When they talk among themselves, advertising people have been admitting since the 1920s that their job is to make people feel inadequate – and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created.
When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But “when it’s deadening,” you feel “shattered at the end of the day, just shattered.
When they added up the figures, John and other scientists found that being disconnected from the people around you had the same effect on your health as being obese – which was, until then, considered the biggest health crisis the developed world faced.
Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you – it’s the cage you live in.
How do we start to rebuild a society where we don’t feel so alone and afraid, and where we can form healthier bonds? How do we build a society where we look for happiness in one another rather than in consumption?
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.
Wouldn’t it be better to spend our money on rescuing kids before they become addicts than on jailing them after we have failed?
The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno says we have moved from having a “proletariat” – a solid block of manual workers with jobs – to a “precariat,” a shifting mass of chronically insecure people who don’t know whether they will have any work next week and may never have a stable job.
This showed that loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now.
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.
Problem drug use is a symptom, not a cause,20 of personal and social maladjustment.
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.
We are all born with a genetic inheritance – but your genes are activated by the environment. They can be switched on, or off, by what happens to you.
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.
When Billie Holiday came15 to London in the 1950s, she was amazed. They “are civilized about it and they have no narcotics problem at all,” she explained. “One day America is going to smarten up and do the.
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.
For anybody who suspects that we need to reform the drug laws, there is an easier argument to make, and a harder argument to make. The easier argument is to say that we all agree drugs are bad – it’s just that drug prohibition is even worse.
The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.
Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.
The United States now imprisons more people16 for drug offenses than Western European nations imprison for all crimes combined. No human society has ever before imprisoned this high a proportion of its population.