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

Hari talked to a man named Joe Phillips for his book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. Phillips worked at a paint shop where he prepared pigments. He hated his job, felt he made no difference, and had no opportunities to grow as a person. At home, Phillips was not motivated to spend time with loved ones, only to watch television, be alone, or drink. Phillips became addicted to Oxycontin, which “made him as blank and empty as the job itself. It seemed to dissolve the conflict between his desire to make a difference and the reality of his life” (76).

Although he was a heavy drinker and had experimented with drugs, Phillips realized he was taking the Oxycontin to deaden his hatred for his job. Phillips thought about becoming a fishing guide in Florida, but “he was blocked by something neither he nor [Hari] fully understood” (86). Hari notes that a global Gallup survey found that 63% of people are “not engaged” with their work, and 24% are “actively disengaged” (77). Further, many people are working longer hours to make ends meet.

Hari interviews Michael Marmot, an Australian doctor who researched how work affects physical health by speaking with members of the British civil service in London. Marmot found that people with the lowest-paying and lowest-ranked jobs in the civil service were four times more likely to have heart attacks and more likely to develop depression (81). Marmot and his team looked at workers in the same department but with different levels of responsibility:

The higher up you went in the civil service […] the more friends and social activity you had after work. The lower you went, the more that tapered off—the people with boring, low-status jobs just wanted to collapse in front of the television when they got home (83).

If work was not enriching and if no one noticed if anyone did a good job, those workers’ entire lives were negatively impacted.

Hari’s mother came from the working class and his father lived in a small Swiss village. When they moved to a Scottish suburb named Edgware, there was no sense of community: “Life was meant to happen, my parents learned slowly, inside your house” (87-88).

Hari highlights the research of John Cacioppo, which examined how loneliness causes stress. Cacioppo and colleagues had 100 people at the University of Chicago live their day-to-day lives wearing heart monitors. They found “[b]ecoming acutely lonely […] was as stressful as experiencing a physical attack” (90). Other research suggested that lonely people are more susceptible to diseases and are more likely to die from illness or health problems than people with good social lives.

Later studies by Cacioppo found that “lonely people are also anxious, have low self-esteem, are pessimistic, and are afraid other people will dislike them” (91). Cacioppo triggered memories of loneliness through hypnosis and by following the lives of a group of older Americans. He concluded that loneliness “leads to depression” and that becoming lonelier drastically increases the chances of developing depression (92). Cacioppo’s theory is that humans evolved to work and live together as part of a group; when that connection is severed, people feel awful. Other researchers found that isolated rats “developed eighty-four times the number of breast cancer tumors as the rats who had a community” (99).

A Harvard professor, Robert Putnam, examined how involvement in community organization declined “across the Western world” (96). In the United States, surveys have found that by 2004 the majority of responders reported having no confidants (96). Hari reflects on a man in a hotel in Kentucky who was going to have surgery for his jaw, but couldn’t afford pain medication in the meantime. He clearly had no one to help him. He also discusses comedian Sarah Silverman, who, in an interview, noted that she felt homesick even when she was at home. Hari interprets this as an example of how “[o]ur sense of home has shriveled so far and so fast it no longer meets our need for a sense of belonging” (98).

Hari also found that even people who are around others may still feel lonely. Talking with Cacioppo, Hari realized: “We have started to believe that doing things alone is the natural state of human beings, and the only way to advance” (101). Likewise, the Internet has become a substitute for social interaction.

Hari interviewed Dr. Hilaire Cash, a therapist specializing in online video game or chat room addiction. Cash founded a rehab center for Internet and gaming addicts called reSTART Life. She observed that her patients were “all anxious or depressed before the compulsion began” (106). Hari muses that the Internet “addresses a basic itch, but it’s never satisfying” (108).

To examine how our values are part of a problem, Hari speaks with the American psychologist Tim Kasser. Growing up, Kasser realized that modern society valued material goods. This contrasted with thousands of years of philosophical tradition, which held that if you put too much value in money and external goods you will be unhappy. In graduate school, Kasser developed a survey and found that “materialistic people, who think happiness comes from accumulating stuff and a superior status, had much higher levels of depression and anxiety” (114).

Hari argues that people are motivated by intrinsic factors, which are actions you do because you value them for their own sake, and extrinsic factors, where you perform tasks not out of desire but to get something in return (115). While everyone has a mixture of both motives, Kasser found that the more you fulfill your intrinsic motives, the happier you are; a person becomes depressed and anxious the more they are driven by extrinsic motives.

Comparing this to junk food, Hari argues: “[W]e have shifted from having meaningful values to having junk values” (117). The focus on only materialistic values worsens relationships because such people only value shallow qualities in their partners. Materialistic people do not often experience what Hari calls “flow states” (118), where a person simply experiences the pleasure of what they are doing. Junk values harm an individual’s self-esteem, because materialistic values make you more dependent on people’s perceptions of you. Being focused on material goods or on your job makes you focus less on family, relationships, and spirituality.

Kasser believes that modern Western culture promotes materialistic values, which he calls the I-Want-Golden-Things Rule. He theorized that a major cause of this is advertising, which is designed “to make people feel inadequate—and then offer their product as the solution to the sense of inadequacy they have created” (122). Hari uses the example of an unhappy middle-class family he knew as a child, who show off their wealth instead of having meaningful lives. Hari concludes that Joe Philips did not pursue his dream of being a fishing guide in Florida because he grew up in a culture that taught him to “stay on the consumerist treadmill, to go shopping when he feels lousy, to chase junk values” (127).