– English Lyrics

Lyrics & Translation

[English]

How has the most connected society in history

also become the loneliest?

It's easy to forget how far we've come.

In just a matter of years, we've gone from phone calls to text messages to video chat.

In an instant we can ring up a family member across the world

and feel more connected with them given the distance then we could have

at any other point in history.

This was science fiction in the 20th century.

It's during that same period of innovation that brought us one-click shopping:

anything we could need delivered to our door the same day.

And so we bought, and stored, and used, and replaced

a generation living better than Louis the fourteenth,

yet finding ourselves more secluded than ever.

Why do people, even after they have their basic needs met with all the tools we have available,

why are we not only unhappy,

but largely depressed?

Author and journalist Johann Hari set out across the world

to speak with leading experts on depression, anxiety, and loneliness

to discover both how we've gotten to this place and more importantly

how do we as individuals in a society start to turn the tide?

This is my 20-minute interview with Johann about what he learned from that research.

All right, so why don't we start out with a little bit of a intro about yourself and about your work.

I really- I write my book "Lost Connections" because there were the- these two mysteries that were really hanging over me for years

Look, I was quite afraid to look into them in some ways

The first mystery is I'm 40 years old and every year that I've been alive

Depression and anxiety have increased here in the United States, in Britain, and across the Western world

Right and I kept asking myself

Why?

Why is this happening? Why are so many more of us each year that passes finding it hard to get through the day right and

I guess I wanted to understand that from because I'm a more personal mystery

When I was a teenager

Remember going to my doctor and explaining that I had this feeling like a pain was leaking out of me out

So I put it at the time

and I felt

Very ashamed of it

I felt

Confused by it

I didn't understand why it was happening

And my doctor told me a story that, and now realized were speaking to the leading scientists in the world on this was oversimplified

Right. My doctor said we know why people feel like this. It's just cuz of a problem in your brain

There's a chemical called serotonin that makes people feel good

Some people are naturally lacking it. You're clearly one of them. All we need to do is give you some drugs

You're gonna feel better

so I started taking a chemical anti-depressant called Paxil and I felt significantly better for a few months and

Then this feeling of pain came back. So I'm back doctor said wanna get high enough dose. I was gonna hide dose again

I felt better again. The feeling of pain came back and I was really in this cycle of taking higher and higher doses

until for thirteen years

I was taking the maximum dose you're allowed to take at the end of which I was still really depressed

And I was surrounded by people who are becoming more and more depressed

So I just forced myself really to start looking into this. So I ended up going on this big journey for the book

I travelled over 40,000 miles

I wanted to meet the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety

And what solves them most importantly so I'm at you know

Not just leading experts, but just a crazy mixture of people with different perspectives from an Amish village in Indiana

Cuz the Amish have very low levels of depression to a city in Brazil that banned

Advertising to see if that would make people feel better to a lab in Baltimore than where they were giving people

Psychedelics to see if that would help and I learned a huge number of things but the core of what I learned

Is that there's scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety

Two of them are in fact biological. My doctor wasn't wrong and

Your genes can make you more vulnerable to these problems

just like some people find it easier to put on weight than others and

There are real changes in your brain that begin when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out

but most of the factors that cause depression or anxiety are not in our biology. Most of the factors for which there's scientific evidence are

Factors in the way we're living and what I learned in the process of writing the book and speaking to so many

Scientists is once you understand the causes of depression or anxiety in this more complex way

Opens up a much broader range of possible solutions that I saw being pinned

Just all over the world

And these are solutions that we need to be explaining to people and offering to them alongside not instead of but as an option alongside

Chemical antidepressants why is society at large?

Reacting in this way. What do you think are some of the influences on people's well-being?

That's leading to the higher and higher rates and depression and anxiety

I'll give you an example of one of the nine causes that arrived at in lost connections. We are below Lea's society

There's ever been there's a study that asks Americans

how many close friends do you have you could turn to in a crisis and

When they started doing this years ago

The most common answer was five today the most common answer not the average but the most common answer is none half of all Americans

Asked how many people know you well say

Nobody right? I spent a lot of time talking to an amazing man called professor

John Cacioppo is that it was the leading expert in the world on loneliness. He was at the University of Chicago

And he explained to me

Why are we alive you and me and everyone watching this? Why do we exist?

One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannah's of Africa were really good at one thing

They weren't bigger than the animals they took down. They weren't faster than the animals they took down

But they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating just like bees evolved to live in a hive

Humans evolved to live in a tribe and if you think about the circumstances where we evolved if you were cut off from the tribe

You were depressed and anxious for really good reasons. You weren't terrible danger you were about to die

Those are still the impulses we have we are the first humans ever

In the long 2 million year history of our species to try to disband our tribes and is making us feel awful

So a key thing for me was not just to understand these problems. But ok. How do we solve those problems?

Right and one of the heroes of my book Lost Connections is an amazing man called. Dr

Sam ever Hampton who pioneered a whole different approach based on this understanding

so Sam was a general practitioner in East London poor part of East London where I live for a long time and

Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety

And like me he thinks there's some role for chemical antidepressants

But he could also see most of the people he was giving them to did become depressed again

And he could see that they were depressed and anxious for perfectly understandable reasons

Right like to give one of the examples I took about in the book loneliness

So he decided to pioneer a different approach one day a woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham

He'd been shut away in our home with dreadful depression and anxiety for seven years and Sam said to Lisa. Don't worry

I'll carry on giving you these drugs. I'm also gonna suggest something else. There was an area behind the doctors the suite of doctors offices

There was no known as dog share alley which gives you sense of what it was like just kind of scrubland

Sam said to Lisa what I'd like you to come and do is turn out a few times a week

I'm gonna come to you cuz I've been pretty anxious

We're gonna meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people. And we're gonna

find something to do together as a group, right the first time the group met Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety

But the group starts talking they're like, what can we do?

These are inner-city East London people

They don't know anything about gardening they decided they're going to teach themselves gardening right gonna turn dogshit alley into a beautiful garden

So they started watching YouTube. They start to read books

They start to get their fingers in the soil. They start to learn the rhythms of the seasons

There's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really powerful

Antidepressant start to do something even more important. They started to form a tribe

they started to form a group they started to care about each other and you know, if

If one person didn't turn up, they'd go and look for them. They'd see if they were okay

They did what human beings do when they're part of tribes. They started to solve each other's problems

The way Lisa put it to me as the garden began to bloom. We began to bloom

There was a study in Norway of a very similar program found. It was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. I

Think for an obvious reason, right?

It was dealing with some of the reasons why they felt so bad in the first place and this is something I saw all over

The world from Sydney to São Paulo to San Francisco the most effective strategies for dealing with depression and anxiety

Are the ones that deal with the reasons why we're in such distress in the first place?

You said that we're living in the loneliest society. There's ever been

how

Can that possibly be with all of these tools at our fingertips, right we have social media

We have the ability to connect and interact with anybody in an instant

I can FaceTime my mom in a second. And if she picks up then we can I can see her face to face

has social media

Played some part in the fact that we are lonely

This is a complex question and with a complex answer

So the glib answer is to go, yeah social media did this to us. Is this too simplistic?

To understand this I went to the first-ever internet rehab center in the world. It's in just outside Spokane in Washington State

It's called restart, Washington. I remember I've arrived there. It's a clearing in the woods

I get out. I got out the car and absolutely instinctively

I looked at my phone to check my email and felt really pissed off. I couldn't see it go. There was no reception

I was like, oh wait you came to the right place?

Right and I spent a fair bit of time there and it's totally fascinating

They get a whole range of people at restart Washington, but they disproportionately get

Young men who become obsessed with these multiplayer role-playing games like World of Warcraft or not at the time that I was there

but now fortnight right and

I'm about Dr. Hillary cash the amazing woman who runs this Center

Sent me that you've got to ask yourself

What are these young men getting out of these games? Because they're getting something right? I

think what they're getting

is a

Kind of hollow version of the things they used to get from the society

But they no longer get they get a sense of a tribe they get a sense of status and they can gain in status

They get a sense. They're good at something they get a sense. They're moving around

Young people barely leave their homes. Now. It's incredible the figures for how rarely children play outdoors

but what they're getting is, I started to think that the relationship between say these these games or

For media and social life is like the relationship between porn and sex, right?

I'm not against porn don't meet a certain basic edge

But if your entire sex life consisted of looking at porn you'd be going around pissed off and irritated the whole time

Because we didn't evolve to masturbate over screens

We evolved to have sex right that wouldn't meet your deeper needs in the same way

I'm not obviously not against the internet would be ridiculous, right?

But we didn't evolve to talk through screens, right

We didn't evolve to look at each other and interact through with our friends through screens

If you and I was speaking even via Skype now

I wouldn't feel you were seeing me and you wouldn't feel you was the other way around

In the way that we feel that we are seeing and hearing each other now, right?

human beings have a need to be seen and

The leading expert on loneliness in the world professor John Cacioppo said gave me good little rule of thumb. He said

If social media is a way station for meeting people offline or staying in touch with them that you'll see offline

It's a good thing if it's the last stop on the line generally something's gone wrong

But he's I think we have to think about as well

the moment in human history when social media arrives

Right a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in my book loss connections

Were already supercharged by then by the late 90s the early 2000s loneliness have gone up

Values have gone up a whole range of things

And what happens is the internet arrives and it looks a lot like the things we've lost

You've lost friends. Here's a load of Facebook friends. You've lost status

Make some status updates, right but it's not the thing. We've lost. It's a kind of

Parody of the thing we've lost and what we need to do in very practical ways is restore

The thing we've lost it seems like today. We have a lot of distractions

That could potentially pull us away from that connection

It seems like a lot of people are driven through consumerism and materialism

and

Many of us are safer and have more than ever have before the size of homes has increased steadily

since the

1930s and 40s

is there any correlation between

material wealth and

Happiness, one of the things I found most challenging in the research for the book because I could see how much it played out in

my own life

Was some research by an amazing man called Professor Tim Casa

So everyone knows junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick right as I can tell from my chins

I'm not immune to this myself

But it's equally strong evidence that a kind of junk of values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick

Professor Kass showed. So for thousands of years

Philosophers have said, you know if you think a life is about money and status and shoving off. You're gonna feel like shit, right?

It's not an exact quote from Confucius. But that is the gist of what he said, right?

But no one scientifically investigated this until professor Kassar

And he showed a few I think really important things

Firstly he showed the more you think life is about money and status and shoving off

The more likely you are to become depressed and anxious by a really quite significant amount

I think this is because we're going a little bit beyond professor kasih here, but I think this is because

Everyone knows they have natural physical needs right? You need food. You need water. You need shelter. You need clean air

If I took those things away from you. You'll been real trouble real fast, and there is equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological means

You need to feel you belong you need to feel your life has meaning and purpose. You need to feel that people

See you and value you beautifully. You've got a future that makes sense and our culture is good at lots of things

I'm glad to be alive today

but we've been getting less and less good and meeting these deep underlying psychological needs if you think

partly because there's many factors going on but partly because if you think life is about money and and

Displaying that money that's gonna divert you from the things you actually do need to have a a meaningful and satisfying life

But professor Cass also said something else. So you showed the more you follow these junk values

The more likely while to become depressed and anxious

He also showed as a society as a culture. We have become much more driven by these junk bodies

It's a cliche to say to your viewers

You won't lie on your deathbed and think about what the likes you've got on Instagram and all the shoes you bought right?

You'll think about moments of love and meaning and connection in your lives. But as Professor Casa puts it we live in a machine

That's designed to get us to neglect

What is important about life right more eighteen-month-old children know what the McDonald's M means the know their own last name?

we're immersed in a machinery that tells us how to do this professor Gossard had really interesting research about how we

How we undo some of that and some of it was really simple

he got a group of people to me once every couple of weeks for four months and just talk about

firstly

consumer objects, they thought they had to have

things like Nike sneakers

Once they talked out loud

how do you think your life will be different when you've got them didn't take long for people to start seeing maybe this is

Bullshit that's been implanted in my head by advertising but then there were important bit was they've got people to talk about well

What are moments

That's not a moment that's gonna make you feel satisfied

What are moment's you have actually felt your life was meaningful satisfying, but we'll talk about different things to some people

It was playing music some people it was swimming some people it was writing whatever it was and and they started saying well

How could you build more of that into your life seeking more of that and doing more of that and less of?

seeking this kind of junk value stuff and

Just that process of meeting every couple of weeks and checking in with each other and explaining how they try to do it

Led to a measurable. They did a good scientific study at this

Immeasurable shift in people's values to become less materialistic, which we know relates to less depression and anxiety. Now of course is the case that

And a guy professor richard Laird has done research on this if you don't have a baseline of material goods

right

If you are in poverty that makes you then you are going to be unhappy

But once you've actually reached a fairly low level of income that you're not actually wanting the basic things

additional money makes, you know happier and actually

Constantly seeking it leads to a corruption of values that makes significantly more unhappy

We talked a little bit before we sat down here about Marie Kondo and minimalism and this movement of people rejecting

consumerism and materialism

to live with less stuff to purchase less things to

Focus less on status in their lives

Do you think

I'm curious

Just what your your thoughts on this this movement towards less is and if you think in some way it will help people

Figure out their values again and reset these junk values that we've created for ourselves

I haven't looked into any huge amount of detail, but

We live in a hurricane of messages

Telling us

The answer to our pain and distress lies in shopping, right? This is a really interesting study that was done in

1978

really simple

You get a bunch of five year olds you

Divide them into two groups first group is shown two advertisements

For whatever the equivalent to like Dora the Explorer or the Teletubbies was in 1978. I forget what it was

Second group is shown no advertisements then all the kids are told

Hey kids got a choice now

You can either play with a nice boy who doesn't have the toy in the embarrassment or you can play with a nasty boy

Who's got the toy? The kids had seen just two advertisements

overwhelmingly chose the nasty boy who had the toy and

The kids who haven't seen their advertisements overwhelmingly chose the nice boy who didn't have the toy right? So just two ads just two

We're enough to prime those kids to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility of fun and connection, right?

Every single person watching your video has seen more than two ads today right more than two advertising messages. So we're living in this

hurricane of messages

Bombarding us with a very particular before

Advertising sells any specific product. It sells the idea that the solution lies in

Purchasing things right? I mean imagine

Advertising is the ultimate frenemy right? It's saying babe I love you. I think you're great. But if you didn't stink

I mean, I'm just saying if you weren't so hairy, I'm just saying, right. It's the ultimate

yeah, it's

It worked. The premise of is it has to make you dissatisfied right?

I mean in the advertised you look at what advertising people say internally to each other

they're very candid about this they call it invented once right because actually

The things that we need are relatively limited

The whole machinery has to be built around making us feel inadequate and then making us by the solution right? So I

think

Movements that say, you know, I'm just gonna purge this shit right back

That is not the answer right? Of course. There are nice things. We all like to have nice things

I have some nice things but the idea that this ceaseless

Treadmill are buying and displaying useless bullshit

The idea that we might want to step off that treadmill and go

Maybe I've got a limited amount of time in which to be alive. Maybe I'll spend my time on things that are more meaningful

seems to me to be a

really positive step

Thanks for watching this video

If you want to get the full 40 minute interview with Johan you can get it at patreon.com slash Matt de Bella

Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
depression /dɪˈpreʃən/ B2	noun - a mental state of low mood and aversion to activity
anxiety /æŋˈzaɪəti/ C1	noun - a feeling of worry or nervousness
loneliness /ˈloʊnlinəs/ B2	noun - sadness because one has no friends or company
society /səˈsaɪəti/ A2	noun - the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community
experts /ˈɛkspɜrts/ B1	noun - people who have a comprehensive and authoritative knowledge of or skill in a particular area
research /ˈriːsɜrtʃ/ B1	noun - the systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources to establish facts and reach new conclusions
brain /breɪn/ A2	noun - an organ of soft nervous tissue contained in the skull of vertebrates, governing bodily activity
antidepressant /ˌæntiˈdɪˈpresənt/ C1	noun - a drug used to alleviate depression
journey /ˈdʒɜrni/ B1	noun - an act of traveling from one place to another
cause /kɔz/ A2	noun - a reason or explanation for an event or situation verb - make something happen
tribe /traɪb/ B2	noun - a social division in a traditional society consisting of families or communities linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties
group /ɡrup/ A2	noun - a number of people or things that are located close together or are considered or classed together
garden /ˈɡɑrdən/ A1	noun - a piece of ground where plants are grown
media /ˈmidiə/ B1	noun - the main means of mass communication
values /ˈvæljuz/ B2	noun - principles or standards of behavior
needs /nidz/ A1	noun - the state of requiring help, or of lacking the necessities of life
feel /fil/ A1	verb - be aware of something through touch or emotion
become /bɪˈkʌm/ A2	verb - begin to be
live /lɪv/ A1	verb - remain alive
connect /kəˈnekt/ B1	verb - bring together or into contact so that a real or notional link is established