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(765)

A new analysis of the pandemic

There are lots of stories to tell about the Covid pandemic. Most of them, on some level, are about politics, about decisions that affected people’s lives in different — and very unequal — ways. Cov...

28 Apr 202547min

Halfway there: a philosopher’s guide to midlife crises

Philosophy often feels like a disconnected discipline, obsessed with tedious and abstract problems. But MIT professor Kieran Setiya believes philosophical inquiry has a practical purpose outside the c...

21 Apr 202550min

Whatever this is, it isn’t liberalism

What exactly is the basis for democracy? Arguably Iiberalism, the belief that the government serves the people, is the stone on which modern democracy was founded. That notion is so ingrained in the ...

14 Apr 202553min

A new way to listen

We have an exciting announcement! Vox Members now get access to ad-free podcasts. If you sign up, you’ll get unlimited access to reporting on vox.com, exclusive newsletters, and all of our podcasts — ...

11 Apr 20251min

The beliefs AI is built on

There’s a lot of uncertainty when it comes to artificial intelligence. Technologists love to talk about all the good these tools can do in the world, all the problems they might solve. Yet, many of th...

7 Apr 202550min

Stop comparing yourself to AI

Why do we keep comparing AI to humans? Jaron Lanier — virtual reality pioneer, digital philosopher, and the author of several best-selling books on technology — thinks that we should stop. In his vie...

31 Mar 202555min

Democrats need to do something

American government has a speed issue. Both parties are slow to solve problems. Slow to build new things. Slow to make any change at all. Until now. The Trump administration is pushing through sweepi...

24 Mar 202550min

How to live in uncertain times

Humans hate uncertainty. It makes us feel unsafe and uneasy. We often organize our lives to avoid it. When it's foisted upon us, we don’t always know how to act. But writer and journalist Maggie Jacks...

17 Mar 202548min