Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions

by Johann Hari

To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you.

Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else.

“every status update is a just a variation on a single request: ‘Would someone please acknowledge me?’

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

People who achieved their extrinsic goals didn’t experience any increase in day-to-day happiness—none.

Materialism is KFC for the soul.

One of his proudest moments was when one of his sons came home one day and said: “Dad, some kids at school are making fun of my sneakers.” They were not a brand name, or shiny-new. “Oh, what’d you say to them?” Tim asked. His son explained he looked at them and said: “Why do you care?” He was nonplussed—he could see that what they valued was empty, and absurd.

depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences.

intense pain for a long period, your brain will assume this is the state in which you are going to have to survive from now on—so it might start to shed the synapses that relate to the things that give you joy and pleasure, and strengthen the synapses that relate to fear and despair. That’s one reason why you can often start to feel you have become somehow fixed in a state of depression or anxiety even if the original causes of the pain seem to have passed.

“It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.”

“When I ask people—‘What would you [personally] do with a basic income?’ about 99 percent of people say—‘I have dreams, I have ambitions, I’m going to do something ambitious and useful.’ ” But when he asks them what they think other people would do with a basic income, they say—oh, they’ll become lifeless zombies, they’ll binge-watch Netflix all day.