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- [00:03]
A
You know, just like bees evolved to live in a hive, human beings evolved to live in a tribe. And we are the first humans ever to disband our tribes. And it makes us feel terrible. A bee separated from the hive has no home and makes no sense and goes crazy. We are very much like that. But we have separated out our homes. We have. We've disbanded our homes. Depression and anxiety are not malfunctions, they are signals. So that feeling of dislocation you experience is the product of a dysfunctional environment. It's not a flaw in you, and it's a necessary signal. Let's listen to it, let's figure out what it means. Because by following that signal, we can get to the solution to the signal, which is a rebuilding of home and belonging and community.
- [00:49]
B
Hi, folks. Welcome back to Homing. It's a foundations episode this week and we're discussing the subject of belonging. We live in an era when friends and family are more dispersed than ever, and online forms of connection can feel a bit hollow. It's little wonder that so many of us struggle with where we belong, not just in our communities, but sometimes within ourselves. My guest today is the author Johann Hari. Through books like Lost Connections and Stolen Focus, he's explored why so many of us feel disconnected from each other and from the things that give our lives meaning. In this conversation, Johan and I explore how the home fits into all of that. We talk about loneliness, the modern crisis of attention, and how home can either deepen those problems or help us recover from them. Before we get going, a quick thank you to everyone who's joined us as a Patreon member. We've had lots of new signups this week and it's massively appreciated. Your support, of course, enables us to keep making these podcasts and also filming the house tours. So very many thanks to all of you. Right, on with this week's podcast, it's Johann Hari on the subject of belonging. I hope you find it useful. Hi, Johan.
- [02:13]
A
Hey, Matt. It's very good to be here. I'm massively over caffeinated today, so I might start speaking very, very fast. I apologize. In a bit.
- [02:19]
B
Look forward to it. Really appreciate the subject is the home. And the first question I want to ask you actually is, what does that word home mean to you? How would you define it?
- [02:30]
A
Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot because I actually think a lot of the crises that are playing out across the world at the moment are a product of a lack of a sense of home or a sense of Home that meets our need for belonging in complicated ways. I guess the best ways of thinking about home that I've heard, there's one I think about a lot I used in one of my books. Alexander Heyman, who's an amazing Bosnian writer, obviously thought a lot about home in relation to the crisis in the former Yugoslavia. But he said, home is where people notice when you're not there. I think it's a really nice definition. It was amazing about Robert Frost, the amazing American poet, said, home is the place where if you go, they have to take you in. They can't turn you away. And I think home is a place that meets your need to belong. Everyone knows human beings have natural physical needs. You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took those things away from you, you'd be in trouble really quickly. But there's equally strong evidence that all human beings have natural psychological needs. 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. You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense. And we are getting less and less good at meeting these underlying psychological needs. Although there are many great things about being alive today. And I think that home is a place, an anchoring place, where a significant amount of your psychological needs can be met. Not all of them. There's a. David Brooks, brilliant American writer, says. I think he's quoting someone else, but he says a satisfying life is a series of daring raids from a secure base, right? Home is a secure base where a significant amount of your need for belonging and psychological needs are met. And I think home is a layered sense, right? You've got the sense of home, which is your, you know, in my case, my flat, right? But you've also got a sense of home moves out almost in, like, concentric circles. Then you've got your home as your tribe of people. The people you know, who you turn to, who you trust. Then you've got almost a wider layer which is like just. It's funny, a couple of days ago, there was a car crash on my street. No one was injured, fortunately, but a woman drove straight into another car. And me and my boyfriend came out. And there were lots of my neighbors there who I don't even know their name, but I know them, right? I've lived on the same street when I'm in Britain for, I don't know, 12, 13 years. And I thought, oh, there's a concentric circle there, right? There's A sort of sense of home on this street. And then there's a concentric circle of like, I'm from London, right? I'm a product of London. London is where my memories live, right. If I go to Edgware, where I grew up, if I go to Brick Lane, where I lived for a long time, if I go to where I live now in North London again, I have memories that live here. And then you've got a layer below that which is like, I'm British, right? And I would say I have a level below that, beyond that, where I'm European, although that's much more contested, you will have noticed. And then there's a sense that my home is actually the planet Earth, right, Which is endangered for all sorts of complicated reasons now. So I think home is a layered sense and we each have a sense of belonging at each of those stages and layers would be my sort of instinctive first response.
- [05:39]
B
Yeah, I really like that. I agree with that. We also talk a lot on this podcast about the idea that your body and mind are a home of sorts as well. Right. Your own troubles you've had with your mental health, you've documented very well. But I would describe that I've had issues with anxiety in the past. I describe that as somehow becoming dissociated from your sort of inner home, somehow when. Could you just describe briefly that process for you? When did you stop feeling at home in yourself? And what was that like, do you think?
- [06:16]
A
Such an interesting way of framing it. I wouldn't describe my own experience that as not being at home in myself. It's interesting to think about why, because I think what you're saying is many people do describe their experience of depression or anxiety in that way. I think it's a really interesting question. Why wouldn't I say that? I mean, it's easy for me to go. Easier for me to go into the narrative of my own depression anxiety, which I no longer experienced and haven't experienced for many years. But I mean, I sometimes get anxious, but not in a problematic way. So I grew up in a family where there was a lot of madness and violence and addiction. And you know, some people go, my family's crazy. And they mean, you know, I've got a over possessive mother or something. It's like, no, no, no, my family were crazy like the Chucky do, and we should not say didn't have many, many good qualities. They did. I grew up in an environment where my needs were not. A lot of my psychological needs were not met through no Fault of the people involved. They were not able to meet their own psychological needs than my child's. But you want to come back to why does it not feel like. So I have a friend, amazing person called V, formerly known as Eve Ensler, who is an incredible playwright and activist. She wrote, best known for writing the Vagina Monologues. And she's always said to me, we've been friends for many years, that I have a divorced relationship with my own body. That I am quite, you know, brain on a stick. I don't really. I think about my body as a sort of necessary thing for me to be able to pick up books and walk around, but not. So she would probably say that it's that I have a divorced sense from my own body, an unhealed divorce sense of my own body still. Which may be why I don't think about it that way. Cause the way that you suggested or. But I don't know, there's more to it than that.
- [08:08]
B
But that's so interesting because that's exactly how actually I would describe somehow feeling homeless in your own body. Because if you feel like your psyche is somehow apart from the body, that is a sort of homelessness, I think. And that's such an interesting description you've given, I think. Why do you think so many of us feel lonely in this culture? I mean, I don't wanna generalize too much, but it does seem to be the case. You'll be able to tell me that loneliness is increasing.
- [08:41]
A
We are living through a extraordinary and unprecedented explosion in loneliness. 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 it years ago, the most common answer was five. Now, the most common answer, not the average, but the most common answer is none, Right? And I spent a lot of time with an amazing man named Professor John Cacioppo, who sadly died recently, who spent 30 years studying the science of. And he made many of the key breakthroughs in what we understand. He proved that depression can be caused by loneliness, that loneliness itself can cause depression. And never forget him saying to me one day, because I was keen to his own. Why is that? And he said to me, you know, why are we alive? You, me, everyone you've ever met. Why do we exist? One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannahs of Africa were really good at one thing. You know, 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. Just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe, right? This is our superpower as a species, right? This is, we band together, we do big things because we band together. If our ancestors on the spans of Africa hadn't banded together, we wouldn't be sitting having this conversation. Some other species would have taken over the earth. And if you think about those circumstances, if you were separated from the tribe, you know, you were depressed and anxious for a really good reason. You were in terrible danger, right? If you got injured, you would probably just die. If you were an animal came, you would be defenseless. So loneliness evolved, as the way he put it, is an aversive signal telling you to get back to the tribe where you will be safe. Right now we live in very different circumstances. The people, our ancestors who lived on the savannas of Africa. But that key underlying principle, we're still that species, that's still how we feel. And if you think about, if you ever separate a bee from a hive, it just goes crazy, right? It can't function. You know, just like bees evolved to live in a hive, human beings evolved to live in a tribe. And we are the first humans ever to disband our tribes, right? And it makes us feel terrible. If you think about this as the hive is a model for thinking about home, right? A very clear model. A bee separated from the hive has no home and makes no sense and spins out, goes crazy. We are very much like that. But we have separated out our homes, we've disbanded our homes, we've told ourselves we can do it alone, that we should do it alone. Even think about someone I know recently went through a terrible tragedy in their lives. And even the things that people were saying, I looked at their Facebook page and people were saying as a thinking it was a nice thing to say, the only person who can help you is you. That's almost completely wrong actually. It's very hard to help yourself in the absence of other people. But even the kind of self help cliches we offer, people are deeply individualistic. They miss who we are.
- [11:44]
B
Exactly. Have you seen any cultures where, where they have managed to retain that sense of community in that way?
- [11:52]
A
I think the place that taught me most about home is an incredible place that I, I went to. I'm gonna go there soon again actually later this year. So in 2011, on a big anonymous council estate in Ber, a Turkish German woman called Nuria Chengis climbed out of her wheelchair and she put a sign in her window. So Nouria lived on the ground floor. In this estate, there's a lot of what we would call tower blocks. And the sign Nouria put in her window said something like, I got a notice saying, I'm gonna be evicted next Thursday. So on Wednesday night, I'm gonna kill myself. So this council estate's called Cotti is in Kreuzberg, for people who know Berlin. So it was a part of Berlin that was totally destroyed. And since then, the only people who wanted to live there or who did live there were. There were three groups. There were recent Muslim immigrants, like this woman, Nouria. There were gay men, and there were punk squatters. But as you can imagine, these three groups didn't get along. And really no one knew any. It was very anonymous, like, you know, any state in Britain, mostly. And people walked past Nooria's window. No one knew her. And they saw this sign saying she was gonna kill herself. And people started to knock on her door saying, hey, Nooria, do you need any help? And she said, no, fuck you. I don't want any help. I'm gonna kill myself, and shut the door. But people started talking outside her door. So this estate, Cotti, the whole of Berlin, has been very rapidly gentrifying. Rents have been going up, but this area in particular, Kreuzberg, had huge rent rises. Loads of people had been evicted already. Everyone was worried that they were gonna, at some point, not be able to pay the rent and they were gonna be evicted. So people really felt for her. So several people who lived there, including an amazing woman called Uli Hartman, she had this idea. So there's a big thoroughfare that goes through the center of Kati into Mitte, into the center of Berlin. And so they had this idea, you know what? On Saturday, if we just block the road and we have a protest, the media will probably come, they'll interview Nuria, you know, they'll probably let her stay. Actually. There might even be a little bit of pressure to keep rents down for all of us. Why don't we try it? So Saturday came. They blocked the road with little makeshift stuff. Nuria was like, I'm going to kill myself. I might as well let them wheel me into the middle of the road. The media did show up. They did a lot of interviews. Everyone who lots of people lived on Cotti came down, protested, and it got to the end of the day, and the police came along and said, okay, you've had your fun. Take this down, go home. And the people lived in Cotti said, well, hang on a minute, you haven't told Nuria she gets to stay. In fact, we want a rent freeze for our entire housing project, our entire estate. We will take all this stuff down when we've got that, but not until then. But of course, they knew the minute they left this little makeshift barricade they made, the police would just tear it down. So a fantastic person called Tanya Gartner, who lives in Kotti, she's one of the punk squatters, so she wears tiny little miniskirts even in Berlin winters. Tanya is hardcore. She had this idea, she had in her flat a klaxon, those things that make loud noises at soccer matches, football matches. She came down and she said, okay, everyone, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna draw up a timetable to man this barricade 24 hours a day until they give us what we want. If they try and take it down before then, let off the klaxon and we'll all come down from our flats and stop them. So people started signing up to man the barricade, people who had never met and would never have met. So Tanya in her tiny little mini skirt was paired with Nouria, who's a very religious Muslim in a full hijab, right? And the first few nights they sat there, they were like, this is super awkward. We've got nothing to talk about. Who could have less in common than us? As the nights went on, they started talking. And Tania and Nuria discovered they had something incredibly powerful in common. So Tanya had first come to Kotti when she was 15 years old. She was thrown out. She was from a kind of middle class family. They hated that she was obsessed with punk. They threw her out. She came there to live in a squat and within a few months she got pregnant. That's when Nuria told Tania something she'd actually never told anyone in Germany before. So she had come from Turkey when she was 16, she'd had two babies, twins, and she came to live in Berlin. And she was meant to earn enough money to send back home to her husband in Turkey so he could come and join her. So she worked every hour she could. God knows how she managed it with these kids. And after a couple of years, when she almost had the money, she got word from home that her husband had died. She had always told people in Germany that her husband had died of a heart attack. But sitting there in the cold at night with Tania and Kotti, she told her the truth, which is that her husband had died of tuberculosis, which at the time was seen as like a shameful disease of immigrants in Germany. Tania and Nuria realized that they were incredibly similar. They had both been kids with kids of their own in this place. They didn't really understand. So directly opposite Kotti, this housing project, there's a gay club called Zudblock. It opened about six months before the protests began. And Zoodblock is a pretty hardcore. To give you a sense of what it's like. The guy who owns it, Richard Stein, the previous place he owned was called Cafe Anal, which I thought you would want to have a sandwich with. Cafe Anal. It's a pun in German, Cafe Anal. But like, nonetheless. So when they opened this club, it's pretty hardcore. You know, there's a lot of very religious Muslims that live in Kati. Some people were really pissed off. Some people smashed their windows. And when the protest began, Zblock gave all their furniture to make the barricade. And after a little while, they said to the people in Kati, you know, you guys should have your plan planning meetings, strategy meetings in our club. Come now meeting, we'll give you free food and drink. And even the kind of lefty social justice people in Kati were like, listen, we're not going to persuade these very religious Muslims to come and have meetings underneath posters so obscene, I don't think I could describe them on your podcast. It did start to happen. As one of the Turkish German women there, Neriman Tanker, said to me, we all realized we had to take these small steps to understand each other if we were going to make this work. And after the protests had been going on for about a year by this time, this. This thing they'd block the road off with because a lot of people who live there are construction workers. They had turned it into like this lovely construction with like doors and roof and rooms. It was really nice. A guy started to turn up one day called Tun Kai. And Tun Kai at that time was. What was he in his early 50s? It's pretty clear when you meet Tun Kai, he' got some kind of cognitive difficulties. He'd been living on the streets and he showed up. He's got an amazing energy about. In Tunkai, he started helping out and everyone liked him. And when they realized he was homeless, he'd been living on the streets, they said to him, hey, you should come and live in this thing we've built, right? We don't want you to be on the streets. Come and live here. So Tunkai moved in and became a much loved part of the Kotti protest. Nine months later, the police showed up. They were. They would come around every now and then to inspect, and Tun Kai doesn't like it when people argue. And he thought the police were arguing, so he went to try to hug one of the officers to calm him down, and the police thought he was attacking them, so they arrested him. That was when it was discovered Tun Kai had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital for 20 years, often literally in a padded cell where literally no one came to see him. He'd escaped one day, he was on the street for a few months and he'd found his way to Kati. So the police took him back to the psychiatric hospital at the other side of Berlin. It was in Charlottenburg, at which point the entire Kotti protest turned into a free Tunkai movement. Right? They descend on this psychiatric hospital on the other side of Berlin. And I remember these psychiatrists being like, what is this? They've got this guy they've had shut away for 20 years who no one cared about, and suddenly they've got these women in hijabs, these very camp gay men, and these punks from Mohicans going, no, let him out. But I remember the psychiatrists, one of them saying, oh, right, so you guys, you want to look after him? And they're like, no, he looks after us. He's part of us. I remember Uli Hartman, one of the people at Cotti, saying to them, but you don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us. Right? You think about that sense of belonging. And I remember when that happened, or shortly afterwards, talking to people about it and think, thinking, God, how many of us, if we were taken away to a psychiatric hospital, would have like dozens and dozens of people going, no, no, no, you don't get to do this. This person comes with us, right? Many things happened at Kati. They got Tuncai back. He lives there still. They got a rent freeze for their entire housing project. They then launched a referendum initiative to keep rents down across the whole of Berlin that got the largest number of written signatures in the history of Germany. But the last time I saw Nuria, the woman who'd started all this by putting that sign in our window, she said to me, you know, I'm really glad I got to stay in my apartment. That's great. I gained so much more than that. I was surrounded by these incredible people all along, and I never knew. And I remember one of the Turkish, German women there, Neriman. And she said to me, you know, when I grew up in Turkey, I grew up in a village, and I called my whole village home. And then I came to live in the Western world, and I learned that here what you're meant to call home is just your four walls and if you're lucky, your family. And then she said this whole protest began and I started to think of all these people in this whole place as my home. And she said she realized in some sense, in this culture, we aren't homeless. Right? We don't have a sense of home that is big enough to meet our sense of belonging. And I remember one day I was sitting outside Cotti, outside Zoodblock, and I could see a lot of these people. I'd been hanging out there a long time. And I remember Tanya said to me, when you're all alone and you feel like shit, you think there's something wrong with you. But what we did is we came out of our corner crying and we started to fight. And we realized we were surrounded by people who felt the same way. And I think you can tell I absolutely love these people in Kotti. They are not exceptional, except in one way, which is they listened to each other's distress and they chose to act on it, not pathologize it or ignore it. They didn't need to be pathologized. They needed to be seen and valued and to act together and to build a sense of home together.
- [22:43]
B
Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, that's so interesting. What do you think we can learn from it on a practical level? I mean, I don't know what you think, but I often think that when we're looking for a new home for ourselves, a flat somewhere, a house somewhere, we can get quite obsessed with the four walls to your point, the construction of the actual thing, the beautiful facade, the aesthetic quality of it. But actually, I wonder whether the starting point should be, how does this home enable me to see as many of the people that I love as regularly as possible?
- [23:20]
A
100%. You know, the average home has a massively increasing amount of floor space. And the number of friends we have has declined and declined and declined. There's a really interesting moment on Desert Island Discs when John Bishop, the Liverpool comedian, so he grew up in Liverpool in a working class community in Liverpool, on an estate, and he's obviously very wealthy now. And he. If I remember rightly, I might be getting some of the details wrong, but I think he took his sons back to the estate. He grew up on. And he thought they would go, oh, my God. You grew up in this terrible poverty. Like, look at how small the houses are actually. They said, this is amazing. You were with your friends all the time. You could have walked out your door and your mates were there immediately, right? It blew their mind. And we think about different forms of wealth, right? Jeff Dyer, writer, wrote in one of his books that, you know, rich people pay a fortune to go to places that are called exclusive. That means other people are kept out. All the best places in the world are inclusive. They're where anyone can walk through the door. You really, since I spent a lot of time in Vegas because I've been writing a book about Las Vegas and a series of crimes that have happened in Las Vegas. Someone I know who's worked in a casino reception in the casino's concierge said. I said, you know which country has the most unhappy, miserable tourists? He said, it's not which country, it's wealth. If you're poor and you can't afford to stay, you're miserable. Once you get to be middle income, you're happy. Beyond that, the richer the guests, the more miserable they are. The more they moan, the more they complain, the more they're trained to look for dissatisfaction, the more unhappy and unfulfilled they feel. We have been taught systematically and structurally to value the wrong things, right? Everyone knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, right? I don't say that with any judgment. I could write a whole book about the fried chicken shops in a 10 minute radius of this building, as in no judgment. But there's equally strong evidence that a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick, right? We have been taught that life is about working hard at jobs. You don't like to acquire shit. You don't need to display it on social media to make people go, omg, so jealous, right? And I spent a lot of time interviewing an amazing man named Professor Tim Casser, who did a huge amount of research on this, who showed that this makes you miserable. Now, in some ways, that's a no shit, Sherlock finding. We all know none of us are gonna lie on our deathbeds and think about all the shoes we bought and all the likes we got on Instagram. We're gonna think about moments of love and meaning and connection in our lives. But as Professor Kasser put it to me, we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life, right? More 18 month old children know what the McDonald's M means than know their own last name from before we can even think clearly, we are absolutely inundated with the idea you don't feel good. There's a solution to that. Buy a load of shit you don't need.
- [26:09]
B
Right?
- [26:09]
A
It's very, very deep in our. In the culture that we've constructed. So these kind of junk values have diverted us from what at some level we all know to be true, which is that that is not the most important thing about life. Of course, if you are in poverty, if you don't have the means to get the basics of life, then it's very important to get money. And that really is a source of unhappiness. But beyond that, you don't get more happy the more money you get.
- [26:34]
B
Right? Yeah, exactly right. So, I mean, why do we therefore climb the property ladder? Why do we look for these signs of status? What are we trying to achieve with that, do you think?
- [26:48]
A
Well, all human beings are a mixture of two kinds of motivation. This has been written about in psychology for 80 years now. So intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. So imagine you play the piano. I'm absolutely shit at music. This isn't me. But if you play the piano, if you play the piano in the morning because playing the piano gives you joy, that would be an intrinsic reason to play the piano. You're not doing it to get something out of it further down the line. It's just that is really something you value, Right? Okay, now imagine you don't play the piano for that reason, but let's imagine you play it. Cause your parents dream for you, is for you to be a piano maestro and you're doing it to please them. Or you want to post clips on Instagram to get likes. Or maybe there's some woman you're trying to impress with playing a particular tune. Or maybe you play it in a dive bar every Friday to pay the rent, right? Those would be what are called extrinsic reasons to play the piano. You're not doing it because that thing is meaningful. You're doing it to get something out of it further down the line. Now, we're all a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and that's health. You should be. But we live in a culture that drives us extremely heavily towards extrinsic motivations. To give you an obvious example, I've just come back from Korea and I did a day of like, tourismy stuff and there were people, other British people there who had traveled A really long way to come to Korea, right? And they were not experiencing Korea at all. They were taking out their phones, posing for selfies, using it effectively as a backdrop to make. To display to people back home. And then they would post it immediately, and then they would look to see the likes as it came. So they were not present. Now, we've all had that experience, right? That's an example of you're in something that is intrinsically pleasurable, you've come a long way, you're maybe never gonna be in Korea again. What an amazing thing. It would have taken a year to get to Korea 150 years ago. You're in Korea. Wow. Fascinating. Incredible. Strange. Genuinely different country. But rather than be present in that experience, the intrinsic pleasure of being in Korea, you jot yourself out of it into the extrinsic display, which, by the way, will only make your friends in London feel like shit. Oh, fucking Bob's in Korea. Fuck him. I'm stuck in the office, right? No one's winning from that bargain, right? No one wants to see your picture of Korea, right? So you can see how we're in our culture, we are being forced out of intrinsic motivation and into extrinsic motivation. And as Professor Kasser puts it, human psyches are very fragile and we can very easily be jolted into an extrinsic space. And it's hard to find your way back to an intrinsic space once that's happened. One of the reasons, I think, answer your question, I mean, there's lots more, but.
- [29:29]
B
Well, let's talk about that then, because obviously, you know, you've spoken a lot about belonging, but then there's also your book. Stolen Focus is all about this idea that our attention is constantly being grabbed away from us. How does that. Just looking at the home, specifically, how should we think about it through the lens of the home, do you think? How do we help ourselves there?
- [29:51]
A
I guess the way I would think about it is the very word home requires presence. If you're not present, you're not at home, right? It requires you to be open and present to your environment. And that requires attention. And our attention is being systematically degraded and stolen. Think about the transformation in our lifetime. I think we're probably about the same age and. And we've lived through a staggering transformation. The average office worker, according to research by Professor Gloria Mark, who I interviewed, focuses on only one task for 40 seconds. Now, for every one child who was identified with serious attention problems when we were 7 years old, there's now 100 children who've been identified with that problem, and that is not the fault of those individuals. Right. This is part of an enormous machinery of degradation that is profoundly undermining our ability to think deeply and pay attention. And that degrades your ability to be present with anything, with your home, with your work. I would say to anyone watching, think about anything you've ever achieved that you're proud of, whether it's starting a business, being a good parent, launching a podcast, you know, playing the guitar, whatever it is, that thing that you're proud of required a huge amount of sustained focus and attention. And the evidence is very clear that when your ability to focus and pay attention degrades, your ability to achieve anything. Degrades. Right. And you feel worse about yourself because you actually are less competent when you can't pay attention. So I think there are two levels at which we need to tackle this. Defense and offense. There are loads of things we can do in our homes to immediately defend ourselves and our kids. Go online, buy something called a K Safe. It's just the letter K Safe. It's a plastic safe. You take off the lid, you put in your phone. You put on the lid, you turn the dial at the top, and it will lock your phone away for anything between five minutes and a whole day. Once it's locked, you can't get into it. I mean, you could smash it if it was an emergency. But then you gotta buy another Ksave. I use that for three hours a day to do my writing. I won't have people around for dinner unless we all agree to put our phone in the phone jail. And it's really difficult at first, right? But the pleasures of knowing that I am listening to you and you are listening to me are so much deeper than whatever shitty Instagram update you'll get in two hours time anyway, right? So that'd be one, two. Download onto your phone an app called Freedom. We all have our weaknesses on the Internet. Some people it's ebay. Some people it's Pornhub. Some people it's Amazon. For me, it would be Instagram. And you can tell that app to block you from looking at that website for five minutes. For five hours. I have Instagram permanently blocked on my phone. I can occasionally access it on my laptop, but never on my phone because I just don't want people to stand up at my funeral and say, yeah, Johan looked at a lot of clips on Instagram. That's just not a good life for me. Right? So those are two very practical things. Loads more I could Recommend. But I want to really level with people because I don't think most people who are communicating about attention are being honest with people. I am passionately in favor of these individual changes. They will make a real difference to your life. But on their own, they are not enough to deal with this crisis. Because this crisis didn't happen because you had bad habits and I have bad habits and our kids have bad habits. This happened because of really big and invasive forces and we need to take on those big and invasive forces. And that might sound very pie in the sky, but that fight has already begun. And the question for everyone is, do you want to join that fight?
- [33:20]
B
What role do you think nature has in all this, would you say?
- [33:23]
A
There's really interesting stuff about this. There's an amazing, literally up the road from here, there's an amazing world leading example of this. So a guy you should have on the podcast, Sam Everington, Dr. Sam Everington, a wonderful man. Sam's a GP here in East London. Sadly, he was never my doctor in when I lived here for a long time. And Sam had loads of patients coming in with really bad depression and anxiety. And like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants. He thinks they have some positive role to play. But he could see when that was all he was doing, prescribing chemical antidepressants, it was taking the edge off for some people, but most of them did actually remain depressed. He began to pioneer a different approach that's now spreading all over Europe. The fancy term for it is social prescribing. So one day a woman came to him called Lisa, Lisa Cunningham, who I got to know well later. So Lisa had been shut away in her home just literally up the road from here with crippling depression and anxiety. She was really suffering. And Sam said to Lisa, don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs, but I'm also going to prescribe something else. I want you to come here twice a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people. Not to talk about how shit you feel. You can do that if you want, but that's not the point of it. I want you guys to, to figure out something interesting that you could do together. And the first time the group met Lisa literally was like vomiting with anxiety. It was just so overwhelming. But the group started chatting. They looked after her, they were chatting. They're like, what could we do? And these are inner city East London people like me. They knew nothing about gardening, nothing about nature. But there was an Area behind the doctor's office that was called Dog Shit Alley. Think gives you a sense of what it was like. It was a scrubland, basically, where dogs would go and do their business. And they were like, well, we could turn Dog Alley into a garden, right? So they started to get books out, the library, started to watch videos on YouTube. They started to get their fingers in the soil. They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. The way Lisa put it to me, you know, as the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom, right? There's a lot of evidence that disconnection from the natural world causes depression and anxiety. And reconnection with nature can be profoundly healing and restorative. It gives you a sense of awe. It lifts you out of your sense of ego. It gives you a sense that you are small and the world is big and you're part of this beautiful big tapestry. There's also a debate about what's called biophilia, that we do seem to actually love looking at green stuff. But they started 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. If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them and be like, hey, what's wrong? It was a bit like Cotti, right, in Berlin. And there's a growing body of research, and this is still small, but growing. One study, I think, in Norway found that it was social prescribing was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants in reducing depression and anxiety. I think, for a kind of obvious reason, right? It's dealing with the actual reasons why people are depressed and anxious. And this is something I saw in the research for lost connections all over the world, from Sydney to Sao Paulo to San Francisco, not just begin with letter S. I don't know why that happened in my head there. The best strategies for dealing with depression anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we feel so bad in the first place. And disconnect from nature is a really profound one.
- [36:36]
B
So we talked about belonging and we've talked about kind of crisis of attention. To what extent do you think those two things are linked? How are they sort of part of the same story, would you say?
- [36:47]
A
Oh, in so many ways. I mean, I'll give you an example of one. Every time you open Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, which I refuse to call X, those companies begin to make money out of you in several ways. The most important is you're scrolling down, you see advertising they make money from ads. Everyone knows how that works. You don't need me to explain it. The second way they make money is much more important. And this was explained to me when I spent a lot of time for Stolen Focus in Silicon Valley interviewing the people who designed this machinery. And they explained to me, everything you do on these apps is scanned and sorted by their artificial intelligence algorithms to figure out who you are and what makes you tick, what makes you happy, what makes you angry, what makes you horny, what makes you sad. And it's figuring this out for lots of reasons, but the main one is to figure out what to show you next to keep you scrolling. Because every time you open the app and begin to scroll, they begin to make money because you see ads. The longer you scroll, the more money they make, because you see more advertising. Every time you close these, the app, that revenue stream disappears. So all of this genius in Silicon Valley, or this AI or these algorithms, when it's applied to social media, is designed to do one thing and one thing only, to figure out how do we get you to open the app as often as possible and scroll as long as possible? That's it, Right? So they've produced machines designed to hack and harvest our attention. Now, that makes us less present in our everyday surroundings, which obviously undermines a sense of belonging at home. But I think there's a deeper mechanism that's even more worrying. The algorithms were set up to figure out what does actually keep people scrolling, and they don't care what it is, they're agnostic about what it is. They just want you to scroll. And the algorithms discovered something that's actually been known about by psychologists for nearly 100 years now. The fancy term for it is negativity bias. It's very simple. Human beings will stare longer at things that make us angry and upset than we will at things that make us feel good. If you've ever seen a car crash on the motorway, you know exactly what I mean. You stared longer at the car wreck than you did at the pretty flowers on the other side of the street. This is very deep in human nature. It's always been part of us. But when it combines with algorithms that learn what makes you specifically angry and pissed off, it leads to a disastrous effect. So imagine a situation. What would be a good example? Picture two girls who go to the same party and they go home on the same bus, right? And they both open TikTok and make videos. And one of them goes. The first girl goes, that was such a great night. We danced all night to Taylor Swift and bts. Loved it. Amazing, right? The algorithm is scanning for the kind of words you use and it's gonna put that video into a few people's feeds. Now imagine the next girl opens her TikTok and goes, karen was an absolute skank at that party and her boyfriend's a prick and just angrily denounces everyone. I don't think teenagers still say sk, but we'll set that aside. Angrily denounces everyone. Right? The algorithm is scanning for those words because it knows about negativity bias. If it's enraging, it's engaging. You'll stare longer at something that makes you angry. It's going to put that video into far more people's feeds. Right? So the more mean and negative your videos are, the more shocking they are. The more, the more they get promoted, the more people get to see them. Now that is bad enough at the level of two teenage girls on a bus. We all know what's happened to the mental health of teenage girls in this society in reaction to these technologies. But now imagine that happening to a whole society where the kind people, the people who want to get along, people who want to say nice things are muffled and pushed to the back. And the mean, hostile and aggressive people are given a megaphone and pushed to the front. Now you think about how that relates to a sense of home, to a sense of home. You've got to have a sense that you like things. Your sense of home comes from positivity. Think about your wider sense of home. Our country, for example, right? I love Britain, right? I'm like comically patriotic. I love our sense of humor. I love the way British people are with each other, especially as I'm away so much. I just love it when I get back, right? It's a sign of how British I am that I want to hug people. Cause I love it so much. And of course I don't. Because we're British and that sense of positivity about our country is being complete, which most British people feel, right? It's been completely driven out by, by this. And we have plenty of problems as a country, don't get me wrong. But this mad, apocalyptic, hate filled narrative, we're being constantly primed to despise and hate each other. Now that's catastrophic for individual mental health. That's catastrophic for our sense of home. It's in the long term. You just can't have a democracy if you're constantly being primed to hate each other in bubbles of rage and fury. I'VE since happened to so many people. I know. I'm sure you have as well, where they just end up hating everyone or tied to narrower, narrower positions where they think everyone who doesn't hold those narrow positions is repulsive and evil. So, yeah, that's one of the many ways it poisons the well of a sense of home, in my view.
- [42:00]
B
Yeah. Okay. I want to take us back to something we touched on at the beginning of the podcast, which is your own experiences of depression and anxiety. And you said that you've largely lifted yourself out of that, that you have moments when you feel anxious, as we all do in modern life, but that it sounds like it's not affecting your life in the way it did before. What do you put that down to?
- [42:26]
A
Would you say I'm very careful with. And you're not priming me to do this, but I just want to be careful to say so. Lost connections and the huge amount of research I did for it is very much not one of those books, kind of self helping books goes well, dear reader, I did this and now you can too. Depression, anxiety are extremely complex. The scientific evidence for nine different causes. Are you right? If I tell you a story for about two minutes, you think, what the fuck is he talking about? What's this got to do with this? My question, bear with me. I promise you it does answer your question. In the early 1980s, there was a doctor in San Diego called Vincent Felitti who was approached, got an offer. So he was contacted by Kaiser Permanente, who are one of the big not for profit medical providers in California.
- [43:09]
B
Yeah.
- [43:11]
A
And they said, look, we've got a problem. We know what to do. The problem was that obesity was rising at the time. It was hugely rising. Actually it was pretty low compared to today, but it was going up. And they were like, look, nothing we do is working. We give people diet plans. It doesn't work. We give people personal trainers. It doesn't work. Can we give you money to just do blue skies research and figure out what would, what would work? So he's like, yeah, okay. He takes the money and he's like, oh, what am I gonna do? So he started to work with 250 very obese people, people who weigh more than 300 pounds and had for a long time and he's working with them and he's like, well, what could we do? And he has this idea that sounds and in fact is quite stupid. He said, what would happen if really obese people literally stopped eating? And we gave them like vitamin C shots. They can get scurvy or whatever. Would they burn through the fat supplies in their body and get down to a healthy weight? So with a ton of medical supervision, they tried. And incredibly, at first, it works. So there's a woman, I'm going to call her Susan, it's not a real name, who went down from being more than 300 pounds to 138 pounds. Incredible. Her family were phoning Dr. Felitti and saying, wow, you've saved her life. There was huge weight loss in this program. And then one day, something happened that no one expected. Susan cracked. She went to KFC or something like it, and she started very heavily eating, and she started to gain a lot of weight. Not. Not quite where she was, but gained a lot of weight. And Dr. Felitti called her in. He said, susan, what happened? She looked down. She was really ashamed. She said, I don't know, I don't know. And he said, well, tell me about the day you cracked. Did anything in particular happen that day? It turned out something happened that day that had actually never happened to Susan before. She was in a bar and a man started chatting her up. Not in a horrible way, in a nice way, but she felt really freaked out and went and started overeating. That's when Dr. Felitti asked her a question he hadn't asked his patients before. He said, well, tell me about when you first started to gain weight. How old were you? And in her case, it was. She was 11, I think. He said, well, did anything in particular happen when you were 11 that didn't happen when you were like 10 or 14? Anything in particular happened that year? And Susan looked down and she said, well, that's when my grandfather started to rape me. And Dr. Felloti interviewed everyone in the program and discovered that 60% of the women had made their extreme weight gain in the aftermath of being sexually abused or assaulted. And at first he's like, what's this about? And Susan explained it to him really well. She said, overweight is overlooked, and that's what I need to be. Dr. Felitti realized this thing that seems so dysfunctional, Gaining a lot of weight and obviously is bad for your health in one way was performing a profoundly positive function for these women. This was a small study, right? It's 200 people. It seems like such a weird finding, 60%, like such a huge number. So Dr. Paluti went to the Centers for Disease Control, who fund a lot of medical research in the US and got money to do a much bigger study. And this is where it led to an incredible breakthrough in depression and anxiety that later helped me. So every single person who came to Kaiser Permanente for healthcare in the city of San Diego, across the whole year, doesn't matter what force, schizophrenia, broken leg, anything, was given a questionnaire. And the first part said, did any of these bad things happen to you when you were a kid? Things happen like neglect, sexual abuse, physical abuse. And it was good to ask at the end just about your weight. But luckily for us, at the last minute, they had a load of other stuff, like, have you ever had an addiction problem? Have you attempted suicide? Are you depressed? That kind of thing. And when they added up the figures, at first they thought, I know we've made a mistake. These figures don't make sense. Do it all. Again, they added them up. The figures were correct. For every category of childhood trauma you experienced, you were two to four times more likely to be depressed. Depressed, anxious, addicted, obese. I mean, but when you went into the multiple categories of childhood trauma, the figures were extraordinary. If you had experienced six categories of childhood trauma, you were 3100% more likely to have an addiction problem and 4600% more likely to have attempted suicide. Which is just. I mean, you don't really get figures like that in medical science very often. And I remember when I first. When I interviewed. Interviewed Dr. Paluti the first time in San Diego. He's a super nice man. You'd like him if you met him. It's quite an old guy. When I met him, I could see that this was good research. I'd read it in advance, obviously, and I felt really angry with him and actually ended the interview early. And I remember walking on the beach in San Diego. I think, why am I so angry with this really nice old guy who's, like, done all this good research? What I heard from it, because I had experienced some very extreme things when I was a child. Child. What I heard him as saying is, so if you've been through this childhood trauma, you're broken. You're. You're like a. A cursed person. Right? Of course, that is not the tone in which he was saying it, or indeed the substance in what he was saying. But that's how I heard it. But I'm really glad I went back because what. What they discovered next in their research was really important for me. So after they finished this research, this wave of the research, they suddenly had all these people in San Diego who'd indicated that they'd been abused as children. And they were like, what do we do with all this data? Right. It seems like quite a big deal. So their doctors were told, don't call them back in. But next time they come in, say to them something like, I see that when you were a child, you were abused. I'm really sorry that happened to you. That should never have happened. You should have been protected. Would you like to talk about it? And 40% of people said, no, I don't want to talk about it. But 60% of people did want to talk about it. And they wanted to talk about, on average for five minutes. And then it was random, randomly assigned that some of them could see a therapist and talk about it more. What was incredible was just those five minutes of an authority figure saying, I'm so sorry, that should never have happened to you. That alone led to a significant fall in depression and anxiety. And the people who were randomly assigned, one got a therapist, got bigger fall. It's not the trauma that screws you over. It's the shame about the trauma. You know, people who are abused are almost always told by their abuser they deserve it. They internalize these ideas. Cause you're a child. We mentioned this before. Releasing shame is profoundly healing. So for me, I think understanding that my feelings of depression, anxiety were signals that something had gone wrong in my childhood, that my needs had not been met, that I've been subject to things I should not have been subjected to, and that that wasn't my fault. Right. And I would never look at a child and think it was their fault that these crazy things happened to them. So why would I think that about myself? That was profoundly healing for me, in addition to lots of other things that I wrote about in Lost Connections that connects, you know, I've got very meaningful work, I've got very secure and stable and loving relationships and friendships. You know, so many of the factors that cause depression, anxiety, kind of, I think I was able to heal them partly because of this deeper healing. Different people need different things. Of course, this is not for everyone, but the. Yeah, but for me, I think that was really important. So, you know, I mean, I have mild, mildly anxious sometimes, but I mean, a human being who didn't feel mild anxiety would in fact be impaired. Right. Like, that would be a bad thing if you couldn't feel any anxiety. So. No, but my anxiety is always within normal and healthy ranges now. And I don't ever feel depressed now. So I really feel it has been a kind of healing journey. And I think to find your way anywhere you need maps. I came here to the studio. And I've been here before. I used Google Maps. Right. If that map had been wrong, I would not be here. But I think what's happened is we've been given inaccurate or. Or oversimplified maps of our pain and our distress for a very long time now. When I went to my doctor when I was a teenager, my doctor, lovely person, said, oh, we know what's wrong with you. There's just some problem with your brain chemistry and you just need some drugs now. There are real biological factors that can contribute to depression and anxiety. The science on that is very clear. And chemical antidepressants give some relief to some people. But that was a ludicrously oversimplified story. Right. Actually, she told me that there was a chemical imbalance in my brain, which is not true. There's never been any evidence that depressed people have a chemical imbalance in their brains. Incredibly, that's a concept that's actually invented by drug company marketers. It was never even a scientific concept. But people are still being told that all the time by their doctors, who should know better by now. Which is not to say there aren't biological factors. There are. There are real brain changes that happen when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out. And your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems that they don't write your destiny.
- [52:05]
B
Yeah. Extent. Is it genetic? Is there a percentage on that?
- [52:09]
A
So your genes interact with your environment, so you may be genetically more predisposed to these problems. You may be more sensitive. A better way to think about it is genetically more sensitive to these problems. But you can't assess the genetic sensitivity in the absence of environmental stimuli that trigger it. What we do know is no one is just predestined by their genes to just whatever the environment and whatever happens in their psyche and whatever happens in their life to be like this. That is not true. Right. There used to be this debate where they would talk about exogenous and endogenous depression. We've moved on from that. The genetic debate has moved on so that it is similar with attention. Right. Some people are genetically more sensitive to the factors that are screwing up our attention, but that just means they're like canaries in the coal mine. We have to be even more important in dealing with the environmental factors, like social media companies invading our attention. For them, the genes aren't a reason to not deal with it. They're an even greater reason to deal with it because they're going to be more sensitive. So, yeah, it's I mean, actually, the genetic debate is. Was completely thrown off for many years by. By many factors. But, yeah, that's. That's. That's now what we know.
- [53:15]
B
Okay, can we circle back to.
- [53:18]
A
Sure.
- [53:19]
B
Something that we brought up at the beginning and you. Where I suggested that this idea of the home is somehow connected to the way that you feel inside of yourself. When I said, you know, perhaps when you were going through that period of depression, you somehow didn't feel at home within your own body and mind. What do you think about that now after what we talked about today? I mean, do you feel at home inside yourself as a human being now? And do you think you always have done? And how would you see that link between this word home and your physicality?
- [53:54]
A
It's a really interesting question. I think the honest answer is, I don't know. But a few things come into my mind, and I feel much less confident about answering this than I do anything else we talked about. I think, and I've noticed this with several people I know this is not a scientific. This is an anecdotal observation. I think people whose homes, when their children are very violent or disturbed can develop an odd sense of home because for most people, home is the place of safety and the outside world is the place of, like, danger that you need to navigate and learn. And I didn't and don't feel like that. Like, I'm just. I've just finished this book that'll be out next year, where for 15 years intermittently I've been going to this. Underneath Las Vegas. There's 600 miles of drainage tunnels, and there are many homeless people who live in these drainage tunnels. And the homeless population of Las Vegas have been being targeted by serial killers. And the book is the story of the people who live in the tunnels and the serial killers who murdered them. And it's funny, for my fact checking, I had to go back and listen to a recording from years and years ago. So there's an amazing charity run by my friends Rob and Paul and George and Danika called Shine a Light. And they're people who used to live in the tunnels who got out and now help the people who still live in the tunnels. They're the most heroic people I know. One time I was. I think it was Rob, and he said we were in a sketchy part of the tunnels and. And Rob said to me something like, you know, Johan, I've noticed, but you're a bit different to the other journalists we've taken down here. Most people we bring down here they're quite nervous. But you seem so relaxed. And I said I'd completely forgot I said this. I said, oh, Rob, if you met my family, this feels just like home to me. Right. So there's. I think it gave me an odd sense of relationship to home. I think it meant that I had a high threshold for being in dangerous places or danger in my own life. Some of which was very good for me in terms of it's enabled a lot of my work. Some of which was not so good for me in terms of like putting yourself in dangerous positions can obviously lead to you being hurt. And it did sometimes, I think, in relationship to my own body. I think again about what V. Eve Ensler said. Vee wrote this amazing book of about called the Apology. Her father sexually abused her when she was starting when she was 8. And it gave her this impaired relationship with her body. And then many, many years later, when she was in her 50s, she got a very serious form of cancer, which she writes about in her book in the Body of the World. And she actually discovered a love for her body through this cancer and a kind of healing because she realized her body's capacity to heal took her back to this or gave her a sense of admiration for its capacities. That really healed some of the disengagement from her body that happened when she was sexually abused. And V always has talked to me about my relationship with my body and is urging me to have a healthier relationship with it. But I think in my case, because some of the abuse I experienced was very physical abuse for violence. I do think when you're a child, if you experience violent abuse, it can cause a separation from the body and a sense of sort of disembodiment or dissociation from the body. So, yeah, I think that's probably gonna sound very Californian. Probably a journey I'm still on, but the. I think that's a journey I'm still on to some degree. I think it's a sense of re. Embodiment and. Or reinhabiting your own body. I do feel quite disconnected from that. I'm not someone who gets other than I think through sex. I don't think I really get many bodily pleasures. My pleasures are sort of pleasures of the mind or of connecting with people or they're not. So, yeah, you've correctly identified something I need to think about more.
- [57:53]
B
It's interesting, isn't it? But you're very cerebral, aren't you? So you're clearly spending huge amounts of time in your own head. You're writing books, you're thinking about things a lot. You're researching, you're interviewing, talking to people. And then, of course, when you. When you publish a book, you're. Then, you know, you're talking about what you've learned. I think it's really interesting what you're saying, because I think if you suffer abuse at an early age, I'm sure that you learn absolutely to take yourself out of your own body. I mean, that makes so much sense to me.
- [58:26]
A
And I think also that doubleness of not only are you being hurt, but you're being told that you caused this hurt, that it's your fault. Right. So it's not just a disconnection with the body, but then a blaming of yourself and your body. Yeah. And I think it's not enough to just have. It's an essential stage, I suspect. But it's not enough to have the intellectual insight of, oh, right, that's what happened there. You can know that. And I believe that is extremely helpful. But I don't think that on its own, it heals it.
- [58:58]
B
Have you tried meditation?
- [59:00]
A
I can't. I can't do it. For a while I did. The only form of meditation I can do, and I still do about once a month, is loving kindness meditation. Do you know about it?
- [59:08]
B
No. Go on.
- [59:09]
A
So I was taught this by my friend Rachel Schubert, who teaches it if people want to look her up. So we live in environments which are so prone to make us feel envious and covetous. Right. And it's a really simple meditation. So what you do is you close your eyes and you begin. You picture someone. The first bit is very easy. Easy. Picture someone you love and you imagine something nice happening for them. And you feel the pleasure. You feel loving kindness towards them. That's easy. Then you picture someone you slightly know. I live on a street where there's a corner shop. At the end, there's a guy who works on the corner shop. And I used to pitch him, but I had to stop because I realized that I was being overly friendly to him after these meditations. Cause it was like, could I've done it for too long? But you picture that person, right? So I don't even know this person's name, Right. Someone I see. I go in there every day, but I don't know his name. I couldn't tell you five facts about his life. And I would picture him and I tried to imagine something happening for him and feeling genuinely happy for him. Right. And then this is where it gets harder Picture someone you don't like. It could be someone who's harmed you or someone who you just don't like in the world. And you try to imagine something happening, good happening for them and the pleasure and joy they're feeling. You try to really feel the happiness, happy for them. Right. And it's a nice way of trying to reset your disposition towards the world. We live in an environment that's so priming us to feel envious and, you know. But just individual meditation. There's significant numbers of people, very often, by the way, survivors of childhood trauma, for whom meditation is not the right thing. I mean, it's fabulous for lots of people. I'm in favor of it. People try it, but if I do it for more than five minutes, my brain starts to spin out.
- [60:57]
B
So I'm exactly the same.
- [60:58]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [60:59]
B
Which is why I asked you about it, because I had a feeling that you would say that. And I suppose I bring it up because I think for people listening or watching, I think it's actually quite important to pass that message on because I think we're sort of all told that we should be able to do this. And it's the thing that's going to make us feel better. I mean, people will disagree with this, but I personally don't think we're all necessarily wired that way. And I. For me, for example, going for a run, it's a very meditative act because there's the repetition of putting one foot in front of the other. You're out outside in the air. But even going for a walk in London and, you know, I was like peering down, you know, at dusk, when you see people going back their lives through sweaty windows, you know, that's quite meditative. I don't think you have to necessarily sit in a corner and try and resolve yourself into stillness. I still think there. There are ways of doing it through movement, I suppose. And I think if you're naturally a movement person, I think that's okay.
- [61:54]
A
So what happens to you when you try to do the still bit?
- [61:57]
B
I've always thought that my worst job would be being an extra in Casualty, where you sprawled out on hospital bed with various wires coming out of you. Because my body does not like to be still. It's just the way that I am. So I just immediately feel the urge to sprint out of the room. And I've had the same. You know, I've tried acupuncture. That's exactly the same for me. Acupuncture is like being sort of nailed into a Bed, you know, we're all different and that's okay.
- [62:28]
A
Anyone who's interested in this debate, I would really recommend my friend Ronald Purser's book, McMindfulness.
- [62:33]
B
Okay.
- [62:34]
A
It's a really interesting book. And he's of course in favour of meditation and mindfulness for whoever wants to do it. And he sees there are benefits to it for many people. But I'm pretty sure he gives an example of a company in the US that threw their employees off their health insurance, but then gave them free meditation classes to deal with the anxiety. I think there's like a perfect example of like, or a paradigmatic example of like a kind of general trend which is we'll make people's lives worse and then we'll tell them the job is on them to fix it by not being so anxious. He introduced me to a great concept by a historian called Lauren Berlant. Cruel optimism, it's called. So cruel optimism is where you take something with really big and deep causes, obesity, depression, attention problems, and you say, hey, buddy, great news, I got the answer for you. You've got all these attention problems. All you need to do is meditate 10 minutes a day on this app. You're going to be fine, right? Or, you know, obesity, because this environment is poisoning us all and making us sick from the moment we're born. Hey, just do this little diet plan. You're going to be great. And it sounds like optimism because you're presenting the person with solution. It's in fact cruel because nine times out of 10, you're setting them up to fail. Not that there aren't benefits to these things. Of course there are. But you're setting them up to fail. And generally when you fail, you think, oh, shit, well, there must be something wrong with me because I did the thing that was the solution. And here I am still feeling like shit. So the alternative to cruel optimism is not pessimism. I do not want pessimism. I'm not a pessimistic person and I don't feel pessimistic about any of the problems that we've dealt with. In fact, I learned through my there are solutions being put into practice all over the world to all of these problems. The alternative to cruel optimism is authentic optimism where you scale the solutions to the size of the challenge. So think about what we're saying about social prescribing or think about regulating social media companies. These are problems which are matching the size of the problem, right? In addition to lots of individual changes that we can make in the Interim, because it's going to take a while to achieve those collective solutions, though they've already begun. I start to think about this. I think one of the reasons why it's easier for me to see this than some people is because I'm a 47 year old, I'm gay and I'm 47. And I think often people will say, look, you're right about these social problems that are making people feel terrible, but we're never gonna solve those problems. So we just need to focus solely at an individual level. And I say, I'm absolutely in favor of individual changes. We're together 100 step away. But if you went back to the 1950s and you were talking to a gay person who was depressed and you've gone, you know what? I think we can actually overthrow homophobia. Right? Good luck with that, mate. We've had 2,000 years of gay people being imprisoned, burned alive, beheaded. Yeah, yeah, you do. You focus on your overthrowing homophobia and we'll just cope psychologically with the living in the closet. And actually it's the people who overthrew homophobia who turned out to be right. I think a lot about amazing friend of mine, Andrew Sullivan, who. But in 1994, Andrew was diagnosed as HIV positive. This is the height of the AIDS crisis. He thought he had a couple of years to live. His best friend Patrick had just died of aids. And he thought, okay, I'm dying. What am I gonna do? So he quit his job, he was the editor of the New Republic magazine and went to a place I know well, Provincetown in Cape Cod, to die. And he thought, okay, I'm gonna die. I'm gonna do one last thing before I die. And he wrote a book, book, the first book ever to argue for a mad utopian idea, one that no one had ever written a book about before. And the crazy utopian idea that Andrew wrote a book advocating was gay marriage. And he thought, I'm never gonna live to see this. No one alive today, I'll ever live to see it. But maybe somewhere down the line someone's gonna pick up this idea. And when I get depressed about the scale of problems we face, and I'm using the word depressed colloquially when I get down about the challenges we face. I tried to imagine going back in time to 1994 and saying to Andrew as he's finishing Virtually Normal that book, okay, Andrew, you're not gonna believe me, but 24 years from now a you'll be alive. That would have completely blown his mind because he didn't know that protease inhibitors were about to. Come on. You'll be married to a man. Cause that'll be legal. And I'll be with you when the Supreme Court of the United States makes a ruling that quotes from your book that makes it mandatory for every state in the United States to introduce gay Marri. And the day after that, you're gonna be invited to have dinner with the president in a White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you and so many other people have achieved. Oh, and by the way, that president, he's gonna be black, right? I mean, it would have sounded like the most ludicrous, preposterous science fiction. Well, it happened. It happened. Cause enough people banded together in a spirit of love and compassion, didn't smash anything up. They didn't burn anything down. They didn't kill anyone. They appealed in a spirit of love and compassion for these changes, incredible changes are possible. They're possible when individuals are brave and when people are brave together. And none of these things that we've talked about are inevitable. We can remember a time before, lots of them. And we're not 1,000 years old, right? Whatever. My nephews say that I am. So we can deal with these problems if we want to. They are comprehensible. There are places in the world that are soft. We can join that fight.
- [67:51]
B
So I think as the last question, I'd like to just bring us back to belonging. If someone listening or watching feels slightly disconnected from the people around them, they feel like they don't belong in the place that they live in. So many of us, I think, are wrestling with this rootlessness and this kind of idea of we don't really know where we should be and why. Do you have any words of wisdom for them on that?
- [68:15]
A
I don't know if it's wisdom, but I would say that's not a problem in you. That's the product of us living in a weird, distorted environment. You know, I would tell them about an amazing guy I interviewed just up the road from here as well, actually, called Dr. Derek Sommerfeld, who had this moment of epiphany. So Dr. Sommerfeld was in Cambodia in 2001, I think, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for the people in Cambodia. Cambodia. They'd never had those drugs in that country before. And the local Cambodian doctors had never heard of them. So they were like, what are antidepressants? He wasn't there to work on this. He just happened to be there and so he told them, and they said to him, oh, we don't need them. We've already got antidepressants. And he was like, what do you mean? And he thought they were going to talk about some kind of, like, herbal remedy, like St. John's War or something. Instead, they told him a story. There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields, and one day he stood on a landmine left over from the war with the US and he got his leg blown off. So they gave him an artificial limb, and after a while, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently it's super painful to work underwater when you've got an artificial limb. And I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry a lot. After a while, he refused to get out of bed. He got what we would call, you know, classic depression. The doctors, the Cambodian said to him, well, that's when we gave him an antidepressant. And Dr. Sommerfeld was like, what is it? They explained that. They went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense, right? You know, talk to the guy for five minutes to see why he was so distressed. One of the doctors figured, you know, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer. He wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much. So they bought him a cow. The community bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped. Within a month, his depression was gone. It never came back. So they said to Dr. Sommerfeld, so you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant. That's what you mean right? Now, you've been raised to think the way we have about our feelings of dislocation and despair. That sounds like a joke. 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 tell us for years. If you're depressed, if you're anxious, if you're dislocated, you're not weak, you're not crazy. You're not, in the main, a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs. And what you need is love and practical support to get those needs met. And what I think that story tells us is depression and anxiety are not malfunctions. They are signals. Right? They're telling us something. They're very painful signals. I remember that very well. But they are telling us something so important and we need to stop insulting those signals by saying they're a sign of weakness or craziness or purely biological malfunction and start listening to them and honoring them. So that feeling of dislocation you experience is the product of a dysfunctional environment. It's not a flaw in you, and it's a necessary signal. And it's one that, by the way, huge numbers of people all around you are experiencing. So let's honor that signal, let's listen to it, let's figure out what it means. Because by following that signal, we can get to the solution to the signal, which is a rebuilding of home and belonging and community. Community.
- [71:38]
B
Fantastic. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much, Johan.
- [71:42]
A
Oh, what a pleasure. Great questions. Thank you.
- [71:43]
B
Really appreciate it.
- [71:44]
A
Hooray.
- [71:47]
B
Thanks everyone for listening along today. And thanks very much, of course, to the brilliant Johan. If you're interested in the themes we talked about today, I can recommend Johann's book Lost Connections, which is very interesting on the subject of belonging and how it affects our men, mental health in general. I thought it was really interesting. You can watch, of course, the video version of this podcast on YouTube and keep up to date with what we're doing over on Instagram. Homing members on Patreon, as you know, get access to all of our behind the scenes house tours with our guests as well. So the handle for all of those platforms is Oming with Matt. This episode was produced by Pod Shop with music by Simeon Walker. Thanks again folks and talk to you next time. Bye bye.