Quotes from Johann Hari

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.

people will never choose to bring drugs into the legal realm of regulation so long as they believe they are demonic substances that hijack most of their users and destroy them. When they discover that these drugs are in fact less dangerous than alcohol, and addiction is caused mainly by trauma and isolation rather than the drug itself, they will be more receptive to new approaches.

For millennia, humans have talked about something called the Golden Rule. It's the idea that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Tim, I think, has discovered something we should call the I-Want-Golden-Things Rule.17 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.

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.

we need to approach drug addiction not as a criminal justice situation but more as a public health situation.

cruel optimism.' This is when you take a really big problem with deep causes in our culture - like obesity, or depression, or addiction - and you offer people, in upbeat language, a simplistic individual solution. It sounds optimistic, because you are telling them that the problem can be solved, and soon - but it is, in fact, cruel, because the solution you are offering is so limited, and so blind to the deeper causes, that for most people, it will fail.

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

We live in an extremely individualistic culture, where we are constantly pushed to see our problems as individual failings, and to seek out individual solutions. You're unable to focus? Overweight? Poor? Depressed? We are taught in this culture to think: That's my fault. I should have found a personal way to lift myself up and out of these environmental problems.

Now that they knew there were addicts at the meetings and that helping them to survive was now an official duty, the city bureaucrats started to talk differently.

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.

A few years ago, long after these Whitehall studies, the British government's tax office had a problem, and they called Michael back to the civil service to ask him to help them—urgently—to find a solution. The staff investigating tax returns kept killing themselves. So Michael spent time in their offices to find out why this was happening.

Cruel optimism takes it for granted that we can't significantly change the systems that are wrecking our attention, so we have to mainly focus on changing our isolated selves. But why should we accept these systems as a given?

The web, by contrast, is "less than ten thousand days old.

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

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.

To have a good life, it is not enough to remove what is wrong with it," Mihaly has explained. "We also need a positive goal; otherwise why keep going?

White boasted. "Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage219

Harry couldn't control the flow of drugs, but he was discovering he could control the flow of ideas—and it was not only scientists Harry believed he had to silence.

wondered if in some ways we are increasingly speed-reading life, skimming hurriedly from one thing to another, absorbing less and less.

Henry Smith Williams died in 1940. Drug Addicts Are Human Beings remained out of print and largely forgotten for the rest of Anslinger's life, and ours. The book contained a prediction. If this drug war continues, Henry Smith Williams wrote, there will be a five-billion-dollar drug smuggling industry in the United States in fifty years' time. He was right almost to the exact year.58

I feel instinctively like I've done a good hard day of work when I have been sitting at my laptop, spotlight-focused on tapping out words—at the end of it, I feel a little Puritan rush of pride at my productivity.

Sleep is a really important balance of many, many neurotransmitters, and if you artificially…pump up one, it changes the balance of that sleep.

Trying to lose weight in the environment we've built is like trying to run up an escalator that is constantly carrying you down. A few people might heroically sprint to the top - but most of us will find ourselves back at the bottom, feeling like its our fault.

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's research into these questions—distilled in their book The Spirit Level