, far more than men. But you see it happening. I see it happening with men too now, you know, about certainly with gym culture and that whole bro culture of, like, being muscly and, you know, having to gym culture and that whole bro culture of like being muscly and being you know having to do to how much do you lift and all of that culture and I used to be

obsessed with like doing certain amount of press-ups a day or this that and the other and it wasn't about fitness you know I'd pretend it was about fitness I'd used to buy say men's health and pretend it was about fitness but it But it was about the opposite of fitness. It was about being slightly mentally ill and feeling like I had to look a certain way. But it's not the fault of the individual. We live in this society where we're encouraged to feel like whoever we are, you know, yes, this is a pressure women feel but all human beings are encouraged to feel in a capitalist society i think um to feel like we kind of lack something and the reason we're encouraged to feel like that is because unless we feel like we lack something we can't we're not going to be

out there buying something we're not going to be out there buying beauty creams or gym memberships um if we felt 100 as satisfied with ourselves as we're satisfied with a newborn baby? And wouldn't it be like the most beautiful thing in the world if, you know, that feeling you have when you see a newborn baby and you see them as a total entity, you don't see a lack, you don't see a problem with their looks, you don't see they haven't got enough money. We don't see that they haven't got enough social media followers or status. And we just see the entire human worth as a complete finished thing of humanity. And wouldn't it be great if we could have a true sort of self-acceptance and self-love and see ourselves always as that sort of baby and you know really just have that intrinsic sense of worth and yes we'd still strive for things and want to fulfill dreams and have

for forward momentum and all that stuff but it wouldn't be a case that oh if we don't achieve x y or z then we're we totally failed as a as a person it's this idea you know and this isn't about looks anymore this is about like you know my problem now is about work I feel like if I put my um foot on the brake with work if I if I stop working then my worth will um go down you know I've always got to have a book on the go I've written something stupid like 20 books in less than 20 years. And it's kind of too much. And I realized recently, it was because I feel like if I don't work, then I will lose a sense of my own value and identity. And, you know, that slogan, you know, the Nike slogan, everyone used to like, just do it. I feel like that became a whole mantra of Western society, like just do it.

We're in a world of doing and productivity. And, you know, the antithesis of the Eastern view of being, you know, we've got this idea that we have to just do. And sometimes it's OK to just be. And, you know, if we can just accept ourselves in the moment, we don't have to actually work out ourselves into value we don't have to work ourselves into value we don't have to make ourselves beautify ourselves into value we're we're actually valuable because we're here as this amazing life form on this amazing rare tender planet that we're on and this craving continually to do it's bad for us it's bad for the planet it's bad for the environment and um yeah it wouldn't it be nice to just sort of step off that train

wow that was such a good answer to that and there's so many things I want to say to that I mean first of all I think you're definitely right and obviously women face huge pressures about what they look like but I think more more and more especially it's really important to hear men talking about that I just don't think it's something that's spoken about enough. It's sort of like a given that guys go to the gym and no one ever necessarily interrogates men's relationship with their bodies or food in the same way that we might see red flags with young girls. And now that I'm older, I even look back and think, actually, some of my guy friends at school really were quite obsessive about food or the gym. And we don't seem to always um necessarily clock that men can have those same insecurities and I think it's really important to be spoken about because it's

definitely as you say like getting worse especially with you know shows in the way that that bodies on Instagram are heralded and all of that kind of stuff um but what you said about self and work I mean I completely relate to that I think a lot of people do now I kind of feel like my my career is my identity I don't really know who I am when I'm not doing work I always say like oh I want to take a big break between podcasts and then when I'm in between seasons I suddenly think like what is the point of me which is obscene because obviously I'm loads of things apart from a podcaster but it's really hard to to find your worth outside of that um I don't know if you've read I recently read I keep talking about it because it's really hard to to find your worth outside of that um i don't know if you've read i recently read i keep talking about it because it's so good utopia for realists by

rutka bregman um and he talks about yes i have read that it's brilliant oh my god it's such a good book and the bit that i love was the talk about the need for leisure that we've completely lost the ability to just enjoy things for the sake of it everything becomes work everything becomes commodified we don't actually know how to not work it's almost like inconceivable to us to do something for no reason yeah no totally and I I feel also it's it's totally counterproductive even if we've got this aim to be productive when when I'm in that deep work state of like work addiction I'm not actually being very creative I kind of need to value rest you know rest is an important part of work you know I I never get a good novel idea when I'm

staring at a word document and I'm just staring at the arctic blankness of that white page and just trying to think of an idea and like I'm in that mode at the moment actually I'm trying to come up with a new novel idea and you can't do it by just pressurizing yourself you have to sort of like step away go for a walk in the sunshine you know often you get an idea in the shower or when you're walking the dog or when you're like not thinking of work you actually get the best work done so it's also about understanding that you know life isn't I feel like there's something slightly masochistic in in our work culture where it hasn't just got it's not just about um being productive and producing stuff but it's got to feel hard it's got to feel a bit difficult and like like we're not it's not

properly work unless it feels hard and i think that's really interesting psychologically why yeah why we need that and um again why why we we can't just accept ourselves as we are but um yeah you're right that's a great book um utopia for realists that's brilliant on the last thing because i know you've been in for ages but you just i've something we're thinking about lately because i've been trying to after reading that book i'm like right i'm going to take up painting i'm going to make jewelry and i'm going to do it all with no intention of it being anything apart from kind of like play and it made me realize that as a child everyone used to call me creative because I was constantly coming up with ideas and I used to

dream about being an author when I was little because I was like how could you ever stop coming up with things to write about my god my brain is just full of ideas and then you've turned into this adult who's all your life kind of been told you're creative I don't know if it's the same for you but I imagine it maybe was and suddenly you're like so stifled because your life is so crammed full of things that aren't play which inherently don't seem to produce creativity and it's also counterproductive like you just said it's like it has to be a struggle when actually some of the best ideas are born out of boredom normally I would imagine yeah staring out the window and I sometimes worry actually but like about my own kids that they

don't have enough sort of staring out the window time because they've always plugged into something or on my xbox or um they're watching a film in the back of the car um but no I I find yeah I mean what I learn a lot from my children I've got like an 11 year old and a 13 year old and I learn how naturally creative they are when they're most creative it's not when they're sort of leaning over their textbooks it's when they're actually messing around and you know my my son Lucas when he was seven he actually gave me one of my novel ideas and it was just a question he had in bed you know um his question was what was father Christmas like as a boy and then i didn't have an answer to give him

a ready answer so i went away and wrote a book about father christmas as a boy an origin story a secular sort of origin story father christmas and um that's now a film and he's in that film i'm just showing off there but um that's coming out this year but yeah but that was um that was just a totally right you know we need randomness in life. We need just sort of like to follow our own minds a bit more and not to always fit into sort of some other ideas, someone else's idea of what sort of hard work is or what to do. I mean, I think in some ways it could be a potentially very creative time. You know,

I think young people now are more aware of options than when I was, say, sort of like 20. I had a bigger world of options out there. You can have your own podcast, you can write your own books, you can create your own, I don't know, brand of smoothie or whatever. There's a million opportunities out there in the world. But the trouble we're almost i think paralyzed by choice um i can't remember which horrible mega brand there's a sort of some big horrible corporate mega brand who did um an experiment on um customer choice i think it was someone like unilever. And they had, I'll just end on this little anecdote. They had this experiment where they had two sections of the supermarket, which they took over. In one section, they had just three brands of shampoo and conditioner on offer.

And then on another section, they had all their brands of shampoo and conditioner on offer. So they had like 47 different conditioners and shampoos. They had the sorts of like shampoos, every different type of hair type and everything. And they sold far more shampoo and conditioner on the aisle where they only had a choice of three than on the one where they had a choice of 47 different types of shampoo and

conditioner. So the point to that little anecdote is that when we are overwhelmed with choice, we get less done, we're less likely to buy the thing or do the thing or create the thing. And now we're so swamped with our lives. I think often the most creative thing and the most work-minded thing isn't to add something new into the mix. It's to take it away, to treat ourselves like a first draft that we're editing and to get rid of some of the clutter. You know, when you're writing a novel, the easiest way to make it better is to take stuff out, not to add stuff in. So it's about finding the bare bones of us again, think in life and to I feel like the problem of modern existence is a problem of too much and that's an environmental problem but it's

also a psychological problem and I think the answer is very much about stripping back and seeing the bare bones of who we are so I'm just going to ruin that you finishing on such beautiful notes just so you're saying that I just realised that I probably watch more films when we used to get videos from blockbusters than I ever do now that I have Netflix because I simply can't pick. So I just don't really watch movies anymore. Yeah. Because it's too hard to choose.

No, well, I mean, Netflix. I mean, I can't say bad things about Netflix because my film is coming out on Netflix later this year. But Netflix, yeah, we have just got, we've got – there's a lot of choice. I feel like, you know, it's not good. Well, it's like when you're watching CNN or something, you're like, which news should I be concentrating on? Should I be concentrating on the news that's running across the screen

at the bottom, what's coming out of the mouth, or what's happening at the top right of the screen? And it's like we're all like these computers with so many frames open. It's like we've got, you know, so many frames open it's like we've got like you know that stupid rainbow wheel that goes when you've got too much going on on your laptop we've got this sort of like rainbow wheel inside ourselves where we're not getting anything done because we've got too much open and too much happening and i'm all for you know being these sort of multi-hyphenate multi-talented people renaissance people with doing different things

all at once but we can't do everything all the time and sometimes it's nice to just strip it all back and just to think right okay what what am i here for what have i got to offer the world what am i interested in what's going to make me happy and go with that and not be totally drowned out with all these other voices and expectations and distractions. I completely agree. Thank you so much for joining me. I've honestly loved this conversation. I'm sorry to have kept you longer than planned, but I feel like I could honestly chat to you all day long. Well, thanks for putting up with my waffle today. I was waffling on, but no, you're very easy to talk to. So thank you. Thank you very much for having me. It's been such a pleasure. If anyone

wants to find you or if you've got anything else you want to point us in the direction towards that's exciting and new or anything like that well i definitely wouldn't follow me on twitter because i i'm sort of non-existence on twitter anymore i would be my only real social social media if you wanted to follow me is matt hay i'm on instagram it's actually matt zed haig on instagram i i when i was eight years old i was really hated being called Matthew because my sister was called Phoebe. And this was before Friends. And Phoebe used to be a really unusual name. So I wanted an unusual name too, because there was five other boys in my class called Matthew. So I went to my grandfather's family tree. And in the 1700s, there was a member of

my family called Zeribabal, which is an old biblical name and so I thought okay I'll be Matthew Zeribable Haig so on Instagram I'm Matt Zed Haig and you didn't ask for all that information but there I've just given you some unnecessary biographical insights to my own weird age old self. That's actually probably a name more unusual than mine which I don't normally hear to be honest because mine's also a bit odd and wild um but yeah thank you so much thank you thank you very much thank you and thank you everyone for listening bye Fanduel Casino's exclusive live dealer studio has your chance at the number one feeling, winning. Which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute?

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