How has the most connected society in history also become the loneliest? It's easy to forget how far we've come. In just a matter of years, we've gone from phone calls to text messages to video chat. In an instant we can ring up a family member across the world and feel more connected with them given the distance then we could have at any other point in history. This was science fiction in the 20th century. It's during that same period of innovation that brought us one-click shopping: anything we could need delivered to our door the same day. And so we bought, and stored, and used, and replaced a generation living better than Louis the fourteenth, yet finding ourselves more secluded than ever. Why do people, even after they have their basic needs met with all the tools we have available, why are we not only unhappy, but largely depressed? Author and journalist Johann Hari set out across the world to speak with leading experts on depression, anxiety, and loneliness to discover both how we've gotten to this place and more importantly how do we as individuals in a society start to turn the tide? This is my 20-minute interview with Johann about what he learned from that research. All right, so why don't we start out with a little bit of a intro about yourself and about your work. I really- I write my book "Lost Connections" because there were the- these two mysteries that were really hanging over me for years Look, I was quite afraid to look into them in some ways The first mystery is I'm 40 years old and every year that I've been alive Depression and anxiety have increased here in the United States, in Britain, and across the Western world Right and I kept asking myself Why? Why is this happening? Why are so many more of us each year that passes finding it hard to get through the day right and I guess I wanted to understand that from because I'm a more personal mystery When I was a teenager Remember going to my doctor and explaining that I had this feeling like a pain was leaking out of me out So I put it at the time and I felt Very ashamed of it I felt Confused by it I didn't understand why it was happening And my doctor told me a story that, and now realized were speaking to the leading scientists in the world on this was oversimplified Right. My doctor said we know why people feel like this. It's just cuz of a problem in your brain There's a chemical called serotonin that makes people feel good Some people are naturally lacking it. You're clearly one of them. All we need to do is give you some drugs You're gonna feel better so I started taking a chemical anti-depressant called Paxil and I felt significantly better for a few months and Then this feeling of pain came back. So I'm back doctor said wanna get high enough dose. I was gonna hide dose again I felt better again. The feeling of pain came back and I was really in this cycle of taking higher and higher doses until for thirteen years I was taking the maximum dose you're allowed to take at the end of which I was still really depressed And I was surrounded by people who are becoming more and more depressed So I just forced myself really to start looking into this. So I ended up going on this big journey for the book I travelled over 40,000 miles I wanted to meet the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety And what solves them most importantly so I'm at you know Not just leading experts, but just a crazy mixture of people with different perspectives from an Amish village in Indiana Cuz the Amish have very low levels of depression to a city in Brazil that banned Advertising to see if that would make people feel better to a lab in Baltimore than where they were giving people Psychedelics to see if that would help and I learned a huge number of things but the core of what I learned Is that there's scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety Two of them are in fact biological. My doctor wasn't wrong and Your genes can make you more vulnerable to these problems just like some people find it easier to put on weight than others and There are real changes in your brain that begin when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out but most of the factors that cause depression or anxiety are not in our biology. Most of the factors for which there's scientific evidence are Factors in the way we're living and what I learned in the process of writing the book and speaking to so many Scientists is once you understand the causes of depression or anxiety in this more complex way Opens up a much broader range of possible solutions that I saw being pinned Just all over the world And these are solutions that we need to be explaining to people and offering to them alongside not instead of but as an option alongside Chemical antidepressants why is society at large? Reacting in this way. What do you think are some of the influences on people's well-being? That's leading to the higher and higher rates and depression and anxiety I'll give you an example of one of the nine causes that arrived at in lost connections. We are below Lea's society There's ever been there's a study that asks Americans how many close friends do you have you could turn to in a crisis and When they started doing this years ago The most common answer was five today the most common answer not the average but the most common answer is none half of all Americans Asked how many people know you well say Nobody right? I spent a lot of time talking to an amazing man called professor John Cacioppo is that it was the leading expert in the world on loneliness. He was at the University of Chicago And he explained to me Why are we alive you and me and everyone watching this? Why do we exist? One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannah's of Africa were really good at one thing They weren't bigger than the animals they took down. They weren't faster than the animals they took down But they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating just like bees evolved to live in a hive Humans evolved to live in a tribe and if you think about the circumstances where we evolved if you were cut off from the tribe You were depressed and anxious for really good reasons. You weren't terrible danger you were about to die Those are still the impulses we have we are the first humans ever In the long 2 million year history of our species to try to disband our tribes and is making us feel awful So a key thing for me was not just to understand these problems. But ok. How do we solve those problems? Right and one of the heroes of my book Lost Connections is an amazing man called. Dr Sam ever Hampton who pioneered a whole different approach based on this understanding so Sam was a general practitioner in East London poor part of East London where I live for a long time and Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety And like me he thinks there's some role for chemical antidepressants But he could also see most of the people he was giving them to did become depressed again And he could see that they were depressed and anxious for perfectly understandable reasons Right like to give one of the examples I took about in the book loneliness So he decided to pioneer a different approach one day a woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham He'd been shut away in our home with dreadful depression and anxiety for seven years and Sam said to Lisa. Don't worry I'll carry on giving you these drugs. I'm also gonna suggest something else. There was an area behind the doctors the suite of doctors offices There was no known as dog share alley which gives you sense of what it was like just kind of scrubland Sam said to Lisa what I'd like you to come and do is turn out a few times a week I'm gonna come to you cuz I've been pretty anxious We're gonna meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people. And we're gonna find something to do together as a group, right the first time the group met Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety But the group starts talking they're like, what can we do? These are inner-city East London people They don't know anything about gardening they decided they're going to teach themselves gardening right gonna turn dogshit alley into a beautiful garden So they started watching YouTube. They start to read books They start to get their fingers in the soil. They start to learn the rhythms of the seasons There's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really powerful Antidepressant start to do something even more important. They started to form a tribe they started to form a group they started to care about each other and you know, if If one person didn't turn up, they'd go and look for them. They'd see if they were okay They did what human beings do when they're part of tribes. They started to solve each other's problems The way Lisa put it to me as the garden began to bloom. We began to bloom There was a study in Norway of a very similar program found. It was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. I Think for an obvious reason, right? It was dealing with some of the reasons why they felt so bad in the first place and this is something I saw all over The world from Sydney to São Paulo
to San Francisco the most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety Are the ones that deal with the reasons why we're in such distress in the first place? You said that we're living in the loneliest society. There's ever been how Can that possibly be with all of these tools at our fingertips, right we have social media We have the ability to connect and interact with anybody in an instant I can FaceTime my mom in a second. And if she picks up then we can I can see her face to face has social media Played some part in the fact that we are lonely This is a complex question and with a complex answer So the glib answer is to go, yeah social media did this to us. Is this too simplistic? To understand this I went to the first-ever internet rehab center in the world. It's in just outside Spokane in Washington State It's called restart, Washington. I remember I've arrived there. It's a clearing in the woods I get out. I got out the car and absolutely instinctively I looked at my phone to check my email and felt really pissed off. I couldn't see it go. There was no reception I was like, oh wait you came to the right place? Right and I spent a fair bit of time there and it's totally fascinating They get a whole range of people at restart Washington, but they disproportionately get Young men who become obsessed with these multiplayer role-playing games like World of Warcraft or not at the time that I was there but now fortnight right and I'm about Dr. Hillary cash the amazing woman who runs this Center Sent me that you've got to ask yourself What are these young men getting out of these games? Because they're getting something right? I think what they're getting is a Kind of hollow version of the things they used to get from the society But they no longer get they get a sense of a tribe they get a sense of status and they can gain in status They get a sense. They're good at something they get a sense. They're moving around Young people barely leave their homes. Now. It's incredible the figures for how rarely children play outdoors but what they're getting is, I started to think that the relationship between say these these games or For media and social life is like the relationship between porn and sex, right? I'm not against porn don't meet a certain basic edge But if your entire sex life consisted of looking at porn you'd be going around pissed off and irritated the whole time Because we didn't evolve to masturbate over screens We evolved to have sex right that wouldn't meet your deeper needs in the same way I'm not obviously not against the internet would be ridiculous, right? But we didn't evolve to talk through screens, right We didn't evolve to look at each other and interact through with our friends through screens If you and I was speaking even via Skype now I wouldn't feel you were seeing me and you wouldn't feel you was the other way around In the way that we feel that we are seeing and hearing each other now, right? human beings have a need to be seen and The leading expert on loneliness in the world professor John Cacioppo said gave me good little rule of thumb. He said If social media is a way station for meeting people offline or staying in touch with them that you'll see offline It's a good thing if it's the last stop on the line generally something's gone wrong But he's I think we have to think about as well the moment in human history when social media arrives Right a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in my book loss connections Were already supercharged by then by the late 90s the early 2000s loneliness have gone up Values have gone up a whole range of things And what happens is the internet arrives and it looks a lot like the things we've lost You've lost friends. Here's a load of Facebook friends. You've lost status Make some status updates, right but it's not the thing. We've lost. It's a kind of Parody of the thing we've lost and what we need to do in very practical ways is restore The thing we've lost it seems like today. We have a lot of distractions That could potentially pull us away from that connection It seems like a lot of people are driven through consumerism and materialism and Many of us are safer and have more than ever have before the size of homes has increased steadily since the 1930s and 40s is there any correlation between material wealth and Happiness, one of the things I found most challenging in the research for the book because I could see how much it played out in my own life Was some research by an amazing man called Professor Tim Casa So everyone knows junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick right as I can tell from my chins I'm not immune to this myself But it's equally strong evidence that a kind of junk of values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick Professor Kass showed. So for thousands of years Philosophers have said, you know if you think a life is about money and status and shoving off. You're gonna feel like shit, right? It's not an exact quote from Confucius. But that is the gist of what he said, right? But no one scientifically investigated this until professor Kassar And he showed a few I think really important things Firstly he showed the more you think life is about money and status and shoving off The more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by a really quite significant amount I think this is because we're going a little bit beyond professor kasih here, but I think this is because Everyone knows they have natural physical needs right? You need food. You need water. You need shelter. You need clean air If I took those things away from you. You'll been real trouble real fast, and there is equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological means You need to feel you belong you need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people See you and value you beautifully. You've got a future that makes sense and our culture is good at lots of things I'm glad to be alive today but we've been getting less and less good and meeting these deep underlying psychological needs if you think partly because there's many factors going on but partly because if you think life is about money and and Displaying that money that's gonna divert you from the things you actually do need to have a a meaningful and satisfying life But professor Cass also said something else. So you showed the more you follow these junk values The more likely while to become depressed and anxious He also showed as a society as a culture. We have become much more driven by these junk bodies It's a cliche to say to your viewers You won't lie on your deathbed and think about what the likes you've got on Instagram and all the shoes you bought right? You'll think about moments of love and meaning and connection in your lives. But as Professor Casa puts it we live in a machine That's designed to get us to neglect What is important about life right more eighteen-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means the know their own last name? we're immersed in a machinery that tells us how to do this professor Gossard had really interesting research about how we How we undo some of that and some of it was really simple he got a group of people to me once every couple of weeks for four months and just talk about firstly consumer objects, they thought they had to have things like Nike sneakers Once they talked out loud how do you think your life will be different when you've got them didn't take long for people to start seeing maybe this is Bullshit that's been implanted in my head by advertising but then there were important bit was they've got people to talk about well What are moments That's not a moment that's gonna make you feel satisfied What are moment's you have actually felt your life was meaningful satisfying, but we'll talk about different things to some people It was playing music some people it was swimming some people it was writing whatever it was and and they started saying well How could you build more of that into your life seeking more of that and doing more of that and less of? seeking this kind of junk value stuff and Just that process of meeting every couple of weeks and checking in with each other and explaining how they try to do it Led to a measurable. They did a good scientific study at this Immeasurable shift in people's values to become less materialistic, which we know relates to less depression and anxiety. Now of course is the case that And a guy professor richard Laird has done research on this if you don't have a baseline of material goods right If you are in poverty that makes you then you are going to be unhappy But once you've actually reached a fairly low level of income that you're not actually wanting the basic things additional money makes, you know happier and actually Constantly seeking it leads to a corruption of values that makes significantly more unhappy We talked a little bit before we sat down here about Marie Kondo and minimalism and this movement of people rejecting consumerism and materialism to live with less stuff to purchase less things to Focus less on status in their lives Do you think I'm curious Just what your your thoughts on this this movement towards less is and if you think in some way it will help people Figure out their values again and reset these junk values that we've created for ourselves I haven't looked into any huge amount of detail, but We live in a hurricane of messages Telling us The answer to our pain and distress lies in shopping, right? This is a really interesting study that was done in 1978 really simple You get a bunch of five year olds you Divide them into two groups first group is shown two advertisements For whatever the equivalent to like Dora the Explorer or the Teletubbies was in 1978. I forget what it was Second group is shown no advertisements then all the kids are told Hey kids got a choice now You can either play with a nice boy who doesn't have the toy in the embarrassment or you can play with a nasty boy Who's got the toy? The kids had seen just two advertisements overwhelmingly chose the nasty boy who had the toy and The kids who haven't seen their advertisements overwhelmingly chose the nice boy who didn't have the toy right? So just two ads just two We're enough to prime those kids to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility of fun and connection, right? Every single person watching your video has seen more than two ads today right more than two advertising messages. So we're living in this hurricane of messages Bombarding us with a very particular before Advertising sells any specific product. It sells the idea that the solution lies in Purchasing things right? I mean imagine Advertising is the ultimate frenemy right? It's saying babe I love you. I think you're great. But if you didn't stink I mean, I'm just saying if you weren't so hairy, I'm just saying, right. It's the ultimate yeah, it's It worked. The premise of is it has to make you dissatisfied right? I mean in the advertised you look at what advertising people say internally to each other they're very candid about this they call it invented once right because actually The things that we need are relatively limited The whole machinery has to be built around making us feel inadequate and then making us by the solution right? So I think Movements that say, you know, I'm just gonna purge this shit right back That is not the answer right? Of course. There are nice things. We all like to have nice things I have some nice things but the idea that this ceaseless Treadmill are buying and displaying useless bullshit The idea that we might want to step off that treadmill and go Maybe I've got a limited amount of time in which to be alive. Maybe I'll spend my time on things that are more meaningful seems to me to be a really positive step Thanks for watching this video If you want to get the full 40 minute interview with Johan you can get it at patreon.com slash Matt de Bella Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time
I love this man and highly recommend his book “Lost Connections.” It’s a great exploration about depression and unconventional remedies he’s found to it.
That said, I’m very passionate about this topic. In the book Johann Hari addresses loneliness and why you can still feel lonely even in a room full of people. There’s no connection that’s why. A professor he interviewed who studies loneliness said that loneliness is a lack of meaningful exchange between 2 or more people (the exchange has to be meaningful to both of y’all).
The fucked up part is when he talks about Chronic Loneliness and how self-sustaining it is. I believe Kursgast touches on it as well in their video on loneliness. The truth is that people who are chronically lonely begin to see the world as a threat and begin to question the motives of every one around them. Incels are the perfect example of what happens to chronically lonely people. Their anger, frustration and extremely fucked up opinion about the world didn’t just happen overnight. It’s a result of chronic loneliness. Which, in my opinion, is extremely sad that we don’t talk about enough.
A solution that Hari proposes in the book is sadly the most obvious which is finding a group of friends who socialize with you a lot. Hari references a couple studies in the book (which I cannot remember off the top of my head) in which it was concluded that individuals who are chronically lonely need more socialization than normal. As if it’s to make up for the lack of it they had previously.
Now the frustrating part is that we will not do this. In my opinion for pure “I don’t want to hang out with incels” type reason we simply will not do this. I’m not judging anybody who does not want to befriend chronically lonely people. I’m really not. However, if I’m being honest, to all the non-violent incels my heart goes out to them since their situation i would argue isn’t completely their fault. Some people just never find a group of friends or a partner who loves them. I have no sympathy for the few who are violent but i do the rest. It’s honestly sad that this loneliness epidemic won’t really have a solution beyond figuring out several coping mechanisms (such as going online and finding like-minded folks).
It’s sad but as human as this problem is. I simply don’t see people creating a “let’s be friends “ initiative where we find buddies for people who are chronically lonely. So instead we just forget about them and let their loneliness fester.
I feel like this video presupposes that more people are depressed when it could easily be true that we're now noticing how many people are depressed.
I loved the part about about how we can't see each other online and are not designed to socialise through a screen around the 10 minute mark. I've always felt that for myself and it feels great to hear someone else say it.
Always nice to hear about the problems of advertisements and an endorsement for buying less. that children study he mentions sounds really interesting too!
Counterpoint: We are not more lonely than we used to be. The danger in these viral stories about a loneliness epidemic is they tend to romanticize the stability of the past's more rigid social structures and ignore or conveniently forget that they were suffocating and didn't actually make people feel less lonely, just less free to complain about whatever their dissatisfaction was:
“The relationship between social media and social life is like the relationship between porn and sex.”
This is a fantastic analogy. This seems like one of those videos where there's just so much information there that i'll need to watch it 1 or 2 more times to absorb everything, but i'm more than happy to do that. this was fantastic to watch.
It wouldn't be surprising if we were more depressed due to the lack of social interactions and relationships. Just look at how many lonely people use reddit in hopes of getting their social needs satisfied, which may work to some extent but it clearly doesn't provide as much enjoyment as in person interactions. People without bonds may feel like machine parts that are supposed to do the work, but otherwise are easily replaceable and worthless, which of course brings the sense of sadness and dissatisfaction.
capitalism has a lot to do with this. the more atomized we are, the easier it is for the corporate overlords to sell us things and keep our labor unorganized. it's seldom mentioned how social isolation functions to the benefit of the upper classes and their grip on economic and political power. the more spaces and opportunities for people interact socially, the more of a chance there is for them to recognize their collective condition and unite to do something about it. that's the reason why, in america at least, there's such contempt for public spaces and an active effort to eliminate public spaces via privatization of public land, criminalizing loitering, utterly car-dependent cities, lack of public transit, etc.
Johann even hints at this in the video, but doesn't go all the way in calling it out: "if you think life is about money, and displaying that money, that's going to divert you from the things you actually need to have a meaningful life."
what if instead of uniting people around hobbies, we instead worked to build the social infrastructure for creating a new society around anti-capitalist principles? creating neighborhood groups that host events open to the public, reclaim public space, reach out to everyone in the neighborhood and not just the depressed, and actually tried to re-create the public realm? asking this because the society we live in right now, wholly dominated by capitalist ideology and centralized corporate power, is clearly making people sick in the head, which means it's probably time to start thinking about alternatives
I have his book Chasing the Scream where he goes into addiction and it's link to loneliness. I haven't gotten fully through it yet but it's fascinating.
There's been an increase in loneliness, particularly among young men, for the last couple of decades. This interview discusses some of the negative impacts of that on our mental health, and some of its causes (and thus what we can do about it).