Quotes from Johann Hari

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.

The ocean makes you feel like the world is greeting you with a soft, wet, welcoming indifference. It's never going to argue back, no matter how loud you yell.

I don't think it's a coincidence that this crisis in paying attention has taken place at the same time as the worst crisis of democracy since the 1930s. People who can't focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions--and less likely to see clearly when they fail. A world full of attention-deprived citizens alternating between Twitter and Snapchat will be a world of cascading crises where we can't get a handle on any of them.

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.

Tristan [Harris] believes that what we are seeing is 'the collective downgrading of humans and the upgrading of machines'. We are becoming less rational, less intelligent, less focused.

She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.

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.

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

Addiction is an adaptation. It's not you—it's the cage you live in.

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.

If you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn't kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.

goes back to the design of the brain…. It's designed to pay attention to the stuff that matters to you.

The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are "multitasking"--which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.

It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war—it was part of the point.

The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world's attention burns.

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

The algorithm they actually use varies all the time, but it has one key driving principle that is consistent. It shows you things that will keep you looking at your screen.

We live in a culture that is constantly amping us up with stress and stimulation.

Wouldn't it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicts than on jailing them after we have failed?

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.

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.

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

Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.

child abuse is as likely to cause drug addiction as obesity is to cause heart disease.