Johann Hari Lost Connections Quotes

What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else. If you have lots of people around you—perhaps even a husband or wife, or a family, or a busy workplace—but you don’t share anything that matters with them, then you’ll still be lonely.

You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met.

Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.

The more you think life is about having stuff and superiority and showing it off, the more unhappy, and the more depressed and anxious, you will be.

We grieve because we have loved. We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we felt.

The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other. The collapse had already been taking place for decades by then. The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing—Facebook friends in place of neighbors, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world. The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?

When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But “when it’s deadening,” you feel “shattered at the end of the day, just shattered.

You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.

The difference between being online and being physically among people, I saw in that moment, is a bit like the difference between pornography and sex: it addresses a basic itch, but it’s never satisfying.

When they talk among themselves, advertising people have been admitting since the 1920s that their job is to make people feel inadequate—and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created.

To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you. You have to be in it together—and “it” can be anything that you both think has meaning and value.

This showed that loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now.

We are all born with a genetic inheritance—but your genes are activated by the environment. They can be switched on, or off, by what happens to you.

So instead of seeing your depression and anxiety as a form of madness, I would tell my younger self—you need to see the sanity in this sadness. You need to see that it makes sense. Of course it is excruciating. I will always dread that pain returning, every day of my life. But that doesn’t mean the pain is insane, or irrational. If you touch your hand to a burning stove, that, too, will be agony, and you will snatch your hand away as quickly as possible. That’s a sane response. If you kept your hand on the stove, it would burn and burn until it was destroyed.

Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection. Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt. This snowball effect, he learned, can be reversed—but to help a depressed or severely anxious person out of it, they need more love, and more reassurance, than they would have needed in the first place. The tragedy, John realized, is that many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around. Indeed, they receive judgment, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world. They snowball into an ever colder place.

...Every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.

When they added up the figures, John and other scientists found that being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese—which was, until then, considered the biggest health crisis the developed world faced.

You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world—they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source—and only there, when we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it.

extremely depressed people have become disconnected from a sense of the future, in a way that other really distressed people have not.

I kept noticing a self-help cliché that people say to each other all the time, and share on Facebook incessantly. We say to each other: “Nobody can help you except you.” It made me realize: we haven’t just started doing things alone more, in every decade since the 1930s. We have started to believe that doing things alone is the natural state of human beings, and the only way to advance. We have begun to think: I will look after myself, and everybody else should look after themselves, as individuals. Nobody can help you but you. Nobody can help me but me. These ideas now run so deep in our culture that we even offer them as feel-good bromides to people who feel down—as if it will lift them up. But John has proven that this is a denial of human history, and a denial of human nature. It leads us to misunderstand our most basic instincts. And this approach to life makes us feel terrible.

You can’t escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can’t be filtered out of the water we drink every day. We are literally awash in these drugs.

Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.

The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.

We have been systematically misinformed about what depression and anxiety are.

One friend told me that she always knew her depression was lifting when she felt her sense of time expanding again

The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno says we have moved from having a “proletariat”—a solid block of manual workers with jobs—to a “precariat,” a shifting mass of chronically insecure people who don’t know whether they will have any work next week and may never have a stable job.

Materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart of poor health”—physical, mental, and emotional.

It turned out that for every category of traumatic experience you went through as a kid, you were radically more likely to become depressed as an adult. If you had six categories of traumatic events in your childhood, you were five times more likely to become depressed as an adult than somebody who didn’t have any. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult.

Antidepressant drugs that increase serotonin in the brain have the same modest effect, in clinical trials, as drugs that reduce serotonin in the brain.

She had felt homesick. But she was at home.

Depression isn't a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences!

Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

Materialism is KFC for the soul.

I’ve pursued happiness for myself my whole life, and I’m exhausted, and I don’t feel any closer to it—because where does it end? The bar just keeps getting moved.

The primary explanation for depression offered in our culture starts to fall apart. The idea you feel terrible because of a “chemical imbalance” was built on a series of mistakes and errors. It has come as close to being proved wrong, he told me, as you ever get in science. It’s lying broken on the floor, like a neurochemical Humpty Dumpty with a very sad smile.

But what I was being taught is—if you want to stop being depressed, don’t be you. Don’t be yourself.3 Don’t fixate on how you’re worth it. It’s thinking about you, you, you that’s helped to make you feel so lousy. Don’t be you. Be us. Be we. Be part of the group. Make the group worth it. The real path to happiness, they were telling me, comes from dismantling our ego walls—from letting yourself flow into other people’s stories and letting their stories flow into yours; from pooling your identity, from realizing that you were never you—alone, heroic, sad—all along.

You’ve got to pull yourself out of the materialistic environments—the environments that are reinforcing the materialistic values,” he says, because they cripple your internal satisfactions. And then, he says, to make that sustainable, you have to “replace them with actions that are going to provide those intrinsic satisfactions, [and] encourage those intrinsic goals.

If you picture of a perfect After-life, it's being with the people you love all the time. He asked me: Why wouldn't you choose today: when you're still alive, to be truely present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions!?

When he put lonely people into brain-scanning machines, he noticed something. They would spot potential threats within 150 milliseconds, while it took socially connected people twice as long, 300 milliseconds, to notice the same threat. What was happening? Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact, he found. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most. John calls this a “snowball” effect, as disconnection spirals into more disconnection.

Nearly twice as many people hate their jobs as love their jobs.

Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.

The vitally important corollary is that evolution shaped us not only to feel bad in isolation, but to feel insecure.” It’s a beautiful theory.

Every single person reading this is the beneficiary of big civilizing social changes that seemed impossible when somebody first proposed them.

They found that 13 percent of people say they are “engaged“ in their jobs—which means they are “enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and contribute to their organization in a positive manner.

When the results came back and were all calculated out, Tim was struck by the results: materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Robert Kohlenberg, a professor of psychology, once thought that depression and anxiety were different things. But as he studied it, he discovered that "the data are indicating they're not that distinct." Depression and anxiety overlap. I started to see depression and anxiety as cover versions of the same song by different bands. Depression is a cover version by a downbeat emo band, and anxiety is a cover version by a screaming heavy metal group, but the underlying sheet music is the same. They're not identical, but they are twinned.

Anywhere in the world where people describe being lonely, they will also—throughout their sleep—experience more of something called “micro-awakenings.” These are small moments you won’t recall when you wake up, but in which you rise a little from your slumber. All other social animals do the same thing when they’re isolated too. The best theory is that you don’t feel safe going to sleep when you’re lonely, because early humans literally weren’t safe if they were sleeping apart from the tribe. You know nobody’s got your back—so your brain won’t let you go into full sleep mode.

Later, one of the world’s leading medical journals, the Lancet, conducted a detailed study of the fourteen major antidepressants that are given to teenagers. The evidence—from the unfiltered, real results—showed that they simply didn’t work, with a single exception, where the effect was very small.

Rufus tells his patients when they come to him feeling deeply depressed or anxious: You’re not crazy to feel so distressed. You’re not broken. You’re not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

It was only a long time into talking with these social scientists that I realized every one of the social and psychological causes of depression and anxiety they have discovered has something in common. They are all forms of disconnection. They are all ways in which we have been cut off from something we innately need but seem to have lost along the way.

We are living, she has come to believe, in a culture where people are not “getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings,” and that is why we can’t put down our smartphones, or bear to log off. We tell ourselves that we live so much of our lives in cyberspace because when we are there, we are connected—we are plugged into a swirling party with billions of people.

Johann Hari’s 2018 book Lost Connections argues that our culture has come to medicate depression first and ask questions later, without recognizing that some discomforts are not medical emergencies. He tells the story of how when he begged for antinausea medication in a jungle hospital in Vietnam, the doctors said, “You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you.

That summer, in a small house near the beach, he began to write a book. He knew it would be the last thing he ever did, so he decided to write something advocating a crazy, preposterous idea—one so outlandish that nobody had ever written a book about it before. He was going to propose that gay people should be allowed to get married, just like straight people. He thought this would be the only way to free gay people from the self-hatred and shame that had trapped Andrew himself. It’s too late for me, he thought, but maybe it will help the people who come after me. When the book—Virtually Normal—came out a year later, Patrick died when it had only been in the bookstores for a few days, and Andrew was widely ridiculed for suggesting something so absurd as gay marriage. Andrew was attacked not just by right-wingers, but by many gay left-wingers, who said he was a sellout, a wannabe heterosexual, a freak, for believing in marriage. A group called the Lesbian Avengers turned up to protest at his events with his face in the crosshairs of a gun. Andrew looked out at the crowd and despaired. This mad idea—his last gesture before dying—was clearly going to come to nothing. When I hear people saying that the changes we need to make in order to deal with depression and anxiety can’t happen, I imagine going back in time, to the summer of 1993, to that beach house in Provincetown, and telling Andrew something: Okay, Andrew, you’re not going to believe me, but this is what’s going to happen next. Twenty-five years from now, you’ll be alive. I know; it’s amazing; but wait—that’s not the best part. This book you’ve written—it’s going to spark a movement. And this book—it’s going to be quoted in a key Supreme Court ruling declaring marriage equality for gay people. And I’m going to be with you and your future husband the day after you receive a letter from the president of the United States telling you that this fight for gay marriage that you started has succeeded in part because of you. He’s going to light up the White House like the rainbow flag that day. He’s going to invite you to have dinner there, to thank you for what you’ve done. Oh, and by the way—that president? He’s going to be black.

But once I knew about Brett’s research, I saw the error I had been making. Now, when I feel myself starting to slide down, I don’t do something for myself—I try to do something for someone else. I go to see a friend and try to focus very hard on how they are feeling and making them feel better. I try to do something for my network, or my group—or even try to help strangers who look distressed. I learned something I wouldn’t have thought was possible at the start. Even if you are in pain, you can almost always make someone else feel a little bit better. Or I would try to channel it into more overt political actions, to make the society better.

It would be grotesque to compare what has happened to workers in the West to what has happened to the Native peoples of the Americas, who have survived a genocide and more than a century of persecution. But while I researched this book, I spent some time in the Rust Belt. A few weeks before the U.S. presidential election in 2016, I went to Cleveland to try to get the vote out to stop Donald Trump from being elected. One afternoon I walked down a street in the southwest of the city where a third of the houses had been demolished by the authorities, a third were abandoned, and third still had people living in them, cowering, with steel guards on their windows. I knocked on a door, and a woman answered who, from looking at her, I would have guessed was fifty-five. She began to rage—how terrified she was of her neighbors, how the kids in the area “have got to go,” how she was desperate for anyone who would make things better, how there wasn’t even a grocery store anywhere nearby any more and she had to take three buses just to get food. She mentioned in passing that she was thirty-seven years old, which took me aback. And then she said something that stayed with me long after the election. She described what the area was like when her grandparents lived there, and you could work in a factory and have a middle-class life—and she made a verbal slip. She meant to say “when I was young.” What she actually said was “when I was alive.

The term doesn’t really make any sense, she said: we don’t know what a “chemically balanced” brain would look like. People are told that drugs like antidepressants restore a natural balance to your brain, she said, but it’s not true—they create an artificial state. The whole idea of mental distress being caused simply by a chemical imbalance is “a myth,” she has come to believe, sold to us by the drug companies.

Ironically, learning that depression and anxiety are not caused by a chemical imbalance made me feel unbalanced. Somebody once told me1 that giving a person a story about why they are in pain is one of the most powerful things you can ever do. Taking away the story for your pain is just as powerful: I felt like I was on a rocky ship and somebody had taken away the railings.

Instead of saying our pain is an irrational spasm to be taken away with drugs, they see that we should start to listen to it and figure out what it is telling us.

When you have a society with huge gaps in income and status, Richard told me, it creates the sense that “some people seem supremely important, and others seem of no importance at all.” This doesn’t affect only people at the bottom. In a highly unequal society, everyone has to think about their status a lot. Am I maintaining my position? Who’s threatening me? How far can I fall?

This is a common human response to the circumstances in which we all live. This is not something that separates you from the world. It’s something, actually, you share with countless others.” We need to see “this is not just my personal problem,” he said, but “a shared problem—and attributable to the kind of society we live in.

But humans do have a choice. We can—as I learned later—find practical ways to dismantle hierarchies and create a more equal place, where everybody feels they have a measure of respect and status. Or we can build up hierarchies and ramp up the humiliation—as we are doing today.

13 percent of people say they are “engaged“ in their jobs—which means they are “enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and contribute to their organization in a positive manner.” Against them, 63 percent say they are “not engaged,” which is defined as “sleepwalking through their workday, putting time—but not energy or passion—into their work.” And a further 24 percent3 are “actively disengaged.” They, Gallup explained, “aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness.

A common symptom of depression is something called “derealization”5—which is where you feel like nothing you are doing is authentic or real.

If you worked in the civil service and you had a higher degree of control10 over your work, you were a lot less likely to become depressed or develop severe emotional distress than people working at the same pay level, with the same status, in the same office, as people with a lower degree of control over their work.

The worst stress for people isn’t having to bear a lot of responsibility. It is, he told me, having to endure “work [that] is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; [where] they die a little when they come to work each day, because their work touches no part of them that is them.

in most cases, loneliness preceded depressive symptoms.8 You became lonely, and that was followed by feelings of despair and profound sadness and depression. And the effect was really big. Picture the range of loneliness in our culture as a straight line. At one end, you are 0 percent lonely. At the other end, you are 100 percent lonely. If you moved from being in the middle—50 percent—to being at 65 percent, your chances of developing depressive symptoms increased eight times.

The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are. Other social scientists then broke this down to look at depression specifically16—and found the higher the inequality, the higher the depression.

in a culture where people are not “getting the connections that they need in order to be healthy human beings,” and that is why we can’t put down our smartphones, or bear to log off.

Joe felt like his human thoughts and insights and feelings were almost a defect.

The recent survey found that one in three British workers check their e-mails before 6.30 am, while 80% of British employers consider it acceptable to phone employees out of hours.

The concept of “work hours” is vanishing for most people—so this thing that 87 percent of us don’t enjoy is spreading over more and more of our lives.

And so, Irving says, the primary explanation for depression offered in our culture starts to fall apart. The idea you feel terrible because of a “chemical imbalance” was built on a series of mistakes and errors. It has come as close to being proved wrong, he told me, as you ever get in science. It’s lying broken on the floor, like a neurochemical Humpty Dumpty with a very sad smile.

I was feeling so lost and depressed, but now, okay … I am a fighter. I feel good. You come out of your corner crying, and you start to fight.” She blew her smoke away from me, into the air. “It changes you,” she said. “You feel strong then.

I was told by my doctor that I was suffering from both depression and acute anxiety. I had believed that those were separate problems, and that is how they were discussed for the thirteen years I received medical care for them. But I noticed something odd as I did my research. Everything that causes an increase in depression also causes an increase in anxiety, and the other way around. They rise and fall together.

Unhappiness and depression are totally different things. There is nothing more infuriating to a depressed person than to be told to cheer up, or to be offered jolly little solutions as if they were merely having a bad week. It feels like being told to cheer yourself up by going out dancing after you’ve broken both your legs.

the English doctor had realized that when you give a patient a medical treatment, you are really giving her two things. You are giving her a drug, which will usually have a chemical effect on her body in some way. And you are giving her a story—about how the treatment will affect her.

a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?

dollars for this single piece of fruit, and carried it into my room in the Very Charming Hanoi Hotel. Like any good foreigner who’s read his health warnings

the people with boring, low-status jobs just wanted to collapse in front of the television when they got home. Why would that be? “When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But “when it’s deadening,” you feel “shattered at the end of the day, just shattered.

And if the standards of the culture were wrong then, I realized, they can be wrong now. You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture - but those standards can badly misjudge what a human actually needs in order to have a good or even a tolerable life.

My desire for a solution that was private and personal - the psychological equivalent of a pill - was in fact a symptom of the mindset that had caused my depression and anxiety in the first place.

You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you've been told up to now, it's not serotonin; it's society. It's not your brain; it;s your pain.

I would start once again to have strong recurring thoughts that said: life is pointless; everything you’re doing is pointless; this whole thing is a fucking waste of time. It would be a thrum of unending anxiety.

If your picture of a perfect afterlife is being with the people you love all the time, he asked me, why wouldn’t you choose today—while you’re still alive—to be truly present with the people you love? Why would you rather be lost in a haze of distractions?

But as Johann Hari argues in his book Lost Connections, these mental health issues are at least as much about problems in life—protracted loneliness, loss of meaningful work, feeling pressured

We are not imprisoned in the values that have been making us feel so lousy for so long. By coming together with what really matters, we can begin to dig a tunnel back to meaningful values.

We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It's time for us all to come home.

In that moment, I finally understood for the first time why -- throughout this journey -- I kept thinking about that day when I got terribly sick in rural Vietnam. When I yelled for drugs to stop my worst symptoms -- the extreme room-spinning nausea -- the doctor told me: "You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you." If i had ignored or silenced that symptom, my kidneys would have failed, and I would have died. You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and you must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world -- they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source -- and only there, where we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it.

something the psychologist W. M. Mace said years ago, riffing on JFK: “Ask not what’s inside your head,”9 he said. “Ask what your head’s inside of.

How could I still be depressed when I was taking antidepressants? I was doing everything right, and yet something was still wrong. Why?

She is not opposed to the technology at all—she’s on Facebook, and likes it—but “I say it is not what you actually need” at your core. “The kind of connection we need is this connection”—she waved her hand between me and her—“which is face-to-face, where we are able to see, and touch, and smell, and hear each other … We’re social creatures. We’re meant to be in connection with one another in a safe, caring way, and when it’s mediated by a screen, that’s absolutely not there.

Loneliness, he concluded, is causing a significant amount of the depression and anxiety in our society.

I started to see depression and anxiety as like cover versions of the same song by different bands. Depression is a cover version by a downbeat emo band, and anxiety is a cover version by a screaming heavy metal group, but the underlying sheet music is the same. They’re not identical, but they are twinned.

It is, he told me, having to endure “work [that] is monotonous, boring, soul-destroying; [where] they die a little when they come to work each day, because their work touches no part of them that is them.

A one-way relationship can’t cure loneliness. Only two-way (or more) relationships can do that.

When I spoke with the journalist Johann Hari about his book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions, he explained that we don’t have a problem with depression and anxiety as much as we have a crisis of meaning. Hari’s book highlights the nine main causes of depression, two of which involve human biology, but the major factors that have rapidly increased depression in the Western world throughout the last century involve disconnection from a meaningful life.