Quotes from Johann Hari

started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis.

were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world

The first tugs towards prohibition were about power, and purity of belief. If you are going to have one God and one Church, you need to stop experiences that make people feel that they can approach God on their own.

The Conservative government decided to "merge" John's clinic with a new health trust, run by evangelical Christians who opposed prescription on principle. The patients panicked, because they knew what being cut off would mean—a return to abscesses and overdoses and scrambling for drugs from gangsters.

The vitally important corollary is that evolution shaped us not only to feel bad in isolation, but to feel insecure." It's a beautiful theory.

We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours.

Materialism is KFC for the soul.

I was for the first time in my life living within the limits of my attention's resources. I was observing as much information as I could actually process, think about and contemplate. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.

His eyes flashing, Leary13 evangelized on a cascade of TV shows that he was the founder of a new religion, with cannabis and LSD as its sacraments. These drugs should, he said, be given to twelve-year-olds so they can "fuck righteously14 and without guilt"—and to prove the point he gave them to his own young teenage15 children, even as they went slowly insane.16

Prohibition, Bourgois explains in his writing, creates a system in which the most insane and sadistic violence has a sane and functional logic. It is required. It is rewarded.

The scientific evidence is clear that exercise significantly reduces depression and anxiety.

They wanted easy answers to complex fears.

today, this attitude—condemn more, understand less—has become the default response of almost everyone, from the right to the left, as we spend our lives dancing to the tune of algorithms that reward fury and penalize mercy.

The question] is no longer: How do we stop addiction through threats and force, and scare people away from drugs in the first place? It becomes: How do we start to rebuild a society where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than consumption?

When alcohol was legalized again in 1933, the involvement of gangsters and murderers and killing in the alcohol trade virtually ended. Peace was restored to the streets of Chicago. The murder rate fell dramatically,25 and it didn't rise so high again until drug prohibition was intensified in the 1970s and '80s.

You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.

Dr. James Williams—who works on the philosophy and ethics of technology at Oxford University—he told me: "If we want to do what matters in any domain—any context in life—we have to be able to give attention to the right things…. If we can't do that, it's really hard to do anything.

In 1993, in the death throes of apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 853 black men per hundred thousand in the population. The United States imprisons 4,919 black men per hundred thousand (versus only 943 white men).

As a culture, in the Western world, we work longer with each decade that passes. Ed Deci, a professor of psychology who I interviewed at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, has shown that an extra month per year has been tacked on to what, in 1969, was considered a full-time job.

I'm not ready for this, I thought. Then somewhere, from the back of my mind, I remembered something the Spanish writer José Ortega y Gasset said: "We cannot put off living until we are ready…. Life is fired at us point-blank.

I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.

Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack.

derinlemesine odaklanma biçiminin böyle bir h?zla ve bu ölçüde azald??? bir dünyan?n ba??na neler gelece?ini merak etmeye ba?lad?m. Dü?ünmenin en derin tabakas? gitgide daha az insan?n eri?ebil­di?i, opera veya voleybol gibi sadece ufak bir az?nl???n ilgisini çeken bir ?ey haline geldi?inde neler olacak acaba?

But why, then, do these ideas persist? Why haven't the scientists with the better and more accurate ideas eclipsed these old theories? Hart tells me bluntly: Almost all the funding for research into illegal drugs is provided by governments waging the drug war—and they only commission research that reinforces the ideas we already have about drugs. All these different theories, with their radical implications—why would governments want to fund those?