Lost Connections: Part Two
The second half of Lost Connections is where Johann Hari really starts to shine. It is not incidental that the pages I started to lose through wear and tear are all after page 160, when Hari starts to propose solutions to the causes of disconnection that he discusses in the first half.
Reconnect
When we medicate our moods, we're treating symptoms. We feel down, depressed, lethargic (or perhaps we can't sleep). We frame our depression, as a society, as a problem with brain chemistry. If depression was primarily a problem with unbalanced brain chemicals, then it would be possible to treat by somehow bringing those chemicals back into balance.
But depression isn't a brain problem--or at least, the amount that it is or could be a brain problem is so minute that it makes more sense to fix problems in our lives and lifestyles than it does to guzzle down meds. We are disconnected in all the ways that matter--from our own histories, from our world, from each other. To reconnect is to find a way out of depression.
Kotti: We Built This City or Reconnecting to Other People
A group of wasteland refugees huddles together in broken housing on the west side after the Berlin Wall goes up. They re-build, brick by brick, the shattered spaces still reeling from WWII. The community grows and modernizes. The wall comes down and suddenly, these wasteland remnants find themselves in the middle of the city. Prime real estate. Their rent gets raised remorselessly, year after year. Nobody even knows who owns these buildings. The poorest denizens of Berlin are being squeezed out of homes they've had for decades.
One woman posts a sign in her window that she can't pay the rent any more and that she's going to kill herself. Come collect her things.
Her community rallies around her. Sets up a blockade of the street. Mans it for two years, night and day. Conservative Turkish house wives dressed in niqābs work with blonde single moms in mini-skirts to keep the cops from dismantling their blockade.
The people of Kotti find a way to solve their problems, some of them, some of the time, just by coming together. The nuclear families that are falling apart, struggling to survive, finding themselves crushed under jackboots of a much more subtle nature, connect with their neighbors.
"Taina told me that in modern society, if you are down, you are made to 'feel it's only in your house. It's only you. Because you didn't succeed--you didn't get a job where you earn much more money. It's your fault. You are a bad father. And then suddenly, when we went on the street, a lot of people realized--hey, I'm the same! I thought I was the only one...It was what a lot of people told me too--I was feeling so lost and depressed, but now, okay...I am a fighter. I feel good. You come out of your corner crying, and you start to fight.'" (Chapter 15, p. 178, 2018).