Quotes from Johann Hari

It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.

Once the financial incentives are changed - through subscription, or public ownership, or another model - then the nature of these sites can change, in ways we can actually begin to envision already. Aza [Raskin] told me that 'it's actually technically not hard' to redesign the major social-media sites so that, instead of trashing your attention span and our societies, they world be designed to heal them

there is strong scientific evidence that persistent cannabis use affects how adolescent and teenage brains develop, and can permanently lower their IQ. One of my best friends when I was a kid smoked a lot of weed, and he feels it harmed him for life. He may be right. Developing brains are more fragile than adult brains: they need to be protected.

You feel you are purely present in the moment. You experience a loss of self-consciousness. In this state it's like your ego has vanished and you have merged with the task—like you are the rock you are climbing.

heroin under prohibition becomes, in effect, a pyramid selling scheme.

Indeed, "Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.

People were, [Tristan Harris] warned, living 'on a treadmill of continuous checking.

A childhood is made up of small moments of connection between a child and their parent. If you miss them, you don't ever get them back.

The best experiences in life that I had, when I thought back on it, came from times when I had been in the mountains climbing…climbing and doing something really kind of difficult and dangerous—but within the scope of what I could do.

The main reason given for banning drugs—the reason obsessing the men who launched this war—was that the blacks, Mexicans, and Chinese were using these chemicals, forgetting their place, and menacing white people.

A study by Professor Michael Posner at the University of Oregon found that if you are focusing on something and you get interrupted, on average it will take twenty-three minutes for you to get back to the same state of focus. A different study of office workers in the U.S. found most of them never get an hour of uninterrupted work in a typical day. If this goes on for months and years, it scrambles your ability to figure out who you are and what you want. You become lost in your own life.

Because of the uprising by VANDU, and a conservative mayor who listened to the facts, opened his heart, and changed his mind, Vancouver now has the most progressive drug policies on the North American continent.

When you are approaching death, I thought, you won't think about your reinforcements—the likes and retweets—you'll think about your moments of flow.

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.

Reading books trains us to read in a particular way—in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens, she has discovered, trains us to read in a different way—in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another.

The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that "every status update is a just a variation on a single request: 'Would someone please acknowledge me?

Until the day that "the Great Judge proclaims: / 'The last addict's died,'254 " the poem said, "Then—not till then—may you be retired.

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.

Mexico is not deciding this policy . . . This war, this criminalization strategy, is imposed by the U.S. government.

James Williams was right: our attention is a kind of light, one that clarifies the world and makes it visible to us. In Provincetown I could see more clearly than I ever had before in my life - my own thoughts, my own goals, my own dreams. I want to live in that light - the light of knowing, of achieving our ambitions, of being fully alive - and not in the menacing orange light of it all burning down.

It fascinated me that you could change behavior so dramatically by changing brain chemistry….

On Lenore's street when she was a kid, everyone played softball and policed the rules themselves. Today, they go to organized activities where the adults intervene all the time to tell them what the rules are. Free play has been turned into supervised play, and so—like processed food—it has been drained of most of its value.

have known that their Edict, if enforced, was the clear equivalent of an order to create an illicit drug industry. They must have known that they were in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence.

Many Silicon Valley insiders predicted that it would only get worse. One of its most famous investors, Paul Graham, wrote: "Unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next forty years than it did in the last forty.