Quotes from Johann Hari

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.

But that's the thing about the pessimistic belief that we are powerless and we can't change anything. It's false.

In 1986, if you added up all the information being blasted at the average human being - TV, radio, reading - it amounted to forty newspapers-worth of information every day. By 2007, they found it had risen to the equivalent of 174 newspapers per day. (I'd be amazed if it hadn't gone up further since then.) The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.

brain moment to moment, task to task—[and] that comes with a cost.

The problem was, Nadine wrote later, that we never knew which mother we were going to get. Everyday after school it was a guessing game. Are we coming home to happy mom or scary mom?

this change has caused another transformation—in how people see the police. "I don't think [people in poor neighborhoods] see the police now as enemies.

Primera causa: desconexión de un trabajo con sentido

It's not so much what happens in those fifteen minutes—Rachel has come to feel that "you're planting seeds during the meditation, [and] it flowers spontaneously during your day, and your life.

What's happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that's with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.

Human beings only become addicted when they cannot find anything better to live for and when they desperately need to fill the emptiness that threatens to destroy them,

Sleep deprivation damages memory as well.

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?

Watch TV and you'll be told the only people who count in the world are celebrities and the rich—and you already know your chances of joining either group are vanishingly small. Flick through an Instagram feed or a glossy magazine, and your normal-shaped body will feel disgusting to you. Go to work and you'll have to obey the whims of a distant boss earning hundreds of times more than you.

The British writer Robert Colville says we are living through "the Great Acceleration," and like Sune, he argues it's not simply our tech that's getting faster—it's almost everything. There's evidence that a broad range of important factors in our lives really are speeding up: people talk significantly faster now than they did in the 1950s, and in just twenty years, people have started to walk 10 percent faster in cities.

Nearly half of all zoos in the U.S. now admit to giving psychiatric drugs to their animals,

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

Allen Barbour, an internist at Stanford University, had said that depression isn't a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences.

al final, de lo que se trata es de lo terrible que resulta hacer algo carente de propósito y sentir que no tienes más remedio que continuar.

Flow can only come when you are monotasking—when you choose to set aside everything else and do one thing.

the faster you make them go, the less they will understand. More speed means less comprehension. ...This showed there's just a maximum limit for how quickly humans can absorb information, and trying to bust through that barrier simply busts your brain's ability to understand it instead. The scientists investigating this also discovered that if you make people read quickly, they are much less likely to grapple with complex or challenging material. They start to prefer simplistic statements.

We have been animals that move for a lot longer than we have been animals that talk and convey concepts,

I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention - it's where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego.

We can't live like this!" I said. "You don't know how to be present! You are missing your life! You're afraid of missing out—that's why you are checking your screen all the time! By doing that, you are guaranteeing you are missing out! You are missing your one and only life! You can't see the things that are right in front of you, the things you have been longing to see since you were a little boy! None of these people can! Look at them!

we all have a choice now between two profound forces-- fragmentation, or flow. Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us.