Quotes About Society

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

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

There's a scientific debate about the precise scale of our sleep loss, but the National Sleep Foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20 percent in just a hundred years.

For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make. The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad—it's just that drug prohibition is even worse.

Yet all over the United States—all over the world—police officers were noticing something strange. If you arrest a large number of rapists, the amount of rape goes down. If you arrest a large number of violent racists, the number of violent racist attacks goes down. But if you arrest a large number of drug dealers, drug dealing doesn't go down. Another

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.

It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

The United States now imprisons more people16 for drug offenses than Western European nations imprison for all crimes combined. No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population.

Stop thinking only about individual recovery, he argues, and start thinking about "social recovery.

seeing this as a debate between whether you are pro-tech or anti-tech is bogus and lets the people who stole your attention off the hook. The real debate is: What tech, designed for what purposes, in whose interests?

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.

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?

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?

It occurred to me as I walked up and down those Lisbon streets that we all—the vast majority of drug warriors, and the vast majority of legalizers—have a set of shared values. We all want to protect children from drugs. We all want to keep people from dying as a result of drug use. We all want to reduce addiction. And now the evidence strongly suggests that when we move beyond the drug war, we will be able to achieve those shared goals with much greater success.

If we don't change course, he fears we are headed toward a world where "there's going to be an upper class of people that are very aware" of the risks to their attention and find ways to live within their limits, and then there will be the rest of the society with "fewer resources to resist the manipulation, and they're going to be living more and more inside their computers, being manipulated more and more.

The damaged 10 percent, by contrast, are the only people we ever see using drugs out on the streets. The result is that the harmed 10 percent make up 100 percent of the official picture. It

It said that we are, collectively, experiencing "a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.

What does it mean to be a society and culture so frantic that we don't have time to dream?

Rufus tells his patients when they come to him feeling deeply depressed or anxious: You're not crazy to feel so distressed. You're not broken. You're not defective. He sometimes quotes the Eastern philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti,26 who explained: "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.

It's the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, "Let them eat cake." Let them be present.

It's not your fault you can't focus. It's by design. Your distraction is their fuel.

But I was going to learn that neither of these stories is true. The primary cause of all this rising depression and anxiety is not in our heads. It is, I discovered, largely in the world, and the way we are living in it. I learned there are at least nine proven causes of depression and anxiety (although nobody had brought them together like this before), and many of them are rising all around us—causing us to feel radically worse.

Toda la lógica de nuestra cultura conspira para que se quede en la rueda consumista, que salga a comprar cuando se sienta mal, que persiga valores de usar y tirar.

Our Western society is a bit ADHD-ish because we're all sleep-deprived…. It's huge.