Modern WisdomJOHANN HARI | The Real Causes Of Depression & Love Island | Modern Wisdom Podcast 172
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,027 words- 0:00 – 15:00
For a really long…
- JHJohann Hari
For a really long time, we've been told implicitly that our depression and our anxiety are malfunctions. They're signs of being broken on the inside. And mostly, depression and anxiety are not malfunctions. They're signals that something isn't going right, either in your psyche or in the environment, and they're signals that we need to change. And what we need to do is stop insulting those signals by saying that they're a sign of weakness, or craziness, or purely biological malfunctions, and instead listen to them. If you listen to the signal, you can find a solution.
- CWChris Williamson
I am joined by Johann Hari, author of Lost Connections. Johann, welcome to the show.
- JHJohann Hari
Oh, it's great to be with you, Chris. You're also a very rare instance of a person who's said my name right first time. I once waited for six hours with a broken arm in casualty 'cause they were calling for Joanna Hairy to come forward, so-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
... I'm always so happy when people get it right first time.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs) Yeah, I think, um, I've said your name or heard it on podcasts and interviews sufficiently for me to know what it is. Um, so for the people who are listening, you should have already heard me say Johann's name. Uh, it is-
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
As far as I'm con- as far as I'm concerned, Lost Connections, your book, is the 80/20 way to understand everything you need to know about depression and I think you should be incredibly proud of it.
- JHJohann Hari
Oh, thank you. I'm, um, really chuffed by that and I'll start paying you commission the more-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, that's-
- JHJohann Hari
... the more times you name drop it. There you go.
- CWChris Williamson
I swear to God, I must have sent it to 20, 30 people and most of them are gonna be listening. Um-
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
... so first questions first. Your book's been out for, what, two and a half, three years now? Something like that?
- JHJohann Hari
Something like that. It, um... Let me think. January two years ago. Yeah, so t- two and a bit years, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Got you. Why is it back in the charts now, then? Apart from the fact that it's great, but why is it back in the charts now?
- JHJohann Hari
It's a really interesting question. I've been thinking about it a little bit. I've been sort of in a slight frenzy finishing another book and, um, and actually g- almost certainly got coronavirus, so I've been a little bit out of it. And I've been thinking a lot about the, the, the themes of the book and, and why they're really resonating with people at the moment. So I guess I should just say what the book is about and then, and then just, just very briefly. Which is really the book was... The thing that impelled me to write the book was that there were these two mysteries that I was thinking about a lot of the time. Uh, the first mystery is I'm 41 years old and all throughout my life, depression and anxiety have increased in Britain, in the U.S., and across the western world, right? And so has anxiety. And I wanted to understand, well, why, right? Why is this happening to us? Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more of us are feeling depressed and anxious? What's going on? And I wanted to understand that for a more personal reason, which is that when I was a teenager, uh, I went to my doctor. I explained that I was very depressed, I was quite ashamed of it. And my doctor told me a story that I, I now know wasn't totally wrong, but was really over-simplified. My doctor said, "Well, we know why people get like this. Some people just have a natural problem in their brain, right? It's got an imbalance. You're clearly one of them. All you need to do is take a load of drugs, you're gonna be fine." Right? So they gave me an antidepressant called Paxil or Seroxat, it's got different names, and it did give me some relief, but for most of the 13 years that I took it, I was still depressed. And at the end of it, I was asking, "Well, what's going on here?" Right? And for, for the book, Lost Connections, I ended up going on a big journey all over the world. I met the leading experts in the world about depression and anxiety, and people who have just very different perspectives on this, as you know, from an Amish village, 'cause the Amish have very low levels of depression, to a city in Brazil that banned advertising to see if that would make us feel better, to a lab in Baltimore where they're giving people psychedelics to see if that helped. Ask me afterwards. And, um, I think the heart of what I learned is there's scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Two of them are in fact in our biology, right? There are real changes that happen in your brain when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out, and your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems. But most of the factors that cause depression and anxiety and make us feel like shit are not in our biology. They're factors in the way we live. And once you understand them, that opens up a very different set of solutions. The reason I started to set it up just thinking about it is a lot of the factors that I learned there's strong scientific evidence for that cause depression and anxiety have been supercharged to fuck in the last five weeks or whatever it is since this began for a lot of us, right? So, to give some very obvious examples, financial insecurity causes depression and anxiety. Now, that in some ways seems like a "No shit, Sherlock" insight, right? If you'd said to my nan or your nan, you know, "Do you think if you're really financially insecure, you're gonna be more or less likely to be depressed?" My grandmother would've clipped me around the ear and said, "Stop fucking wasting my time." Right? She was Scottish. That's, of course-
- CWChris Williamson
Nice. That's a good S- that's a good Scottish accent there, man.
- JHJohann Hari
... the closest I get-
- CWChris Williamson
I'm impressed, man.
- JHJohann Hari
Uh, it's the closest I can get to it.
- CWChris Williamson
You've nailed it.
- JHJohann Hari
You know, but, but, um, uh, the... I could say a lot about Scottish accents later-
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
... if you want, but in the, uh, uh, all my, um... Not 'cause of my nan, but 'cause of my mother, all my, um, negative thoughts in my head, 'cause my mother's a very positive person in many ways, but also very negative, um, uh, happen in a Scottish accent. So whenever-
- CWChris Williamson
That's hilarious.
- JHJohann Hari
... I remem- whenever I feel I'm fucking up, I'm like, "What you doing, you cunt? What you doing?"
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
But, uh, "What the fuck is this?" But, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
I've got to, I've got to interject there. Um, Alain, Alain de Botton, one of my favorite philosophers, says-
- 15:00 – 30:00
(laughs) …
- JHJohann Hari
is she goes, "Ya, ya, ya. Ya, ya, ya, ya, ya."
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
She once sent me a, a, about a year ago she sent me an email, and it said, um, "Oh, Johan, you're really good in this clip." And I thought, "Oh, she's watched something I've done. That's nice." And I click the clip. It's the fucking Queen speech. (laughs)
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, I thought it was gonna be, uh, Made In Chelsea or something like that. And she said, "Oh, this is you on Made In Chelsea." Um, so I wanna go high level. For the people who haven't read Lost Connections-
- JHJohann Hari
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
... can you just run us through the nine and the seven? Um, the, uh, sorry, the, um, the causes and the solutions? Just, just titles of that, and then I wanna-
- JHJohann Hari
It can sound a bit, make it sound a bit weird. Can I talk about something that connects a lot of them-
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. Yes.
- JHJohann Hari
... I think would be a better way of kind of explaining to people.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- JHJohann Hari
So this is not, not true of all of them, but it's, it connects a lot of them. So every- and it goes, relates exactly to what you just said. So everyone knows they have natural physical needs, obviously, right? You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd obviously be in trouble really quickly. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs, right? You need to feel you belong. You need to feel connected to other people. You need to feel your life has meaning. You need to feel your work has meaning. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And the culture that we've built is good at lots of things, right? I'm glad to be alive today. A lot of things are better than they were in the past. But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep underlying psychological needs that people have. A lot of them, not all. Uh, and I think this is the key reason why depression and anxiety have, have b- have been going up. And, and, you know, there are loads of different people who explain this to me in all sorts of different ways. But the moment when it really emotionally fell into place for me was when I went to interview this South African psychiatrist called Dr. Derek Summerfield. He's an amazing guy. And Derek happened to be in Cambodia in 2001 when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for the people in that country, because they'd never had them in Cambodia before. And the local doctors, the Cambodians, were like, "Well, what are these drugs?" And he explained to them, and they said to him, "Oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants." And they, and he was like, "What do you mean?" And he thought they were gonna talk about some kind of like herbal remedy, like, I don't know, ginkgo biloba, St. John's wort, something like that. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who, uh, worked in the rice fields. And one day he stood on a landmine leftover from the war with the Americans, and he got his leg blown off. Um, s- so they gave him physical therapy, they gave him an artificial leg, and after a while he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently, it's really painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow.
- JHJohann Hari
And I'm guessing it's quite traumatic to go back and work in a field where you got blown up. The guy started to cry all day. After a while, he refused to get out of bed. He developed classic depression. This is when they said to, to Dr. Summerfield, "Well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant." And he said, "What was it?" And they explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense, right? It had causes in his life that actually when you sat down with him were entirely understandable. Um, one of the doctors figured after listening to him, "You know, if we bought this guy a cow..."... he could become a dairy farmer, he wouldn't be in this position that was fucking him up so much. So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, he stopped crying. Within a couple of months his depression was gone. They said to Dr. Summerfield, "So you see, Doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean, right?" Now, if you've been raised to think about depression the way we have, that sounds like a joke, right? "I- I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow." But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively is what the leading medical body in the whole world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to explain to us for years, right? If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not, in the meshet- the main, a machine with broken parts, right? You're a human being with unmet needs and what you need and deserve is support to get those deeper needs met. And the reason why I say "our" rather than "your" is 'cause that farmer on his own could not have solved that problem, right? He needed people around him to help him figure out what had gone wrong, and more importantly, to think of a solution and build a solution with him. And I think so many of the problems we face, in a way, you know, when you explain these causes to people... I mean, let's think about another one, a really obvious one that's risen in the last five weeks. Loneliness, right? It's not rocket science when you explain to someone, "If you're lonely, you're more likely to become depressed," right? But I remember, do you know, it's funny, I remember when... I remember the night before my book came out, I was sitting with one of my best mates and we were talking about it. And you know, when a book comes out, you- you always think about how people are gonna react. And I said, "I think most people are gonna say..." You know, obviously there's interesting stuff that people could learn and lots of stories and facts and people they won't know about in the book. But I thought some of the ideas, I thought they're going to go, "Well, n- no shit, Sherlock. Why the fuck did we, uh... What we needed you to tell us that loneliness and financial insecurity causes depression, right?"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
"This is really obvious." And then the book came out and I kept being introduced in radio (laughs) interviews and things, people going, "Well, we're now going to talk to Johann Hari, who's written this incredibly controversial new book."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm. (laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
And I-
- CWChris Williamson
I wanna, I wanna interject there, Johann. So two things. First thing being the best books tell you a story that you already know, is a universal... Atomic Habits by James Clear, one of the best books that I've read over the last few years. I knew everything that was in that book, but no one had synthesized it, put it across with those examples and put it in a single unit, right? That makes a big difference. Second thing, reason that I think people see Lost Connections as controversial is that it puts the locus of control onto the individual. From an individual's perspective, you're hearing stories of snowflake generation and helicopter parenting and all this sort of stuff. Lack of sovereignty, lack of high agency, no upward mobility, people wanting the state and increase in socialism and, and sort of leftist thought where people want the state to give them as much as they can and do the problems, fix the problems for them. I think it shines a bright light and a very ugly mirror onto some of the things that people are doing that can affect their own mood. Now again, neither of us, both, both of us have suffered depressive, depressive episodes and depression in our lives. Neither of us are saying that depression is in, uh, in, uh, an easy mistress to bear, right? Like it is an existential crisis that feels like you're drowning in thought. Um, but being told that you have, that we have more control over our mental health than we might have thought, it makes you become the architect or more of the architect of your own suffering. And that's quite uncomfortable for people.
- JHJohann Hari
It's interesting, I- I, I'm thinking about what you're saying because I think there's... Think how I'd put it slightly differently. I think it's, if you're given a story about your pain, right? Even if that story doesn't work very well, at least you feel like you know where you are, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
And, uh, what's called the biomedical model, which is basically just the idea that depression and anxiety are overwhelmingly biological, right? Biological flaws in you, in the individual. I think because people have been told that story for so long, it becomes a, and it, I don't say this separately, uh, for me, it became part of how I saw myself. It became part of how I, how I, um, how I understood the world.
- CWChris Williamson
Inbuilt, right?
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah. And if someone, and i- by the way, it's not that those insights are totally wrong, right? There are real biological factors, but if someone comes along and says, "Um, that's true, but actually..." And it's not just me saying this, it's the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization. "Actually, these problems are mostly social problems and we mostly need to deal with them together, you know, as individuals and as groups." Um, it's very painful to make the transition from one story about your distress to another.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
It's, it's disorientating. The analogy I was, I thought of, I think when I was learning this, 'cause it was destabilizing for me, was like, if you feel like you understand your pain, even if you feel like shit, but you understand it, to me it's like there's a dog, a wild dog, but it's on a leash, right? And that moment of switching stories, of seeing that something much more complex and I think interesting and empowering is going on-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
... is like a moment when the dog is let off the leash, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
And, and that's a very disorientating moment. But actually, I wanted to ask you about this, Chris, 'cause I, I'm really interested in how you think about this. That I was thinking about this in relation to Love Island and reality TV that I think for me, one of the interesting things, I've been thinking about it a bit in the last few weeks, but obviously it's a big part of the book, is I think one of the things we can get from this crisis is an understanding of what had gone wrong with our values. So there's-And this, for me, was one of the most challenging things that I learned about in the research for Lost Connections, and I could see how much it had played out in my own life. So, um, everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? As you can see from my chins, I'm not immune to this temptation. I'm really pissed off that KFC is r- some KFCs have reopened, but not within a radi- delivery radius of me.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- 30:00 – 45:00
A little bit, yeah.…
- CWChris Williamson
who are retweeting and posting vitriol on a daily basis. If you want to find out who is the cause of this problem, look in the mirror." And the problem is people... the general public believe that somebody with a blue tick now no longer has feelings or emotions, they're just like this kind of sounding board to throw things at. So that's kind of my, my thoughts in terms of like the big stuff that's gone on recently. Um, more so in terms of the values and things, man, like my main problem with reality TV at the moment is it takes these people out of the general public and then puts them on a pedestal, and what does that say to everybody that's listening?... it says that you, too, your path toward becoming two million follower blue tick person with a, a huge clothing deal with this particular company, all that you need to do is get on reality TV. Like that's now the path to itself. So a lot of people, I think, that go on reality TV aren't looking for a springboard for their career, they are looking for it to be their career. And that, for me, is, i- is, um, is a challenge. I, I don't think necessarily that kids who are growing up at 14 years old should be looking to Love Island as the pinnacle, like the zenith of what their career aspirations should be, and yet I know that that's the case. I was away in Dubai with my dad a couple of years ago, and we were sat down with, um, a young family. We got put in, it's when you go on one of those tours together and you get put in a car and it's like mom and dad and a young kid and 18-year-old daughter, and, uh, Dad- we're talking about just, "So what do you do?" and "What do you do?" and "What do you do?" And this, that, and the other. And I was, "Oh, I run club nights and I do this," just give a brief, brief overview of stuff. And there was a bunch of stuff in there that I thought was super interesting and virtuous but not really ... none of them batted an eye, none of them batted an eye at playing cricket for Durham back in the day, even though one of the kids played cricket for Durham. None of them batted an eye at the podcasts or the other bits and pieces. Halfway through the night, my dad dropped, "Oh, and Chris was on Love Island." That was it, rest of the night, that's all they wanted to talk about. And I thought, "That is a misalignment of values as far as I'm concerned." That is being, uh, something which literally is essentially by chance, being put on a pedestal m- significantly higher than things which, uh, require genuine, uh, work ethic, uh, and, and, sort of virtue and value to get to. Um, so that's my thing to do with Love Island. And I've also got something that, um, uh, relates back to what you were saying before to do with how people like to try and, um ... they want to make sense, right? They want to have a story to tell themselves and why they have comfort in a story. And this is the third time I'm gonna drop this same psychological effect on the podcast so the listeners should know by now but they might not. Uh, it's something called compensatory control. Have you heard of this?
- JHJohann Hari
A little bit, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, cool. So Matthew Syed in The Times talked about this, uh, and what he said was that when there is a period of uncertainty, people much prefer to give something a story than to believe that it could happen by chance. So one of the, uh, experiments that was done was people that were given an uncertain medical diagnosis were much more likely to see patterns in a meaningless screen of static than those that weren't. And, uh, it's used, it was used by Matthew Syed to explain why there's a proliferation of 5G conspiracy theories and stuff like that at the moment, because it is significantly easier to believe that this global pandemic was caused by the plans of some malign scientists than by the chance mutation of a silly little microbe. And, um, as soon as I saw that, it has got so, that compensatory control has so many wide-ranging implications.
- JHJohann Hari
I think that's really interesting. I wanna go back to the Love Island thing in a second if we can, but-
- CWChris Williamson
Sure.
- JHJohann Hari
... that's so interesting because I think wha- there's ... Michael Marmot, who's a professor, brilliant Australian professor who studied lots of aspects of health and depression, said to me, "At the heart of so much depression is a lack of control." And I think it's interesting, um, l- we live in a society and culture where people have very limited control over their lives, right? Um, and people have been actually systematically denied it. So I'll give, uh, uh, an obvious example which is Michael Marmot did, i- is Australian, like I say, an Australian scientist, who made a real breakthrough in the 1970s. So I had noticed that loads of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work, right? Uh, I was like, well, am I, um, maybe people I know are unusual, so I looked at the science on this and the polling actually is really striking. So 13% of people like their work most of the time. 63% are what they, they called sleep working, you don't like it, you don't hate it, you sort of get through it. And, uh, I think it was 23% fucking hate their jobs, right? It's quite striking, right? That means you're almost twice as likely to hate your job as to love your job, and the vast majority of people are not enjoying the thing they're doing most of the time. So I started to think, "Well, could this bear some relationship to our depression and anxiety crisis?" And that's when I learned about and went to interview Professor Marmot. So he had basically discovered in the 1970s the single biggest factor that causes depression at work, not the only one but the biggest factor by a long way, is if you go to work tomorrow morning and you have low or no control over your work, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
So if you go in and you're like a robot on a mach- uh, on an assembly line, right? So you, you can't use your creativity, you can't use your intelligence, you can't ... you just got to do what you're told and you're told by your boss and that's why you have to do it. Um, and, and it's really interesting, I think, so ... and workplaces are now very controlled, you know, people are living under the tyranny of email. Um, and, and I think, um, I think it's one reason actually, this lack of control is one reason why slogans like "Take Back Control," the Brexit, um, slogan, which, uh, uh, resonates so deeply-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
People at a very deep level feel they don't have control over their lives. Now I ... leaving the European Union hasn't given anyone back any control over anything. I'm, as you can probably guess my m- my views about that, but whatever you think about that, I think it does help us to understand why these things resonate. And it's really interesting because there is a solution to that, right? A very simple solution, and it's a big change but it's in some ways simple. Uh, to understand it, I went to interview, um, a group of people in Baltimore. Uh, one of them is called Meredith Keogh. And Meredith was, when I met her, she was in her, uh, early thir- late 20s, early 30s.And Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night just sick with anxiety, right? She had a kind of administrative job. It wasn't the worst job in the world, right? Sh- she would tell you she wasn't being bullied or anything, but she just... It was really boring and she couldn't bear the thought this was gonna be the next 30 years of her life. More than that, 50 years, whatever. Um, so one day with her, uh, her husband, Josh, and her friend, they did this really quite bold thing. Josh had worked in bike stores in Baltimore since he was like 15 and especially in the US, you know, low income jobs, you don't have healthcare, you don't even have guaranteed holiday time. You know, it's just really insecure.
- NANarrator
Ruthless. Yeah. Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
Brutal. You can be fired at any moment. You've got no rights at work. And, um, one day Josh and his- the colleagues he worked with in this bike store said to themselves, "What does our boss actually do?" Right? They- their boss wasn't a asshole or anything, but they were like, "We seem to do all the work and he seems to make all the money," right? So they decided they were gonna, uh, do something bold. Uh, they set up a bike store of their own, but this bike store works on a different principle. So the place they'd worked before was like where most people watching this will work, a corporation, right? You've got a boss at the top and everyone has to pretty much do what he says or you leave. You know, you can rebel a little bit, but it's pretty limited. Um, that's actually a very recent human invention, and it goes back a little bit more than 100 years. They decided they were gonna build their bike shop around an older idea. So their bike shop is what's called a democratic cooperative. So they don't have a boss. Uh, they make decisions about the business together, have a meeting once every couple of weeks to vote if they don't agree, in practice they agree most of the time, they share all the proceeds, the money, according to how much they work, some do a little bit more work than others. Um, they, um, they share out the good tasks and the shitty tasks and no one gets stuck with the sh- all the shit tasks. And one thing that was so interesting, and this totally fits with Professor Marmot's research, spending time with them was how many of them talked about how they had been depressed and anxious in their previous job and were not depressed and anxious now. And it's not like they, you know, they- they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to become Beyonce's backing singers, right?
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
They fixed bikes before they fix bikes now. What was the difference? Now they had control over their work. Now that's still a capitalist economy. They compete in a capitalist economy. They had to have a good shop or it was shut down, right?
- NANarrator
Right.
- JHJohann Hari
But the- the- the u- the unit that's competing is a democratic cooperative where... And I was thinking about when I was spending time there and at other democratic cooperatives, and there's loads of them, I was thinking about how many people do I know who are depressed and anxious, who would feel quite differently if they knew that tomorrow they were going to work in a workplace where the boss was accountable to them as well as the other way around-
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
... where they can control it, where if they can use their intelligence for their task, if something isn't working, they can persuade their colleagues, they can change how it works. It's actually more efficient as well. A study at Cornell University found that more democratic businesses do much better, because you're using the intelligence of all your workers, not just, you know, you're not deadening them all day.
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
So there's a lot of ways we can change the way we live. Partly that's individuals can do that, and partly I- I just- I just think we should get rid of corporations. I think everything should be a democratic... All businesses should be democratic cooperatives. They're more... It's more efficient, it's better for the economy, and it's much better for people's mental health. But, um, the... I think it helps us to see again when you reframe problems in this way based on the best science, again, you can see how that's saying to people who are depressed and anxious, it's not that there's something wrong with you, right? It's not that you're broken. It's that we- we fell into these ways of living that didn't work very well for us, that don't meet our needs, and we can change those things together, right? We don't have to go on in these way... It's about giving people, like you were saying before, Chris, giving people a sense of power and agency that we can change, change these things.
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
And some are small changes, some of them are big changes, but the changes that are possible are incredible. And one of the reasons I think I'm actually very optimistic about change is partly because I'm gay, right? And I'm 41 years old and I've seen the world... If you had ex- I didn't hear the phrase gay marriage till I was 21 years old, right? And- and when I heard it, I thought, "Well that's fucking never gonna happen," right?
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
This is gay, and I- I- I... In the book, I tell a story about a really close friend of mine who, um, I think about all the time when I get into a mode where I think, "Oh, we can't change anything." And I've been thinking about him a lot in the last few weeks for reasons that will be obvious when I say it. So in 1994, my friend Andrew Sullivan was diagnosed as HIV positive at the height of the AIDS crisis. The last big plague, if you like. Uh, it's not totally the same, a lot of differences obviously, but some parallels.
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
And this was before there were protease inhibitors or anything. So this was a death sentence, right? His best friend Patrick had already died of AIDS. Gay people, intravenous drug users, all sorts of people were just dying all over the place. And Andrew decided he would do one last thing before he died. He went to a little place called Provincetown, and he wrote a book about a crazy utopian idea that no one had ever written a book advocating, right? And he thought, "Well, I'm never gonna live to see this obviously. No one alive today will live to see it, but maybe someone further down the line will pick up this idea." The idea he wrote the first book ever to advocate was gay marriage, right? And when I try to get... When I think, "Oh fuck, things are never gonna change-"
- NANarrator
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
I try to imagine going back in time to 1994 and saying to Andrew, "Okay, Andrew, you're not gonna believe me. 26 years from now, you'll be alive. Step one, great news." Right?
- NANarrator
Elton- Elton John's married.
- JHJohann Hari
(laughs) Elton John's married. You'll be fucking married-
- 45:00 – 1:00:00
Yes, it does. …
- CWChris Williamson
sentence here on my notes which says, "Searches for the term depression are 50% higher now than they were in December. Does this prove your hypothesis that depression is highly dependent on environmental factors?"
- JHJohann Hari
Yes, it does.
- CWChris Williamson
Thank you. Look at that, we did it.
- JHJohann Hari
And important to say, it's important to say it's not my hypothesis-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
... it's the hypothesis of the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization-
- CWChris Williamson
And your hypothesis.
- JHJohann Hari
... who by the way, we're all turning, and me, (laughs) yeah but I got it from them, so let's give them fair credit-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
... uh, and lots of other people as well, as well as doctors and psychiatrists and scientists. But the, the, um, who I learned it from. Um, but yeah, no, I think you're totally right that, that, you know, these were always primarily, they're a real biological components, it's important to keep stressing that, I'm happy to talk about them if you want-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- JHJohann Hari
... but these were always primarily biological and psychological problems. Uh, and, uh, sorry, I'll say that again. These were always to a large degree social and psychological problems-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
... and a large part of the solutions need to be built around dealing with those problems. And the last third of my book, Lost Connections, is really very practical ways people I met all over the world, from east London to Sydney, who were, uh, to Sao Paolo, who were dealing in a very practical way with these problems.
- CWChris Williamson
I wanna, I wanna talk about those in a second. One thing that I've been thinking a, a lot about recently, uh, is to do with the self-development, uh, world, which I'm, I'm head and feet into. You know, I, a big advocate of morning routines, I have a very routinized day, I do my journaling, I make sure that I have a morning walk in sunlight, I do, you know, I have a, a significant number of structures that, um, ensure that my self-care is looked after. In fact, self-care is one of the phie, five, uh, key core habits that I have in my life, it's one of the key values that I have in my own life, because if I don't do my self-care then everything else crumbles as well. But I wonder how much of the s- resurgence or the surgence in the world of self-development is due to people trying to take control, trying to bring some order to the chaos of their life. It's like a very macro version of OCD, you know? There's, there's certain things that you can control, there's certain things that you can't control, but if, an- I know this for a fact, I know that if I do morning walk, journaling, meditation, reading, back rehab, cook my food, train, go to sleep on time, don't spend too much time on my phone, don't use my phone until 4:00 PM, all the, all the structures, all these things, and that sounds incredibly autistic, you know, to have this, like (laughs) -
- JHJohann Hari
No, it doesn't.
- CWChris Williamson
... structure, structure of the day, but that brings order to chaos, right? That allows me, that wraps that around, and I think that it's twofold. Firstly, I think that we still, as a modern society, haven't got over our fear of death, and I think that we are trying to transcend our fear of death through the longevity movement, which is going on at the moment. I had Dr. David Sinclair, one of the world's leading-
- JHJohann Hari
Ah, yeah, yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
... longevity doctors on, huge, huge name, and, um, the comments to that video, I've never had more passionate comments to it. Why? Why, why would people be getting so emboldened, so, so, uh, uh, emotional about something which is, uh, m- nicotinamide, amide, dinucleotide supplementation and resveratrol at 3:00 in the morning and stuff like that. Why are people getting so, uh, emotional about intermittent fasting when I can have Douglas Murray on talking about transgender pronouns and, like, people just sort of, "Naah, it's a thing," and then some people get emotional about it. The reason that I think it is, is because people are desperately searching, they've lost faith in, in religion, I think that secularism's, uh, increasing and that there's, the afterlife and stuff doesn't give people that sense, same sense.... of comfort about where their life's going to finish, so they're desperately trying to hope that they can extend it. And I think that the, uh, self-development world is perhaps a similar way, a similar way that people are trying to bring control into their life, trying to create these structures, the morning routine, the evening routine, the way that they think, you know, meditation practice, "Oh, I'm just... let, let go, return to the breath, let go, return to whatever is present, the power of now," all of this sort of stuff. I think that there's some unifying, um, some unifying principles in there.
- JHJohann Hari
That's really interesting. I'm just thinking about what you're saying. I think, I think there's lots of things in what you're saying. One thing, and I-I don't think it's the biggest thing, but I think one thing that relates to that, I think you have to see that in the context of this explosion in loneliness, right? So the- there, there's incredible studies on this. A, a study that asks Americans, "How many close friends do you have who you could turn to in a crisis?" And when they started doing it years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer is none. Right? Uh, 40% of Americans agree with the statement, "Nobody knows me well." And on those international league tables in Britain, we're just, we're just behind them. And I think there's a thing about... i- in a profoundly lonely society, all an individual has is the self, right? Or at least they begin to believe all they have is the self.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
And what that can do is begin to promote, uh... so it can promote, uh... and I'm not saying this is... I wanna be clear, the kind of things you're describing, like having a routine and so on, are extremely healthy ways of structuring anyone's life-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
... whether you're, you know, a lonely society or a profoundly socially-connected society. So I'm not talking about that, but I think it can produce a kind of, um, self-centeredness because the self is all you have, and I remember speaking, um... I spent a lot of time interviewing this incredible man named, um, Professor John Cacioppo, who was the leading expert in the world on loneliness. And, uh, he sadly died recently, but he... I remember him saying to me, you know, um, "Why do we exist? Why are we here," right? Um, one key reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing. They weren't bigger than the animals they took down a lot of the time. They weren't faster than the animals they took down a lot of the time, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating. So just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe. And we are the first humans ever to disband our tribes. And if you think about the circumstances where we evolved, if the human... if an individual was separated from the tribe, they'd be depressed and anxious for a really fucking good reason. "You're about to die," right? "You're in terrible danger. If you get injured, no one will be there to heal you, uh, if you... you, you can't hunt." Um, the, the-
- CWChris Williamson
How... I want to interject there, Johan-
- JHJohann Hari
Sure, sure.
- CWChris Williamson
... because I've heard you tell this, I've heard you tell this story a number of times.
- JHJohann Hari
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I've always wanted to jump out-
- JHJohann Hari
Sure, sure. Please.
- 1:00:00 – 1:12:13
A fact. And she,…
- CWChris Williamson
yeah, yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
A fact. And she, she was the first person to document that, um, bonobos will work really hard to make dildos. And she was in, obviously in a, a British zoo, so if you give them like a bucket, they will break off the handle and just start going at it, uh, uh, like it's a dildo.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- JHJohann Hari
Um, and she thought it was hilarious because she's from Chile which is a much more free and open place when it comes to sexual things, and she thought it was just hilarious watching all these British people with their kids trying to explain to them-
- CWChris Williamson
No, darling. Darling, look away.
- JHJohann Hari
... "That's-" (laughs) Exactly, but-
- CWChris Williamson
Little, little Johnny asking mommy, "What's that?"
- JHJohann Hari
But, you know, it's this really fascinating thing which is ... So she worked with bonobos in Whipsnade Zoo and then she worked with bonobos in their natural habitat in the Congo. It was just at the end of the war in the Congo which I'd actually covered as well. And Isabelle, uh, was out there. She was living with this, this bonobo troop for years and she noticed something which hadn't been documented until her which is in-... uh, captivity, bonobos will often develop symptoms that look a lot like human depression. A bit like the submission response. You know, they just sit, they rock back and forward, they won't join the group, they look like, they f- they, you know, they stop grooming themselves, they go to shit, right? And she noticed this never happens in the wild. And she, she argued ... And there's a huge amount of evidence that animals in captivity, um, start behaving in ways that look like obsessive-compulsive disorder or, or mental illness, right? Parrots will rip out their feathers, elephants will grind their tusks down. You know, which are a source of great pride in the wild, down to, like, bloody stumps. Um, horses will start obsessively swaying. There's all sorts of things. And Isabelle argues a big part of this is just physical movement, right? We've become a society that does not move.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
Um, if you think about the- the actual n- amount of movement we do, we are the humans who move least who have ever lived, right? And a- and she argues, uh, I think the way she put it to me, it's in the book, is sort of, "An animal that is not moving through its natural habitat cannot be a healthy animal physically or mentally." I think that's totally right. But I just wanted to go back to something you were saying before, I, 'cause I forgot to pick up on this. I think, 'cause one of the things that, about Love Island I'm, I'm really interested in. I, I actually love reality TV but I was away from Britain when Love Island came out, so I- I- I-
- CWChris Williamson
Good for you, it's fine.
- JHJohann Hari
If you did me, uh, if you gave me a, uh, a, a ... If you d- gave me a, um, what do you call it? A Trivial Pursuit que- series of questions-
- CWChris Williamson
You'd be shit, yeah.
- JHJohann Hari
... about-
- CWChris Williamson
It's fine.
- JHJohann Hari
... about Big Brother in the, in the early 2000s-
- CWChris Williamson
Got you.
- JHJohann Hari
... I could do a lot there. But, um, but what I'm interested in about Love Island is, Love Island, the, the people who from Love Island who've contacted me and people on other reality shows, led me to think there's this thing about ... I think it reveals something about the game. I mean, the game of our society and culture, not narrowly the game of Love Island. That the people who are winning the game feel like shit, right? That tells you something about the game. It's a bit like when you meet billionaires, right? I've now, in my life, met quite a lot of billionaires and I've almost never met a billionaire who wasn't unbelievably unhappy, right? Like, achingly unhappy. And, um, I've met t- two that I would say were not unhappy and all the rest were, right? And I think there's something about ... Because it's, um, b- because it's a game that's a quest to be valued, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
... for things that are, uh ... I won't be able to come up 'cause I don't wanna disrespect, um s-
- CWChris Williamson
Throw it out there, Johann. No one, no one on Love Island has, has, uh, so few followers that they can't take on the chin what you're gonna say, so just say it.
- JHJohann Hari
I would say, ca- it's actually not really a comment on Love Island 'cause as like I said about it. But I was ... It's a great thing to look amazing, right? And to ... And that's an effort to look amazing, right? Obviously some people start off with slightly better genetic inheritances than others-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- JHJohann Hari
... but it's an effort. And that is an achievement, and I don't, I'm not dissing that for a minute. I, it's something I appreciate and enjoy in other people. Sadly not in myself.
- CWChris Williamson
(laughs)
- JHJohann Hari
But the, but, but I think because you're being honored, that b- I would accept that, I would exempt that bit 'cause that's an effort and an achievement. But because you're being honored for things that are like following, you know ... How would I put it? Um-
- CWChris Williamson
I, I already know, I already know what, I, I know what it is, right? So-
- JHJohann Hari
You get it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I know, I know, I know precisely what it is. I think I've got a, a couple of different bits here. So, um, first and foremost, it's the dichotomy diff- I do a lot of fitness, I talk a lot about fitness on this channel. It's a dichotomy difference between training for aesthetics or training for performance. Training for aest-
- JHJohann Hari
Oh.
Episode duration: 1:49:08
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