Terrorists know it.

Sex isn’t really what sells. What sells is fear.

And now we don’t just have to imagine the worst catastrophes. We can see them. Literally. The camera phone has made us all telejournalists. When something truly awful happens – a terrorist incident, a forest fire, a tsunami – people are always there to film it.

We have more food for our nightmares. We don’t get our information, as people used to, from one carefully considered newspaper or TV news report. We get it from news sites and social media and email alerts. And besides, TV news itself isn’t what it used to be. Breaking news is continuous. And the more terrifying the news, the higher the ratings.

That doesn’t mean all news people want bad news. Some do, judging from the divisive way they present it. But even the best news channels want high ratings, and over the years they work out what works and what doesn’t, and compete ever harder for attention, which is why watching news can feel like watching a continuous metaphor for generalised anxiety disorder. The various split screens and talking heads and rolling banners of incessant information are a visual representation of how anxiety feels. All that conflicting chatter and noise and sensationalist drama. We can feel stressed watching the news, even on a slow news day. Because, really, there is no longer such a thing as a slow news day.

And when something truly terrible has happened the endless stream of eyewitness accounts and speculation and phone footage does not help anything. It is all sensation and no information. If you find the news severely exacerbates your state of mind, the thing to do is SWITCH IT OFF. Don’t let the terror into your mind. No good is done by being paralysed and powerless in front of non-stop rolling news.

The news unconsciously mimics the way fear operates – focusing on the worst things, catastrophising, listening to an endless, repetitive stream of information on the same worrying topic. So, it can be hard to tell these days where your anxiety disorder ends and where actual news begins.

So we have to remember:

There is no shame in not watching news.

There is no shame in not going on Twitter.

There is no shame in disconnecting.

2

THE BIG PICTURE

‘We seldom realise, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.’

—Alan Watts, The Culture of Counter Culture: Edited Transcripts

Life moves pretty fast

OF COURSE, IN the cosmic perspective, the whole of human history has been fast.

We haven’t been here long. The planet is around 4.6 billion years old. Our specific and wonderful and problematic species – Homo sapiens – has only been here for 200,000 years. And it was only in the last 50,000 years that things picked up a gear. When we started wearing clothes from animal skins. When we began burying our dead as a matter of practice. When our hunting methods became more advanced.

The oldest known cave art is probably Indonesian and over 40,000 years old. In world terms that was a blink of an eye ago. But art is older than agriculture. Agriculture arrived basically yesterday.

We’ve only had farms for 10,000 years. And writing has only been around, as far as we know, for a minuscule 5,000 years.

Civilisation, which began in Mesopotamia (roughly Iraq and Syria on today’s map), is under 4,000 years old. And once civilisation began, things really began to speed up. It was time to fasten our collective seat belts. Money. The first alphabet. The first musical notation system. The pyramids. Buddhism and Hinduism and Christianity and Islam and Sikhism. Socratic philosophy. The concept of democracy. Glass. Swords. Warships. Canals. Roads. Bridges. Schools. Toilet paper. Clocks. Compasses. Bombs. Eyeglasses. Mines. Guns. Better guns. Newspapers. Telescopes. The first piano. Sewing machines. Morphine. Refrigerators. Transatlantic telegraph cables. Rechargeable batteries. Telephones. Cars. Aeroplanes. Ballpoint pens. Jazz. Quiz shows. Coca-Cola. Polyester. Thermonuclear weapons. Rockets to the moon. Personal computers. Video games. Bloody email. The world wide web. Nanotechnology.

Whoosh.

But this change – even within the last four millennia – is not a smooth, straight upward line. It is the kind of steepening curve that would intimidate a professional skateboarder. Change may be a constant, but the rate of change is not.

How do you stay human in a world of change?

WHEN LOOKING AT triggers for mental health problems, therapists often identify an intense change in someone’s life as a major factor. Change is frequently related to fear. Moving house, losing a job, getting married, an increase or decrease in income, a death in the family, a diagnosis of a health problem, turning 40, whatever. Sometimes, it doesn’t even matter too much if the change is outwardly a ‘good’ one – having a baby, getting a promotion. The intensity of the change can be a shock to the system.

What, though, when the change isn’t just a personal one?

What about when change affects everyone?

What happens when whole societies – or a whole human population – undergo a period of profound change?

What then?

These questions are, of course, making an assumption. The assumption is that the world is changing. How is the world changing?

Chiefly, and most measurably, the change is technological.

Yes, there are other social and political and economic and environmental changes, but technology is related to all of them, and underlies them, so let’s start with that.

Of course, as a species, we humans have always been shaped by technology. It underpins everything.

Technology, in its baggiest sense, just means tools or methods. It could mean language. It could mean flints or dry sticks used to make fire. According to many anthropologists, technological progress is the most important factor driving human society.

Inventions such as man-made fire, the wheel, the plough or the printing press weren’t just important for their immediate purpose but in terms of their overall impact on how societies developed.

In the 19th century, the American anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan announced that technological inventions can lead to whole new eras of humanity. He saw three phases of social evolution – savagery, barbarism and civilisation – with each one leading to the next due to technological leaps forward. This seems a bit dodgy now, I think, because it implies an increasingly questionable moral advancement from ‘savages’ to the ‘civilised’.

Other experts have had different takes.

In the 1960s a Russian alien-hunting astrophysicist named Nikolai Kardashev thought the best way to measure progress was in terms of information. In the beginning there was little more than the information contained in our genes. After that came things like language and writing and books and, ultimately, information technology.

Nowadays, contemporary sociologists and anthropologists pretty much agree that we are heading deep into a post-industrial society, and that change is happening faster than ever.

But how fast?

According to Moore’s Law – named after the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, who forecast it – processing power for computers doubles every few years. This exponential doubling is the reason the small smartphone in your pocket packs way more power than the giant room-sized computers of the 1960s.

But this rapid power growth isn’t just confined to computer chips. It occurs across all kinds of technological things, from bits of stored data to internet bandwidth. It all suggests that technology doesn’t simply progress – its progress speeds up. Progress breeds progress.

Computers now help to build new computers with increasingly small amounts of human involvement. Which means lots of people have started worrying about – or hoping for – the ‘singularity’. This is the stuff of fever dreams and nightmares. The singularity is the point at which artificial intelligence becomes more intelligent than the brainiest human being. And then – depending on your inner optimism-to-pessimism ratio – either we will merge with and advance with this technology, and become immortal and happy cyborgs, or our sentient robots and laptops and toasters will take us over and we will be their pets or slaves or three-course meal.

Who knows?