that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you’re trying to be a reasonably good human being for.
Because there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days.
Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.
We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.
One single really bad idea. That’s all it takes.
Ten years ago a man was standing on a bridge. This story isn’t about that man, so you don’t really need to think about him right now.
The policeman tries to be patient. He presses his thumbs hard against his eyebrows, as if he hopes they’re two buttons and if he keeps them pressed at the same time for ten seconds he’ll be able to restore life to its factory settings.
Because you’ve probably been depressed yourself, you’ve had days when you’ve been in terrible pain in places that don’t show up in X-rays, when you can’t find the words to explain it even to the people who love you.
Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish.
Most adults have had a number of really bad moments, and of course not even fairly happy people manage to be happy the whole darn time.
At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.
Maybe the younger man isn’t lying, maybe he really is okay. But the older man definitely isn’t, not yet.
“Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments.
You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing.
the freedom not to have to worry,
Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.
We lie to those we love.
this wasn’t because she was stupid. She was just a miserable person.
because sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either.
Not about how terrible it was, but about how odd it is that you can’t hate your mom. That it still doesn’t feel like it was her fault.
You probably have someone in your life whom you’d do something stupid for.
Perhaps that’s what hurts most of all, the millions of tiny clues that you didn’t notice.
happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now. A whole world constantly asking us: “But is your life as perfect as this? Well? How about now? Is it as perfect as this? If it isn’t, change it!”Falling in love is magical, after all, romantic, breathtaking… but falling in love and love are different.
The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves.
The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn’t that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that it steals all the plans you had for the future.
The stupidest thing people who have everything think about people who have nothing is that it’s pride that stops a person from asking for help.
because you don’t want the girls to have parents who are at war with each other. You try to sort everything out yourself, and eventually you get a stroke of luck:
So what do you do? You struggle on. Hope that’ll be enough.
When you leave them at school you go into an alleyway and sit down on the edge of the sidewalk and cry because you can’t stop thinking: You shouldn’t have loved me.
All your life you’ve promised yourself that you’ll cope with everything. Not be a chaotic person. Not have to beg for help.
But Christmas Eve arrives, and you suffer your way through it in lonely despair, because the girls are going to spend New Year’s Day with you. The day before New Year’s Eve you put the latest letter from the lawyer who wants to take them away from you in your pocket, next to the letter from your landlord which says that if you don’t pay the rent today you’re going to be evicted.
It struck Jim that today’s youngsters had far too much choice, that was the whole problem
the problem with the middle class is that you think someone can be too rich to buy things. But that’s not true. You can only be too poor.
“Sometimes it’s hard to know who the biggest crooks are, people who rob banks, or the people who run the banks.”
Why is it that people like you always think successful people should be punished for their success?
“democracy as a system is doomed, because idiots will believe anything as long as the story’s good enough.”
“I didn’t say that money was happiness. I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure.”
“Having a purpose. A goal. A direction. And do you want to know the truth? The truth is that far more people would rather be rich than happy.”
it’s impossible not to upset people like you the moment you start to say anything at all.
Conflicts are good. Only weak people believe in harmony, and as a reward they get to float through life with a feeling of moral superiority while the rest of us get on with other things.
“I buy distance from other people.”
Because practically everyone distinguishes between good and bad, so if we breach our own moral code, we have to come up with an excuse for ourselves.
It could be religious or political conviction, or the belief that we had no choice, but we need something to justify our bad deeds
It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?”
You can get it into your head to do some unbelievably stupid things when you run out of tears, when you can’t silence the voices no one else can hear, when you’ve never been in a room where you felt normal.
ever since she was very little she’d been scared of drowning. Not death itself, but the moments before it. The panic and powerlessness.
“When you’re drowning you can’t call for help, you can’t wave your arms, you just sink. Your family can be standing on the beach waving cheerfully to you, completely unaware that you’re dying.” Nadia had felt like that all her life.
She had lived among them. Had sat at the dinner table with her parents, thinking: Can’t you see? But they didn’t see, and she didn’t say anything.
She became a psychologist.
I’ve been here before. I know a better way down.
Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it.
She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.
People want to be good. Deep down. Kind. The problem of course is that it isn’t always possible to be kind to idiots, because they’re idiots.
The whole thing is a complicated, unlikely story. Perhaps it isn’t even a story about idiots.
That’s the only thing someone who definitely wants to live and someone who definitely wants to die have in common: if you’re going to jump off something, you need to be pretty damn sure of the height.
just because you don’t much like life doesn’t necessarily mean you want the alternative.
When you’ve been together for a very long time, it’s the little things that matter.
First the heart stops, then it races. First comes the shock of not understanding what’s happening, then comes the shock of realizing precisely what’s happening. The survival instinct and fear of dying start to fight, making space for some surprisingly irrational thoughts in between.
Do you know what the worst thing about being retired is? JACK: No. ANNA-LENA: That you get too much time to think.
It’s harder than you might think to take people hostage when they’re idiots.
I think it’s wonderful, I really do, that people are free to love whoever they like nowadays.
Parenthood can lead to a sequence of years when the children’s feelings suck all the oxygen out of a family, and that can be so emotionally intense that some adults go for years without having an opportunity to tell anyone about their own feelings, and if you don’t get a chance for long enough, sometimes you simply forget how to do it.
You can’t make them adapt to you, you simply have to adapt to them.
“Stockholm” is, after all, an expression more than it is a place, both for men like Roger and for most of the rest of us, just a symbolic word to denote all the irritating people who get in the way of our happiness. People who think they’re better than us... “Stockholm” can also be a syndrome, of course.
Everyone who doesn’t see us, doesn’t understand us, doesn’t care about us. Everyone has Stockholmers in their life, even people from Stockholm have their own Stockholmers, only to them it’s “people who live in New York” or “politicians in Brussels,” or other people from some other place where people seem to think that they’re better than the Stockholmers think they are.
Everyone inside the apartment had their own complexes, their own demons and anxieties:
Sometimes “Stockholm” can actually be a compliment: a dream of somewhere bigger, where we can become someone else. Something that we long for but don’t quite dare to do.
Everyone in the apartment was wrestling with their own story. They may not have had much in common, but they all knew what it was like to make a mistake.
A man wants to be looked in the eye and told the truth when he’s no longer needed.
I’m so positive that it makes people depressed. That I always think the glass is half full when there’s just enough to drown yourself in,
You have to know so much as a parent, you have to know everything, right from the start.
three of the hardest words an older man can say to a younger woman: “You’ll manage it.”
I know this is too long, and I'm tire of copy-pasting. So here's a shared Kindle notebook for the Notes and Highlights!
Anxious People - Notebook.html
The first pages were kinda annoying (as usual) because the way it’s written, I think that would be better if it’s narrated like verbally. Reading it is a little bit confusing that I needed to read then re-read and re-read again just to understand what it was implying.
“Don’t think about cookies,” and now you’re thinking about cookies. Don’t think about cookies. All you need to know is that a man was standing…. So then don’t tell me. Maybe?
I started drafting this review at chapter 20 where my mood shifted to another. I almost stopped reading the book and move on to another Goodreads recommendation, but I though yeah let’s give it a couple more chapters and then boo! Chapter 20, now I’m sad, now I’m crying, and I hate roller coasters of emotions because that my every day and I am reading to escape my normal day but hello, Fredrik Backman. (I promise I’m gonna read a horror book next to this one!)
Edit from future May: You finished this, you loved this, and you did not follow it with a horror book.
From a trying-hard funny (which works at some parts, to be fair), it had a hard shift to being a parent also trying hard to become a good one. I hate that. I hate that I had to read that. Because I was imagining how hard it was and I am a parent, too, and I feel like if I were him, I’d lose myself, too. I’d do stupid things, too.
“The day before New Year’s Eve, you put the latest letter from the lawyer who wants to take them (your kids) away from you in your pocket, next to the letter from your landlord which says that id you don’t pay the rent today, you’re going to be evicted.” That sucks. That is so painful. And knowing that your spouse is a bit worried about you being the father of her children, sucked more.
I never gave up and read more pages. The scene (or chapters, rather) where the hostages and the bank robber had their moments sharing their life stories was my favorite part. Thank God, I did not lose the courage to go and move on to these pages.
Most people love reading books because it's as if they "travel to other places". I love books because it makes me see what other people may feel. Yea, kind of traveling as well, but the experience of meeting new people and learning unfamiliar cultures and realizing others' way of thinking is much more precious.
I am that person who (almost always) think that I am in some level of depression and anxiety. Reading this book did not invalidate my feelings, instead it made me realize that while different people have different tolerance on bllshts, they also have different ways to cope. While they have different personal challenges, they also have different ways to tell their loved ones they're still by their side. And if you think "other people" may not be affected by your life decisions, well you're wrong. There is at least one person out there who cares. And sometimes they care a lot that their own decisions are affected by yours already, you just don't know.
It took me exactly two weeks to finish this book. Because 1) the first parts, I admit, was kind of confusing and not an easy read; 2) I was (and still am) busy at work and parenting that I have only a few minutes a day to read and absorb what I was reading.
In the end, I rated it 4-point-something. Four was just not enough, and I couldn't give a five either because of my reasons. But I love that it affected my life and mindset in general so I'm shelfing it with my best and fave books.
