Book Review: Reasons to stay alive by Matt Haig

Matt Haig has been writing about depression. His book Midnight Library on the same lines has been a bestseller. And ‘Reasons to stay alive’ is an account of his own experience with depression, and how he coped with it. What were the reasons he could find to just Stay Alive? He shared how reading and writing had been a solace for him. How with the love of his parents and his girlfriend (now wife), Andrea he learned to appreciate life and eventually overcame depression.

Below are some of the paragraphs from this book that I loved.

Is there no way out of the mind? Sylvia Plath famously asked.

I had been interested in this question, what it meant and what the answers might be, ever since I have come across it as a teenager. If there is a way out, a way that isn’t death itself, then the exit route is through ‘Words’. But rather than leave ‘The’ mind entirely, words help us leave ‘A’ mind and give us building blocks to build another one, similar, but better. Nearby the older one, but with firmer foundations, and very often with a better view.

Happiness is not very good for the economy. if we were happy with what we had, why we would need more. How do you sell anti-ageing moisturiser? by making them worry about age. How do you get people to vote for political party? by making them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? by making them worry about everything. How do you get them to get plastic surgery? by highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch TV shows? by making them worried of missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone?by making them feel like they are being left behind.

To be calm, becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non upgraded existence, to be comfortable with our messy human selves, would not be good for business.

Yet we have no other world to live in. And actually when we really look closely, the world of stuff and advertising is not really life. Life is the other stuff, life is the stuff left behind when you take away all that stuff, or ignore it for a while.

Life is the people who love you, no-one will choose to stay alive for an iPhone. It’s the people we reach by that iPhone that matter. And once we recover and live again, we do so with new eyes, things become clearer and we are aware of the things we were not before.

Reading and writing are the most nourishing from of meditation anyone has so far found.

Books are possibilities, they are escape routes. They give you options when you have none, each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.

I loved external narratives, for the hopes they offered, films, dramas, and most of all books. They were themselves the reasons to stay alive.

Every book written is a product of a human mind at particular state. Add all the books together and you get the end sum of humanity

Every time I was reading a great book, it was like reading a kind of map, a treasure map. And the treasure I was being directed to was in-fact to find myself. But each map was incomplete. And I would locate the treasure if I would have read all the books. And so the process of finding myself was an endless quest, and books themselves seems to reflect this idea. Which is why the plot of every book ever can be boiled down to someone is looking for something.

One cliche attached to bookish people is that, they are lonely, but for me books were my way out, of being lonely.

Books were about movement, they are about quests and journeys, beginning and middles and ends. Even if, not in that order. They are about new chapters, and leaving old ones behind.

Just as the ground below New York and Lagos becomes identical, if you go down far enough beneath the earth surface. So every human inhabitant on this planet, shares the same core.

I am you and you are me. We are alone, but not alone. We are trapped by time, but also infinite, made of flesh, but also stars.

I am sure reading this will give you more Reasons to stay alive.

Book:#200

#LearningNeverEnds #CuriousTitans #Depression #MattHiag