100 Quotes by Johann Hari

We grieve because we have loved. We grieve because the person we have lost mattered to us. To say that grief should disappear on a neat timetable is an insult to the love we felt.

Materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety.

Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.

It turned out that for every category of traumatic experience you went through as a kid, you were radically more likely to become depressed as an adult. If you had six categories of traumatic events in your childhood, you were five times more likely to become depressed as an adult than somebody who didn’t have any. If you had seven categories of traumatic event as a child, you were 3,100 percent more likely to attempt to commit suicide as an adult.

The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other. The collapse had already been taking place for decades by then. The web arrived offering them a kind of parody of what they were losing – Facebook friends in place of neighbors, video games in place of meaningful work, status updates in place of status in the world. The comedian Marc Maron once wrote that “every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?

It took me a while to see that the contrast between the racism directed at Billie and the compassion offered to addicted white stars like Judy Garland was not some weird misfiring of the drug war – it was part of the point.

Materialism is KFC for the soul.

You can’t escape it: when scientists test the water supply of Western countries, they always find it is laced with antidepressants, because so many of us are taking them and excreting them that they simply can’t be filtered out of the water we drink every day. We are literally awash in these drugs.

Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.