The Gray Area with Sean Illing16 Apr 2018

Is modern society making us depressed?

“What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief — for our own lives not being as they should?” asks Johann Hari. “What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost yet still need?” In his new book, Lost Connections, Hari advances an argument both radical and obvious: Depression and anxiety are more than just chemical imbalances in the brain. They are the result of our social environments, our relationships, our political contexts — our lives, in short. Hari, who has struggled with depression since his youth, went on a journey to try to understand the social causes of mental illness, the ones we prefer not to talk about because changing them is harder than handing out a pill. What he returned with is a book that claims to be about depression but is actually about the ways we’ve screwed up modern society and created a world that leaves far too many of us alienated, anxious, despairing, and lost. The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti famously said, “It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.” So that, then, is the question Hari and I consider in this conversation: How sick, really, is our society? Books: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate by Naomi Klein A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster by Rebecca Solnit Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Denne episoden er hentet fra en åpen RSS-feed og er ikke publisert av Podme. Den kan derfor inneholde annonser.

Episoder(764)

The case against free will

We all think of ourselves as authors of our lives. The difference between our happy ending and someone else’s tragic one are the choices we each make. But what if none of that’s true? Sean’s guest ...

3 Nov 202558min

What the climate story gets wrong

The story we tell about climate change is mostly a story about loss. But look to the data, and that story starts to fall apart. Emissions are peaking in key sectors. Clean energy is scaling faster tha...

27 Okt 202549min

The Great Enshittening

Open a browser and you can feel it instantly: everything online just feels… worse. Search results that look like ads. Social feeds that you don’t control. Streaming platforms that are packed with ads....

20 Okt 202547min

America chose violence. Now what?

Is America at a tipping point? Sean Illing talks with Barbara Walter, one of the world’s leading experts on violent extremism and domestic terror. She’s the author of How Civil Wars Start, about ho...

13 Okt 202558min

What's worth remembering?

We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories, and those stories — true...

6 Okt 202558min

Why TikTok matters

This week, Sean talks with Emily Baker-White, author of Every Screen on the Planet, about why TikTok feels uniquely addictive, how it turned social media into a push-not-pull entertainment feed, and w...

29 Sep 20251h 3min

The sun will save us

Bill McKibben has spent four decades warning us about climate change. Much of what he predicted has come true. And yet, his new book Here Comes the Sun is more hopeful than you might expect. That’s be...

22 Sep 202547min

How much free speech is too much?

Free speech is often treated as a timeless and sacred right. But what if it’s more myth than reality? This week, Sean is joined by historian Fara Dabhoiwala, author of What Is Free Speech? They tra...

15 Sep 202554min