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Johann Hari

Johann Hari Books

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“As a culture, in the Western world, we work longer with each decade that passes. Ed Deci, a professor of psychology who I interviewed at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, has shown that an extra month per year has been tacked on to what, in 1969, was considered a full-time job.”

Work
Book:Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention— and How to Think Deeply Again
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“When John and his colleagues added up the data, they were startled. Feeling lonely, it turned out, caused your cortisol levels to absolutely soar - as much as some of the most disturbing things that can happen to you. Becoming acutely lonely, the experiment found, was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack. It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger.”

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“What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.”

ReadingBooks
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“The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The American Time Use Survey--which studies a representative sample of 26,000 Americans--found that between 2004 and 2017, the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40 percent, while for women, it was down by 29 percent. The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone.”

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“I realized that the collapse in reading books is in some ways a symptom of our atrophying attention, and in some ways a cause of it. It’s a spiral – as we began to move from books to screens, we started to lose some of the capacity for the deeper reading that comes from books, and that in turn, made us less likely to read books.”

ReadingBooks
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“I was for the first time in my life living within the limits of my attention's resources. I was observing as much information as I could actually process, think about and contemplate. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.”

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“He told me that literature is full of stories where humans create something in a burst of optimism and then lose control of their creation. Dr. Frankenstein creates a monster only for it to escape from him and commit murder. Aza began to think about these stories when he talked with his friends who were engineers working for some of the most famous websites in the world. He would ask them basic questions, like why their recommendation engines recommended one thing over another, and, he said to me, "they're like: 'We're not sure why it's recommending those things.'" They're not lying—they have set up a technology that is doing things they don't full comprehend. He always says to them: "Isn't that exactly the moment, in the allegories, where you turn the thing off—[when] it's starting to do things you can't predict?”

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“The average office worker now spends 40 percent of their work time wrongly believing they are "multitasking"--which means they are incurring all these costs for their attention and focus. In fact, uninterrupted time is becoming rare. One study found that most of us working in offices never get a whole hour uninterrupted in a normal day.”

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

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“If your picture of a perfect afterlife is being with the people you love all the time, why wouldn’t you choose, today while you're still alive, to be truly present with the people you love?”

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Book:Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions
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“For all the chatter that Britain has moved beyond class, recent studies have found that it determines the life chances of British people more today than at any point since the Second World War... A child born into a rich family in Britain will almost certainly live and die rich, while a child born into a poor family will almost certainly live and die poor.”

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“You will get something wrong today, and tomorrow, and every day of your life. So will I, and everybody you know. You don’t have a choice about being wrong sometimes: mistakes will be your life-long companion. But you do have a choice about whether to approach your error in terror so you suppress, ignore and repeat it — or to make it your honest, open ally in trying to get to the truth.”

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Author:Johann Hari
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“The opposite of addiction is human connection. And I think that has massive implications for the war on drugs. The treatment of drug addicts almost everywhere in the world is much closer to Tent City than it is to anything in Portugal. Our laws are built around the belief that drug addicts need to be punished to stop them. But if pain and trauma and isolation cause addiction, then inflicting more pain and trauma and isolation is not going to solve that addiction. It's actually going to deepen it.”

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