Johann Hari - We Have Lost our Connections
嘉宾：Johann Hari
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Books can change your life, and there are so many books that changed mine. One of those books is called *Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions*. I've wondered for years why mental health issues are on the rise, why people are lonelier than ever before, why some people hate their jobs, and why anxiety is so prevalent amongst young people. But most importantly, I've wondered what the cure is for all of this.
This book helped me to find those unexpected answers. It helped Elon Musk to find those answers. It helped Hillary Clinton to find those answers. And I think it will help you to find those answers too. As the CEO of a company and as an entrepreneur, understanding our minds is the key to unlocking them. It's the key to knowing what's important for our minds, it's the key to success, happiness, and fulfillment.
I've been obsessed for the last decade with understanding the human mind. I took up psychology classes at age 16, and although my attendance was 30% in school generally, that was the lesson that I never missed. People are the only thing that really exists in our world, and psychology is the key to understanding them. This is why on today's podcast, I traveled to London to the home of Johann Hari, the author of that book, *Lost Connections*.
I talked to him about everything I've been wondering. He has reached hundreds of millions of people. His accolades are too far-reaching for this introduction. Our conversation was inspiring, eye-opening, and life-changing. So, without further ado, this is *The Diary of a CEO*, and I'm Stephen Bartlett. I hope nobody is listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
I'm a massive fan of your book and your writing generally. I first discovered your book after listening to you on the Joe Rogan podcast, and then I quite aggressively plugged the book to all of my team and our happiness teams. I always get asked across Instagram, especially when I show my bookcase, to recommend a book, and your book is the one that I've been plugging a lot lately.
*Lost Connections* changed my perspective on mental health and why so much of my generation, so many of our employees, and our teams globally are reporting to be suffering from some kind of mental health issue. What I wanted to talk to you about today is a number of things—everything from the impact social media has, the role of mental health issues in the business community, but also some fundamental questions and misconceptions. But first, why did you write *Lost Connections*?
It was a really personal reason for me. When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and saying that I had this feeling like pain was leaking out of me, and I couldn't control it or regulate it. I felt very ashamed of it and I didn't understand what was going on. My doctor told me a story that I now realize was really oversimplified.
My doctor said, "We know why people get into this state. There's a chemical called serotonin in people's brains. Some people are just naturally lacking it or have a chemical imbalance. You're clearly one of them. That's why you feel like this, and all we need to do is give you these drugs and you're going to feel better." So I started taking a drug called Paxil or Seroxat. I felt a whole lot better really quickly.
After a couple of months, I felt great, and then this feeling of pain started to bleed back through. I went back to the doctor. The doctor said clearly he didn't give me a high enough dose, so he gave me a higher dose. Again, I felt better, and again, the feeling came back. I was in this cycle of taking more and more and getting shorter and shorter periods of relief.
For 13 years, I was taking the maximum dose you're allowed to take, at the end of which I was still really depressed. I thought, "Something's not right here." I wanted to understand what was going on because I was doing everything I was told to do according to the story that I had been given by my doctor and the story that's told by the wider culture.
I decided I wanted to go on a big journey. It ended up being over 40,000 miles. I wanted to sit with the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety, and people who were trying treatments and different ways of responding to this problem.
At the core of it was this mystery: I'm 40 years old in a few months, and every single year that I've been alive, depression and anxiety—people reporting depression and anxiety—have increased across the Western world. I was thinking, if it was just a problem in our brains, why would it be going up so much?
I learned lots of things, but the core of what I learned is that there's scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety. Some of them are indeed biological—it's not a chemical imbalance in your brain, but there are real things that happen in your brain and your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems. But most of them are factors in the way we're living. Once you understand those factors that are causing depression and anxiety to rise, it opens up a very different set of solutions.
Is it definitely true then that mental health issues are on the rise broadly across the Western world?
There's a debate about this. What we definitely know is more people are reporting these problems. Significantly more people are saying they're depressed and anxious. There's several things going on. Partly what's happening is there's been a big decline in stigma about people talking about mental health problems. That's a great thing.
I think, for example, of my grandmother. My grandmother, when I look back and talk to people who knew her—she sadly died—there were periods in her life when she was very clearly depressed. She would never have shown up on any depression statistics because she wouldn't have dreamed of going to the doctor. It was something she would have been very ashamed of.
So partly there would be an expected increase in the figures just because there's been a decline in stigma. But I think there's other things going on that can show us that there is an actual increase. Let's look at one of the nine causes of depression and anxiety I write about in *Lost Connections*.
We are the loneliest society there's ever been. There's a study that asks Americans, "How many close friends could you turn to in a crisis?" When they started doing this years ago, the most common answer was five. Today, the most common answer is none. There are more people who have nobody to turn to than any other option.
What is life like when you have no one to turn to? I learned a lot about this from an amazing man called Professor John Cacioppo, who was the leading expert in the world about loneliness at the University of Chicago. He showed me and said, "Why are we alive? Why do we exist?"
One of the key reasons is because our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing: they weren't faster than the animals they took down, they weren't bigger than the animals they took down, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating. That's our superpower as a species.
Just like bees evolved to need a hive, humans evolved to need a tribe. And we are the first humans ever to try to live without a tribe. Professor Cacioppo proved two things. One is that human beings separated from tribes—lonely humans—become depressed and anxious. Just like if you ever separate a bee from its hive, it goes crazy. And we also have a huge amount of evidence that there has been a really big increase in loneliness.
So I think that tells us, given that we know loneliness causes depression and given that we know loneliness has massively increased, it seems reasonable to me to assume therefore depression has increased. There are other causes—the nine that I could find scientific evidence for. Some have remained the same, one has probably slightly fallen, but most of them have risen.
This podcast centers around business, entrepreneurship, and I guess the pursuit of success generally speaking. But what is it that's causing us to become lonelier? Because entrepreneurs are known to be incredibly lonely as a professional group of society.
I think it's a lot of things, but I'll give you an example of one of the other causes. Everyone listening to this knows that junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick. For most of my 20s, I basically lived on KFC. I had a low point one day when I went to my local KFC at the end of Brick Lane.
I remember going in and saying my order, and the guy behind the counter said, "Oh Johann, I'm really glad you're here." He went back behind the fryers and came back with every member of staff and a really big Christmas card which they'd all written to "our favorite customer." One of the reasons why my clogged heart sank is because I suddenly thought, "This isn't even the fried chicken shop I go to the most!"
But okay, so we know that junk food appeals to the part of us that wants nutrition but actually doesn't give you nutrition and makes you sick. Something very similar has happened with our values. A kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick.
There's an extraordinary man called Professor Tim Kasser who I learned a lot about this from. He's in Illinois and has done incredible work researching this for 30 years. He showed that every human being has two kinds of motivation. Imagine you play the piano because you love it and it gives you joy. That would be an *intrinsic* reason to play the piano. You're not doing it to get something out of it; you're doing it because that experience is the thing you love.
Now imagine you play the piano not because you love it, but to pay the rent in a dive bar, or to impress a woman, or because your parents are massively pressuring you. That's not an intrinsic reason to play. That's called an *extrinsic* or junk reason to play it. You're doing it to get something else out of the experience because of how it will look to other people.
Obviously, all human beings are a mixture of intrinsic and extrinsic motives. But what Professor Kasser showed is, firstly, as a culture, we have become much more driven by these junk values. We've become much more obsessed with doing things because of how we'll look to other people, for money, and for status.
Professor Kasser also showed the more you are driven by money and status and the kind of external appearance of how you look to other people, rather than joyful or important experiences with them, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious.
I think social media drives us so much to be driven by these junk values. I think all the time about my teenage nephews and teenage niece. I think about my godchildren who are just on the cusp of starting social media. Social media drives people to think in terms of these junk values: How many likes did I get? How good do I look in this picture for Instagram? The more you are driven in those directions, the more unhappy you will become.
There's a deeper reason for that which connects a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety I write about. Everyone listening to your show knows that they have natural physical needs. Obviously, you need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air. If I took them away from you, you'd be screwed really quickly.
But there's equally strong evidence 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 where you're going to be valued.
Our culture is good at lots of things—I like dentistry, I like gay rights—but we've been getting less and less good at dealing with these deep underlying psychological needs that people have. I think it's a really key factor in why the crisis is going up.
And do you think those junk values are making us lonelier? Because if you look at social media, there are very few posts on my timeline that talk about doing things for those intrinsic reasons that you described. There's very few people that post "Today I went for a walk in the park because I like taking a walk in the park." It'll be "Today I went and bought myself a Rolex because I think that will improve my extrinsic value."
It's a really good example. Think about how many people are following the "script for happiness" that we're given by this society. They work really hard at a job they don't like to buy things that they then show off and display on social media. And they're puzzled that at some level they feel like shit.
So what do they do? They work harder, they buy more stuff, they show that off on social media, they still feel like shit. There's that line that people say in AA and NA: you can never have enough of something that's not quite enough. We're given a script for happiness that doesn't work.
There's a really interesting person I interviewed called Dr. Brett Ford. They did this really interesting research. They wanted to figure out a simple question: If you or anyone listening to your show decided you were going to really make an effort to spend more time being happier, would you become happier?
They did this research in four countries: the United States, Japan, Russia, and Taiwan. The results were really weird. In the United States, if you tried to make yourself happier, you didn't become happier. But in the other three countries, if you tried to make yourself happier, you did. They were like, "What's going on? How can this be?"
They looked in more detail. It turned out in the United States—and I'm pretty sure it would be true of Britain as well—if you try to make yourself happier, generally you do something for *yourself*. You buy something, you amuse yourself, whatever it is. In the other countries, generally, if you wanted to make yourself happier, you did something for *someone else*. You did something for your friends, your family, your community.
We have an individualistic idea of what happiness is, and they have an instinctively collective idea of what happiness is. And our story about happiness, our individualistic story, just doesn't work. A species of individualists would have died out on the savannas of Africa. They wouldn't have been able to cooperate. We wouldn't be alive to have this conversation if those had been our instincts.
I think what junk values do is they divert you from the things that are genuinely meaningful about life and get you to focus on things that won't make you happy. I'll give you a bit of a cheap example, but I think it illustrates it well. In 2009, Melania Trump went to speak at NYU. One of the students asked her, "Would you have married Donald Trump if he wasn't rich?" And she said, "Do you think he would have married me if I wasn't beautiful?"
Which in one way makes me respect Melania Trump—you think, "Oh well, you know the terms of the bargain." But think about what that means. That means they value each other entirely for external qualities. That means Melania Trump is going through life knowing if one day she got fat or she lost her looks for some other reason, she's out. And Donald Trump knows if he loses his status, his power, he's out of there.
You can see how, if you value things and people and life according to these external junk values, you're going to be more insecure. Compare that to, for example, Barack and Michelle Obama, who I'm sure would say, "Well look, we'd love each other even if we became homeless and were burnt in a fire." You can see how that model of a relationship and that way of being in the world would make you feel more secure, more contented. And we've all become more like the Trumps. Trump is an expression of these values.
I want you to give me some advice then based on the journey that I've taken as an entrepreneur. When I was 18 years old, I came from a family that didn't have anything. My parents are bankrupt; we didn't have nice things at all. So at 18, I wrote in my diary that the things I wanted to achieve before I was 25 were these following four things: I wanted to be a millionaire before I was 25, I wanted a Range Rover to be my first car, I wanted to work on my body image, and I wanted to get a girlfriend.
Interestingly, before 25, there were multiple offers for people to buy my company. At those moments, 18-year-old Steve showed up to almost collect upon the things that he thought he wanted. But by 24, 25, I literally went on Auto Trader and looked at cars and then I went on Rightmove that night and looked at houses that I would buy. Just by looking at those things, I felt a tremendous sense of almost emptiness and fear at the thought that if I bought that Lamborghini Aventador or that house, I would actually be losing something. I'd feel emptier because of that idea of hedonistic adaptation where you just keep chasing pleasure.
That's so moving because what you did is you allowed yourself to feel the emptiness of that system. What's striking to me—and you will have met them too—is I have met almost no exceptions. Every single extremely rich person I've met has been such a miserable person. Deeply, deeply unhappy.
I don't mean, "Oh, a bit unhappy considering they're really rich." I mean like achingly unhappy. I can think of maybe two exceptions.
I've got goosebumps then because that's literally part of the reason why I felt so empty when I looked at those things. I almost imagined in my head the person I would become, and I knew that person, and they aren't happy. In fact, they've told me they're not happy. The person that has the car that I wanted to buy is miserable. And they've literally said to me quote, "I will never be happy because I'm never satisfied because I'm always chasing the next thing, and therefore I'll never be happy." And so for a second, when I looked at that car, it made me think, "Fuck, I don't want to be that person."
It's a really weird thing, isn't it? Because on the one hand, I look at all this science, but the thing the science shows us is something that at some level we all know. It's almost a banal cliché to say no one listening to this program is going to lie on their deathbed and think about all the things they bought. You're not going to sit on your deathbed and think, "What a great life I had, I had two Range Rovers." You will think about moments of love and connection and meaning in your life.
And yet, we've designed a machine—we all live in a machine that's designed to get us to neglect the things that are actually important in life. What I find really moving in what you said is, early enough in life, you clocked, "Wait, this story I've been told—which we sing like a kind of karaoke song, the lines have been laid out for us—Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz?" I'm singing this song, and I feel like shit.
So we've got to think about, firstly, how is that story constructed? There's a really simple little experiment. It was done in 1978. They get a bunch of five-year-olds and they split them into two groups. One half of the group is shown an advert for whatever the equivalent to Dora the Explorer was in 1978. And the other group of kids is shown no adverts at all.
At the end of it, they say to all the kids, "Okay kids, you've got a choice now. You can either play with a really nice boy who doesn't have the toy that was in the advert, or you can play with a nasty boy who's got the toy." The kids who've seen just that one advert mostly choose to play with the nasty boy who's got the toy. And the kids who haven't seen the advert mostly choose the nice boy.
So think about that. One advert primed those kids to choose an inanimate lump of plastic over the possibility of meaningful connection and fun. Everyone listening to this has seen more than one advert today. So you see that tells you Melania Trump's journey. It's a value system created by an extreme kind of neoliberal capitalism that then becomes the kind of logic of the society, the logic of all of us.
Like, think about it, I when I was a kid, I really craved Nike trainers. You could not have had a child who was further from playing basketball like Michael Jordan than me! And yet, why did I want them? It was solely because of that story. How do we get out of this? There's lots of things—I think we should much more tightly regulate advertising—but to me, there's a more interesting part of this.
A really interesting guy called Nathan Dungan, who with Professor Kasser did this really interesting experiment. He was a financial advisor in Minneapolis. He was contacted by a bunch of middle-class schools. The schools were like, "We've got a big problem. These kids are really freaking out if their parents don't buy them like brand sneakers or whatever. They're getting really genuinely distressed if they don't get these designer labels. Can you come in and talk to them about budgeting?"
So he comes in and he starts talking to the kids about budgeting, and very quickly he clocks, "This is going to get me nowhere. This is not a budgeting issue. This is like a values issue." So they did this experiment. The kids came in with their parents, once a fortnight for four months. They come in and they just meet. It started by saying, "I want you just to write down the things you've *got* to have."
Quite quickly, the things they feel they've got to have, you know, designer sneakers would come up quite quickly for the teenagers. And Nathan would say to them, "Well, can you write down what you would have if you had those sneakers?" And quite quickly the kids would say, "Well, I would feel I was valued by the group, I would feel I had status, people would be impressed by me."
The minute you say it out loud, it doesn't take long for people to go, "Ah. Why do I think I need sneakers to be respected by the group?" And they'd go, "Well, where does this come from?" And they would look at advertising, they would critically look at advertising. But then the next stages I think were really interesting.
They started to say, "Okay, once they've kind of deconstructed the junk values—this thing you think you want is actually just a meaningless lump of plastic—how could we actually get you the things you want? What do you actually think is important in your life?" As the weeks went on, they would figure out what they actually valued and try to figure out ways to do that more. How to interview both the adults and the teenagers.
This was quite a small intervention—once a fortnight for four months. It led to a really significant fall in junk values, which we know leads to a decline in depression and anxiety. I think that tells you something really interesting because people are so hungry to have these conversations.
This is not like explaining quantum physics to people. When I think about the nine causes of depression and anxiety that I write about in *Lost Connections*, and then the solutions—so Nathan's program is almost like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for consumerism—it doesn't take long to explain them to people and for them to just intuitively get it. They sense there's something wrong in what we've been doing and this is part of the solution. But as I say, we live in a machine that's designed to get us to divert from that, but that machine was created by humans, and humans can dismantle it. We don't have to live in a machine that makes us feel like shit.
A question I get asked a lot is—obviously because I work in the industry of social media—should we cancel social media, turn it off, in order to protect the future generations and to maintain our value system?
I was really interested in thinking about this. I went to the first ever internet rehab center in the world in Washington State. I remember arriving and instinctively glancing at my phone and being really pissed off I couldn't check social media. I was like, "Oh wait, you're in the right place!"
I think the answer there is a bit complicated. It's not like a "yay social media" or "boo social media" answer. So they get all kinds of people at this internet rehab center, but the woman who runs it, Dr. Hilary Cash, explained to me they disproportionately get young men who become obsessed with multiplayer online role-playing games like *World of Warcraft* and *Fortnite*.
She said to me, "You've got to ask yourself, what are these young men getting out of these games? Because they're getting something. They're getting the things that young men used to get from the culture but no longer get. They get a sense of a tribe, that they're part of a group. They get a sense that they're good at something and they're getting better at something."
"They get a sense they can physically roam around. The average British child now spends less time outdoors than the average maximum security prisoner because by law a maximum security prisoner has to have 70 minutes a day. At least they get a sense they're fucking moving around because that's what they're doing in these games. They're getting a sense that people see them and value them."
But of course, what they're getting is really like a parody of those things. I think the relationship between social media and social life a lot of the time is a bit like the relationship between porn and sex. I'm not opposed to porn, but if your whole sex life consisted of looking at porn, you'd be going around pissed off and irritated the whole time because we didn't evolve to wank over screens; we evolved to have sex.
No one feels deeply satisfied after an hour wanking over porn in the way they do after sex, if it goes right at least. In a similar way, we didn't evolve to interact through screens. But you've got to think about the moment when the internet arrives, which tells us to see it's more complicated than just "the internet did this to us."
If you look at, for most people, the internet arrives in the late 90s, the early 2000s. A lot of the factors that cause depression and anxiety had already massively increased by then. There had already been a huge increase in loneliness. There had already been a huge fall in people interacting with the natural world, all sorts of things. There'd been a big increase in people feeling humiliated by inequality.
And what happens is the internet comes along and it looks a lot like the things we've lost. You've lost friends? Well, here's some Facebook friends. You've lost status? Here's some status updates. So in a sense, like all addictive behavior, it's an attempt to fill a hole that's been left.
So the simplistic thing to do is to say well just shun the social media, get rid of it. But the more complex—and I do think social media can make these things worse, I think it encourages people toward junk values as we've talked about—if you simply take away the social media and don't do anything to make their lives better, they're still going to be just suicidally depressed because they're anesthetizing themselves with the drug and then the thing they were anesthetizing themselves against re-emerges.
That's why good addiction responses to addiction aren't about just taking away the drug; they are much more about helping the person to rebuild their life and rebuild their connections. In a similar way, if we want to understand why we're so addicted to social media, we've got to understand these deeper factors. The social media addiction is a symptom of the disconnection of the society.
A good rule of thumb was Professor John Cacioppo said a really useful thing to me. He said, "If social media is a *waystation* to meeting people offline, then it's a good thing. If it's the *last stop* on the line, something has gone wrong." And I think that's a good rule of thumb.
Because I've publicly criticized social media for all of the reasons you've described there, people often call me a hypocrite because that's ultimately how we make our money. As a business like Social Chain that's not looking to make the world a worse place because we existed, I do like your answer there because it kind of offers us hope that we could play a big role in helping to fulfill or to plug the gap in other ways that social media is just filling for people. Do you think Social Chain's approach then should be to invest in *offline* socializing and connectivity in our society?
Well, I would say a couple of things about that. So firstly, everyone alive is a hypocrite. If the only people who can argue for social change are perfectly pure people, then there will be no argument for social change ever. Mahatma Gandhi, one of the most admirable people ever, killed his wife. Nelson Mandela, one of the most admirable people ever, beat his wife. Everyone is morally flawed and everyone is a hypocrite in some respect.
Generally, I think the charges of hypocrisy—while of course there are some instances of gross hypocrisy—I think charges of hypocrisy are generally not very helpful and don't get us anywhere. The question is: Do we agree this is a bad thing? How do we change together?
In terms of the changes we can advocate, I'll give you an example of a really interesting one that really moved me. One of the heroes of *Lost Connections* is this amazing doctor called Sam Everington. He's a doctor in the East End where I used to live for a long time. Sam was really uncomfortable because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety. Like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants—he thinks they have a real but limited role—but he could just see most of the people he was giving these drugs to remained depressed.
So one day he decided to try this different approach. A woman came to see him called Lisa Cunningham, who had been shut away in her home for almost seven years with just crippling depression and anxiety. Sam said to Lisa, "Don't worry, I'll carry on giving you these drugs, but I'm also going to give you something else. I'm going to prescribe for you to take part in a group."
There was an area behind the doctor's surgery that was known as "Dog Shit Alley," which gives you a sense of what it was like. It was like scrubland basically. Sam said to Lisa, "What I'd like you to do is come and turn out a couple of times a week. I'll come and support you." Sam himself had had quite a lot of anxiety. He said, "With a group of other depressed and anxious people, we're going to turn Dog Shit Alley into something nice."
The first time the group met, Lisa was literally physically sick with anxiety. But they decided they were going to learn gardening. These were inner-city East London people; they didn't know anything about gardening. They started to get their fingers in the soil, they started to learn the rhythms of the seasons. There's a lot of evidence that disconnection from the natural world is a big cause of depression and actually interacting with the natural world is a really strong antidepressant.
But something else happened that I think was as important, which is they started to form a group. They started to form a tribe. They started to care about each other. They started to do what human beings do when we solve a tribe: they started to solve each other's problems. They started to notice if someone wasn't there.
I remember Lisa saying to me, "As the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom." There was a study in Norway of a very similar program that found it was more than twice as effective as chemical antidepressants. I think for kind of obvious reasons; it's dealing with some of the reasons why they felt so terrible in the first place.
This is something I saw all over the world: the best solutions to depression and anxiety are the ones that deal with the reasons why we're in this distress in the first place. I kept seeing this in so many places—this capacity for reconnection that is just beneath the surface.
In the summer of 2011, on a big housing project in Berlin, a woman called Nuria Chengis climbed out of her wheelchair and put a sign in her window. She lived on the ground floor. She was a woman in her early 60s. The sign said something like: "I got a notice I'm going to be evicted next Thursday, so on Wednesday night I'm going to kill myself."
This is a big housing project in a very poor part of Berlin called Cotti, where basically because it was such a kind of slum area, you only really had three groups who lived there: there were recent Muslim immigrants like this woman Nuria, there were punk squatters, and there were gay men. As you can imagine, these three groups would look at each other with a lot of mutual incomprehension. No one really knew anyone on this housing project; most people didn't know each other.
But they saw this sign in her window and they started to knock on her door. And they said, "Do you need any help?" and Nuria said, "Fuck you, I don't want any help," and shut the door in their faces. But people who lived nearby just stood outside and they started just talking, people who'd never spoken before.
And they were all pissed off because their rents were going up as well and lots of people were being evicted in Cotti. So they felt like this was coming for them too. One of them had an idea—you might remember this was the summer of the revolution in Egypt. They'd been watching this on the news. One of them had an idea: there's a big thoroughfare that goes into the center of Berlin that runs through Cotti.
One of them had this thought: "On Saturday, if we just blocked the road for a day and we all go and protest and we wheel Nuria out, probably the media will come. There'll be a bit of a fuss. They'll probably let her stay in her flat. Maybe there'll actually be a bit of pressure to keep our rents down." So they decided to do it. They wheel Nuria out. The media does come. Nuria is interviewed—she was a bit bemused to be interviewed, but she's interviewed.
And then it gets to the end of the day and the police say, "Okay you've had your fun, take it down." And the people who live there said, "Well hang on, you haven't told Nuria she gets to stay, and we want a rent freeze for all of us for this whole housing project. When we've got that, we'll take this blockade down."
But of course, they knew the minute they left, the police would just tear it down anyway. So one of them—one of my favorite people at Cotti, a woman called Tanya Gortney, she's one of the punk squatters—Tanya had an idea. In her flat, she had a klaxon. She went and got it and she said, "Okay, what we're going to do is we're going to draw up a timetable to man this barricade. We're going to man it 24 hours a day, and if the police come at any point to take it down before we've got the rent freeze, before Nuria's told she can stay, let off the klaxon and we'll all come and we'll all stop them."
So people start signing up who would never have met. Tanya in her tiny miniskirt was paired with Nuria, who's a very religious Muslim in her headscarf. The first few night shifts they had were super awkward. They're sitting there like "We've got nothing in common, what are we going to talk about?" But as the nights went on, they discovered they had something really important in common.
Nuria told Tanya she'd never told anyone: Nuria had come to Berlin when she was 17 from a village in Turkey with her two young children. They were babies, and her job was to raise enough money to send back home for her husband so he could come. After she'd been in Berlin for a year, she got word from home that her husband had died. And she told Tanya something she'd always been ashamed of—she'd always told people that her husband had died of a heart attack; actually, he died of tuberculosis, which was seen as like a disease of poverty.
And that's when Tanya told Nuria something she didn't talk about very much. She had come to Cotti when she was 15; she'd been thrown out by a middle-class family. She realized they both had been children alone in this place with children of their own. They realized they had something incredibly powerful in common. There were these pairings happening all over Cotti where people were realizing this.
Directly opposite this housing project in Cotti, there's a gay club called Südblock that opened about four years before. It's run by a person I love called Rickard Strauss. When they'd opened this club, you can imagine there's a lot of very religious Muslims there, so the windows had been smashed. The gay club started giving all their furniture to the protest so they could make it a more permanent barricade.
After a while, they started saying, "You guys could have all your meetings in our club if you want. We'll give you free drinks, we'll give you food." And at first, even the lefties at Cotti were like, "Look, we're not going to get these very religious Muslims to come and have a meeting underneath posters for like fisting night, right? It's not going to happen."
But it did start happening. I remember one of the Muslim women saying to me, "We all realized we had to take these steps to get to know each other." After the protest had been going for about a year, one day a guy appeared at Cotti called Tuncay. Tuncay had been living homeless, but he's got an amazing energy about him and everyone immediately liked him.
By this time, they had built a permanent structure in the middle of the street, and they started saying, "Well, we don't want you to be homeless, you should live in this structure." So he started living there and he became like a much-loved staple of the camp. After he'd been there for about nine months, one day the police came—they were coming and inspecting every now and then. Tuncay doesn't like it when people argue, and he thought the police were arguing, so he went to hug one of the officers.
And they thought he was attacking them, so they arrested him. That was when it was discovered that Tuncay had been shut away in a psychiatric hospital for 20 years, often literally in a padded cell. He'd escaped one day, he'd lived on the streets for a few months, and he'd found his way to Cotti. So the police took him back to this psychiatric hospital right the other side of Berlin.
At which point, the whole of the Cotti protest camp turned into a kind of "Free Tuncay" movement. They descend on the hospital, and I remember the psychiatrist just being completely baffled that this person they've had shut away for 20 years suddenly they've got these women in headscarves, these very camp gay men, and these punks demanding his release.
I remember Ulli, one of the protesters, saying to the people there, "But you don't love him. He doesn't belong with you. We love him. He belongs with us." Anyway, it took them a long time, but they got Tuncay back. He's there now; he still lives there. And there were lots of things that happened at Cotti—the headline is they got a rent freeze for their entire housing project.
They then launched a referendum initiative to keep down rents across the city that got the largest number of signatures in the history of the city of Berlin. But I remember the last time I saw Nuria, talking to her and her saying to me, "You know, I'm really glad I got to stay in my neighborhood, that's great. But I gained so much more than that. I was surrounded by these amazing people all along and I never knew."
There's a Bosnian writer called Aleksandar Hemon who said, "Home is where people notice when you're not there." They didn't have people who noticed when they weren't there, and then they did. And I could see how intoxicating that was. It was so clear to me there how much those people did not need to be drugged; they needed to be *together*.
Nuria was suicidal. Tuncay was shut away in a padded cell. What solved these problems? I remember Tanya saying to me one time, "When you feel like shit and you're all alone, 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 how strong we were."
These were a random collection of ordinary people like you would find in any street, in any city. What they found was a way to come together. Now, of course, coming together will mean different things for different people and that model won't work everywhere. But people are so hungry for this coming back together. People can feel how divorced they are.
And I guess the key thing I wanted to explain to people after I'd learned so much about this for the book is: If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not crazy. You're not a machine with broken parts. You're a human being with unmet needs, and you are surrounded by other human beings with unmet needs. And the way we get those needs met is by coming together and fighting for something better.
That's really what I took away from your book. I think I had so many misconceptions that had been fed to me by other misinformed people. One of the other things that it really made me think about as an employer is the way that our teams are treated at work. I remember and I'll never forget the example you gave about the bicycle store and the employees of that bicycle store. When this particular bicycle store removed the management layer and became self-autonomous and gained freedom and operated in more of a democracy than typical companies operate, I believe the financial performance was better, they were all happier and less depressed.
What I really wanted to ask you though is as it relates to work and the working environment that we create as entrepreneurs and CEOs and managers, what are the things that we should do for our teams in order to ensure that they are happy, engaged in our businesses, and ultimately succeed?
There's a difficult answer to that if I'm honest, which is what I would say specifically to CEOs. So, just to step back a sec: one of the reasons I was interested in this is because I noticed that lots of the people I know who are depressed and anxious, their depression and anxiety focuses around their work.
I started looking at what's the evidence for how people feel about their work. There's a really good study by Gallup, an incredibly detailed study done in loads of countries. It found 13% of us like our work most of the time. 63% are what they call "sleepworking"—you don't like it, you don't hate it, you tolerate it. And 24% of people fucking hate their jobs. That means 87% of people don't like the thing they're doing most of their waking life.
I learned about and went to meet an incredible Australian social scientist called Professor Michael Marmot, who made a real breakthrough on this in the 1970s. He discovered the single biggest factor that makes people depressed at work: If you go to work tomorrow and you have low or no *control* over your work, you are significantly more likely to become depressed and anxious.
So if you feel that you're just like a robot on a line, you're just taking orders from above, you don't have much choice, you can't use your creativity, you don't have freedom, you are much more likely to become depressed and anxious. And so I started thinking, well what's the antidepressant for that? And as you mentioned, I learned about this different model—it's actually the model of the modern corporation that's a really weird aberration in human history.
I spent a lot of time with this woman called Meredith Keogh. Meredith used to go to bed every Sunday night just sick with anxiety. She had an office job, and it wasn't the worst office job in the world, she wasn't being bullied or harassed. But she just couldn't bear the thought that this was going to be the rest of her life for 40 years.
One day with her husband Josh, she did this quite bold thing. Josh had worked in bike stores since he was a teenager. And one day, Josh with his colleagues in the bike store just asked themselves, "What does our boss actually do? We seem to fix all the bikes, he seems to make all the money." They liked their boss, he wasn't like a monster or anything, but they were like, "We kind of feel like we could do this."
So they decided to set up a bike store of their own. It's called Baltimore Bicycle Works. It works on a different principle: most people work in corporations where the boss at the top is the dictator. They decided to set up their bike store as a democratic cooperative. So they don't have a boss. They take decisions about the company together by voting once every few weeks. They share the profits, obviously. They share out the shitty tasks and the good tasks, so no one gets stuck with the shitty tasks.
And one of the things that was fascinating is how many of them talked about how they'd been depressed and anxious before and were not depressed and anxious now. And it's important to say it's not like they quit their jobs fixing bikes and went off to become Beyoncé's backing singers; they fixed bikes before, they fix bikes now. The difference is now they've got control over their work.
So, if you want your workers to be happy, give them back control over their work. That's one key factor. So in a sense, my advice to CEOs is you shouldn't really exist. Of course, there's a place for management and there's a place for elected leaders within an organization that are chosen by the workforce because they do something particularly brilliant.
But in a way, asking what would you ask corporate CEOs to do is a bit like saying, if we were in the Middle Ages and there's all these terrible problems, "What would you beg the King to do?" Well, I would say we shouldn't have a King, we should get rid of the King and we should have a democracy, and then we can sort out the problems ourselves. I wouldn't beg the King for anything.
I deeply agree as well. I think that a modern CEO should really get out of the way and let people solve their own problems and arrive at their own decisions. We've tried really, really hard to do that. Even this week, as our teams will tell you, we launched a committee within the company where the members of the team decide what happens to the company—so they decide the working hours, and a lot of this is actually inspired by some of the things I read in your book.
We've got a head of happiness, and she has a team below her. And so she's created what she calls like the "Happiness Club" where members of the team—there's ten a week—decide what the company does and what the working hours are, what food is in the fridge, what our company trips are, etc. We're really trying to democratize that because of what I read in your book.
Oh, that's really nice! At some level, we all know this when we apply it to other things. Why is North Korea a horrific basket case where people are starving to death, and South Korea one of the most successful economies in the world when actually back in 1953 they were in the same place?
Well, South Korea is a democracy and North Korea is a dictatorship. In a democracy, you have everyone's brain on the job. In a dictatorship, you've got one person's brain on the job. And you think about what happened in Baltimore Bicycle Works—of course, people are much more motivated if they are able to use their creativity, you've got everyone's brain on it, you've got the knowledge of everyone, everyone's trying to think out how to solve the problems rather than one person thinking out how to solve the problems and everyone else trying to tap dance to his tune or her tune.
Of all the solutions to depression and anxiety that I write about in *Lost Connections*, the shift in work I think is both the most important and in some ways the hardest. But I'm aware that when I talk about these big structural problems, it can seem daunting, especially to people who are currently depressed and anxious.
I'm aware that we've got these big structural problems, but one of the reasons why I'm optimistic about the capacity to change things—even in these dark times, because the system is falling apart and we can see it can't hold—is I'm 39 and I'm gay, and I have just seen the most incredible changes happen in my lifetime.
One of my nephews is just turned 18, and last year I showed him the things that were on the front pages of British newspapers when I was the age he is now. He literally said, "Did people call the police?" He just couldn't believe it because there's been such a huge change. Now, if the craziest UKIP local counselor tweeted the things that used to be on the front page of the *Sun* every day, he'd have to resign.
In 1994, Andrew Sullivan—who some of your listeners will know is an amazing writer and journalist—Andrew Sullivan was diagnosed HIV positive. Height of the AIDS crisis, people are dying all around him, this is before we got any decent treatment. And he goes to a little place in Cape Cod called Provincetown to die.
And he decides the last thing he's ever going to do is to write a book about a crazy utopian idea no one's ever written a book about. He's like, "I'm never going to see this happen, no one alive is going to see this happen, but maybe someone somewhere down the line is going to pick up this idea." The book he wrote, the first ever book about the idea, was gay marriage.
When I get depressed and I think, "Oh fuck, we're up against these big things," I try to imagine going back in time. Go to Andrew in Provincetown in 1994 and saying, "Hey, you're not going to believe me. 26 years from now, first point, you're going to be alive. Good news, he wouldn't have believed that. Second point, you're going to be married to a man, that'll be legal. Thirdly, the Supreme Court of the United States, when it rules that it's mandatory for every part of the US to introduce gay marriage, will quote this book that you're writing now. And I'll be with you the next day when you get an invitation from the President of the United States to go to a White House that will be lit up in the colors of the rainbow flag to celebrate what you've achieved. Oh, and by the way, that President, he's going to be black!"
That would have sounded like the most ridiculous science fiction you could imagine. Andrew lived to see that happen. Now, he also lived to see Donald Trump be the President, so things can go both ways. I'm not being mindlessly optimistic about this. But one of the great lessons I think of the incredible transformation in how gay people are seen and treated is if you organize—and this wasn't just gay people by any means, this was lots of heterosexual people who opened their hearts and loved gay people—if you appeal to the people around you in a spirit of love and compassion, and you work really hard and you don't give up, you can prevail and you can make incredible changes.
The changes don't happen by themselves; you have to fight for them, you have to fight really hard, you have to keep at it, and you have to do it in a spirit of love and compassion, not a spirit of contempt and rage, appealing to people's goodness, not their rage and hatred. But those changes can happen.
In a way, the fight about the things that are causing depression is in some ways easier. Gay people are like 5% of the population; we're a very small number of people relatively. Depression and anxiety—one in three middle-aged women in the United States is on antidepressants at any given time. The factors that are causing depression and anxiety that I write about in *Lost Connections*, they're making some people depressed, but they're making most people less happy and more diminished than they could be.
So if we fight to deal with the things that are making some people really depressed and anxious, that will enrich the lives of almost everyone in this society. This is a fight that can mobilize far more people because it affects far more people's lives. Admittedly, it's a bigger ask, it's taking on more powerful forces as well, so I don't want to be naive about it. But I do think these factors can be dealt with because, as part of the journey for the book, I went to places that had dealt with them. I've seen it happen. These are not abstract.
People should be profoundly optimistic that we can fight and we can prevail and that we don't have to live in a society where more and more people are becoming depressed and anxious and we're experiencing all these symptoms of that distress. I think about what's happening in the US at the moment—male life expectancy has fallen for the first time since the Civil War because people are killing themselves, committing suicide with guns and committing suicide with opiates, or anesthetizing themselves so much that they accidentally kill themselves because they're in such deep pain.
The symptoms of this distress are all around us, and we can just kind of carry on with the same bullshit script, the one that you very smartly saw before your 25th birthday, you're like, "Wait a minute, this is not a path to a good and happy life." But we can carry on... and the fact that the most powerful person in the world is Donald Trump tells us something really profound.
It's not that his voters are stupid or that they're bad people because I don't believe they are. This man who is so obviously unwell, so obviously sick and deeply unhappy—I don't think I've ever seen a more unhappy person than Donald Trump, a person who can't take satisfaction in anything, who lives in an actual golden tower married to a really hot woman and is the most powerful person in the world and is achingly unhappy. The fact that the people at the top of the game feel like shit tells you something about the game.
You do talk about this in your book, so that's a great segue. Will we be getting a *Lost Connections 2* at some point?
Some people write the same book over and over again and I can't really do that, I get bored. But I am writing on related themes which I'm not meant to talk about at the moment. But I should say, because my publishers always tell me off if I don't say this, that if you want any more information about my book, if you want to know where you can get the book or the audiobook, you go to www.thelostconnections.com.
On the website as well, you can take a quiz to see how much you know about the causes of depression and anxiety, you can listen to audio of loads of the people we've been talking about, loads of the experts, there's amazing people in Berlin, loads of people. You can find out by my social media following... I got asked in an interview recently, "What's your Snapchat?" and I was like, I'm a 39-year-old man! Only 39-year-old men on Snapchat are definitely pedophiles! That should be just how they detect pedophiles—just go to men over the age of 35, "What is your Snapchat?" and if they've got one, arrest them immediately! So you cannot follow me on Snapchat, but you can follow me on the other things where I don't look very often because it makes me sad.
To conclude, I follow you everywhere. I read the book and then I told everyone else to read the book around me that I thought was important to my life. Then I downloaded the audiobook as well. Then I watched all of your YouTube videos. I've seen the story of the wonderful South African man that you described as well. On the point of junk values, I follow you and you're one of the people in my timeline that helps to make me junk-values-neutral because I think your tweets are very good for my soul and my mind.
I'd encourage everybody to go and follow you at least on Twitter and definitely buy the book because everybody that I've recommended it to has seen some kind of shift in their perspective for the better, including me. I don't shout books out much; I actually don't have a lot of time to read a lot of books so I end up just on Blinkist, but yours was the first book this year that I've probably almost read twice because I'm on that journey of seeking answers that your book has. So I want to thank you for taking the time to write it and I mean that from the bottom of my heart because it definitely has and will make the world a better place. And thank you so much for your time today as well because I know how busy you must be. I appreciate you.
Oh, thank you so much, I appreciate you as well.
No worries. And as you said, the book is everywhere so go and buy it.
I think I meant to mention you can also find out what a range of people thought about the book from Russell Brand to Hillary Clinton to Elton John at the website. Amazing. Brilliant. That's the bit I was meant to say.
Amazing. Thanks, Johann.