Quotes About Society

Parents beware! Your children . . . are being introduced to a new danger in the form of a drugged cigarette, marijuana. Young [people] are slaves to this narcotic, continuing addiction until they deteriorate mentally, become insane, [and] turn to violent crime and murder.

Loneliness, he concluded, is causing a significant amount of the depression and anxiety in our society.

American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.

You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you've been told up to now, it's not serotonin; it's society. It's not your brain; it's your pain. Your biology can make your distress worse, for sure. But it's not the cause. It's not the driver. It's not the place to look for the main explanation, or the main solution.

Big Pharma was offering the solution that an isolated, materialistic culture thought it needed—one you can buy. We had lost the ability to understand that there are some problems that can't be solved by shopping.

And many of our scientists imagine the root cause of addiction can be found on a brain scan, in a society that is falling apart, where many people have no friends, where they are taught life is all about buying things and showing them off on Instagram, where they are experiencing more and more humiliation as each day passes.

In a world that thinks there's no such thing as society, the idea that our depression and anxiety have social causes will seem incomprehensible. It's like talking in ancient Aramaic to a twenty-first-century kid.

Why is alcohol sanctioned and smiled at, while the police crack down constantly on weed—when it seemed to him that the weed smokers cause a lot less trouble than the drinkers?

You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live. Much more than you've been told up to now, it's not serotonin; it's society. It's not your brain; it;s your pain.

The internet arrived for most of us in the late 1990s, into a society where the middle class was starting to crumble and where financial insecurity was rising, and we were sleeping an hour less than people did in 1945. It would always have been hard to resist the sophisticated human-hacking of surveillance capitalism, but it appeared we were already getting weaker, and we were easier to hack than we would have been otherwise.

have become the first humans to ever dismantle our tribes. As a result, we have been left alone on a savanna we do not understand, puzzled by our own sadness.

Joe felt like his human thoughts and insights and feelings were almost a defect.

We live in an extremely individualistic culture, where we are constantly pushed to see our problems as individual failings, and to seek out individual solutions. You're unable to focus? Overweight? Poor? Depressed? We are taught in this culture to think: That's my fault. I should have found a personal way to lift myself up and out of these environmental problems.

something the psychologist W. M. Mace said years ago, riffing on JFK: "Ask not what's inside your head,"9 he said. "Ask what your head's inside of.

wondered if in some ways we are increasingly speed-reading life, skimming hurriedly from one thing to another, absorbing less and less.

Trying to lose weight in the environment we've built is like trying to run up an escalator that is constantly carrying you down. A few people might heroically sprint to the top - but most of us will find ourselves back at the bottom, feeling like its our fault.

Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson's research into these questions—distilled in their book The Spirit Level

Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin, 2015), 42.

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

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.

As a society, we are dreaming less and less.

The more unequal your society, the more prevalent all forms of mental illness are. Other social scientists then broke this down to look at depression specifically16—and found the higher the inequality, the higher the depression.

If it's more enraging, it's more engaging. If enough people are spending enough of their time being angered, that starts to change the culture. As Tristan told me, that turns hate into a habit.

When you have a society with huge gaps in income and status, Richard told me, it creates the sense that "some people seem supremely important, and others seem of no importance at all." This doesn't affect only people at the bottom. In a highly unequal society, everyone has to think about their status a lot. Am I maintaining my position? Who's threatening me? How far can I fall?