‘Lost Connections’ and ‘A Heart That Works’
December 6, 2023 at 2:07 am | Posted in Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon, Democracy, depression, Dorothy Rowe, humour as medicine, Inequality, Inequality - Australia, Johann Hari’s Lost Connections, mental illness, National Health Service UK, Public Good, Rob Delaney - A Heart That Works | Leave a commentTags: 10 Cloverfield Lane, @johannhari01, Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Catastrophe, Devs, Genevieve Jurgensen’s The Disappearance, Isabel Allende’s Paula, Maggie Scarf’s Unfinished Business, Midsommar, rachelshubert.com, Rob Delaney, Sharon Horgan, thelostconnections.com, www.bicycleworks.com
How to find hope in a world gone mad
During a week at the coast recently with four others, one of the books I’d brought was Johann Hari’s Lost Connections: Why you’re depressed and how to find hope (Bloomsbury, 2018). Three of those friends at different times picked up the book and couldn’t stop reading it. Not because they were depressed but because Johann Hari’s books are like that: exceptionally easy to read and about intrinsically fascinating topics. He has the beautiful style of a bright person who reveals his mistakes and the anxieties and puzzlements of his heart in an appealing and often humorous way. He’s an independent thinker who presents rigorous evidence and complex information lucidly.
I’d read many books on depression when I was fighting a serious bout back in the 1980s. Fighting is not an apt verb because one of the worst things about depression is that it takes away one’s energy. Hard to fight anything when it’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning. The book that helped me most then was Maggie Scarf’s Unfinished Business. That was at a particular time in my battle and it could be different for different people and would be different for me at a different stage.
I beat my youthful depression after an epiphany that came after more than a year of weekly counselling with a gifted psychologist. Much of that time I was unemployed and libraries are free so I read everything my counsellor recommended, even some novels, like The Colour Purple. They all helped and I found anything written by Dorothy Rowe powerfully illuminating. Rowe was an Australian psychologist who later went against the new pharmaceutical trend and insisted that the SSRI drugs were not effective, that depression was a symptom of a deeper problem, which was best solved by the old-fashioned ‘talking cure.’ You can still buy her books in second hand shops and online and they’re really worth reading: accessible and with a clear-eyed, common sense analysis of our society and people’s behaviour.
Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression
Years later, Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An atlas of depression (Simon & Schuster, 2001) came out and even though it was, thank God, not relevant to me any more, I read it and it’s a towering piece of work, the best and certainly most comprehensive about depression I’d read up to then.
But Hari’s Lost Connections eclipses even that. Not that we should compare them – all of these books and especially Solomon’s are brilliant and I’m sure have helped countless people.
Continue Reading ‘Lost Connections’ and ‘A Heart That Works’…
Tools for self-destruction – Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine
October 15, 2023 at 1:36 am | Posted in capitalism, dangers of social media, digital technology, Inequality, mental illness, miscarriage of justice, politics, value of the arts | Leave a commentTags: Facebook, Jordan Peterson, Max Fisher, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Susan Johnson's Aphrodite’s Breath, The Chaos Machine: The inside story of how social media rewired our brains and our world, You Tube
The manipulation of neural pathways
The weekly radio co-hosting preparation was swallowing too much time and compelling me to spend most of it on current affairs. I’m doing it only once a month now. Without the radio over-commitment, I limit current affairs consumption to basic knowledge of what’s going on. What’s going on is always depressing. And there’s nothing ordinary people can do about the corruption and ignorance level to which this country has sunk.
According to Max Fisher we can thank social media for this. Fisher has outlined how this happened in his The Chaos Machine: The inside story of how social media rewired our brains and our world (Quercus, 2023).
Neuroscientist Polly Crocket discovered that social media activates a powerful set of neural pathways and that online norms of ever escalating outrage and conflict ‘transform ancient social emotions from a force for collective good into a tool for collective self destruction.’ Fisher explains that this technology, ‘by training us to be more hostile, more tribal, and more prone to seeing out-group members as less than fully human, might be doing the same to society and politics as a whole.’ (p. 46)
Online platforms like Facebook mean that ‘billions of people’s moral compasses are potentially tilted toward tribalism and distrust. Whole societies are nudged toward conflict, polarization, and unreality – toward something like Trumpism.’ (ibid)
Tearing society’s fabric apart
The Facebook founder is making too much money from the feedback loops manipulating preferences towards extremes to pay more than lip service when governments try to make him rein in its algorithmic preferences. The head of the UN Fact Finding mission found that social media, especially Facebook, played a ‘determining role’ in the genocide in Myanmar and then Sri Lanka. The misinformation and lies spread by Facebook tore the fabric of those societies apart, just as we see it doing the same to other countries. In Sri Lanka when the government blocked Facebook the violence stopped.
Continue Reading Tools for self-destruction – Max Fisher’s The Chaos Machine…
Thirty Two Words for Field and Sand Talk – Irish and Indigenous wisdom
May 12, 2023 at 9:17 pm | Posted in arts and health, Australia behind, Blasket islands, Books, capitalism, Common Good, Democracy, Indigenous wisdom, Inequality - Australia, Living creatively, Manchan Magan, mental illness, Nature writing - Irish, rural Ireland, Sand Talk, sustainable living, value of the arts | 1 CommentTags: Indigenous wisdom, Irish wisdom, Julia Louis Dreyfus’ ‘Wiser than Me’, NeoLiberalism dogma versus Indigenous wisdom, our co-dependent relationship with nature, The Voice referendum, Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape by Manchán Magan, Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk
Connecting with a better world
Apart from reading some fantastic books, I’ve been having fun with my new Kick-Start creative writing workshops. They’ve been zipping along with the poetic contributions of talented students, filling the BRAG room on Tuesday nights with laughter and creative verve. BRAG stands for Braidwood Regional Arts Group and you can find it here: https://www.bragart.com.au
I’ve also been filling in for someone on a local radio station plus submitting my novel MS, Off the Plan, and making collages out of my painted papers and photographs, even working towards an exhibition with some others. And still dancing the Argentine tango. Brilliant books like Thirty Two Words for Field: Lost words of the Irish landscape by Manchán Magan (Gill Books, 2020) have taken up some time too.
Sounds resonate inside us. If ever you’ve heard a cow lowing after losing her calf, you’ll have felt with her the panicked despair floating out on the air. In Irish there’s a word for the sound: diadhárach – the particular loneliness of a cow bereft of her calf. Before the English suppressed the Irish language, words like this connected the speakers more deeply to the world around them. It’s great that Irelanders learn Irish in school now, reconnecting with their native tongue after centuries of English repression of it.
A deeper truth
Manchán Magan considers in his book ‘how words can be wedges that prise back the surface layer of thought and feeling, revealing a deeper truth.’ (p. 185) He observes in his intriguing book that old languages are rich in words that ‘emphasise our interrelatedness with all life and that reveal the empathy we have with each other and with our surroundings. They acknowledge our co-dependent relationship with nature, revealing almost as much about our inner processes and frailties as about the world around us.’ (p. 311)
You don’t have to know a word of Irish to be totally absorbed by this enchanting book. The author offers 45 words for stones and 4,300 words to describe character traits. He spent summers on the Blaskets with his grandmother where he learnt the many ways to express the changing qualities there of the light, winds and the sea. The language expressed a different way of being, of connecting with the landscape around them. Continue Reading Thirty Two Words for Field and Sand Talk – Irish and Indigenous wisdom…
Lost Focus – Johann Hari’s feasible solutions to our burning problems
April 13, 2022 at 4:08 am | Posted in capitalism, Democracy, depression, digital technology, dreams, Leisure, Living creatively, media negativity, mental illness, stress management, writers' health | Leave a commentTags: ADHD, Aza Raskin, extremism, Facebook, Google, Johann Hari, sleep, Stolen Focus, toxic culture
Tsunamis of information are drowning us
We’ve lost our ability to focus. Tsunamis of information are coming at us, drenching us every minute of every waking hour. We can’t keep up with it, mentally or emotionally. What we sacrifice when we try is depth. Not to mention sanity, peace of mind and our democracy.
In other words, the stakes could not be higher. Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus (Bloomsbury, 2021) is an important book, beautifully written, which outlines practical solutions for the problems that unregulated social media has unleashed.
While researching this book, Hari interviewed 250 relevant experts worldwide. One of them was Aza Raskin. You mightn’t have heard of him but chances are, he’s influencing your behaviour every day. His dad invented the Apple Macintosh for Steve Jobs. The internet used to be divided into pages. When you got to the bottom of one, you had to decide to click a button to get to the next page – an active choice that gave you time to think: do I really want to continue reading this? Aza designed a code that took away that choice: infinite scrolling.
All social media now uses a version of this. It automatically loads more when it gets to the bottom. It will scroll infinitely.
Soon after his code took effect, Aza Raskin began noticing how his friends seemed unable to pull themselves away from their devices. He did some sums, and calculated that his invention was making people spend 50% more time than they otherwise would on sites like Twitter. For many it’s vastly more. He saw people becoming angry, hostile and lacking in empathy as their social media use rose. Had he invented something that not only drains away people’s time, but ‘that tears us, rips us, and breaks us’? (p. 116) Continue Reading Lost Focus – Johann Hari’s feasible solutions to our burning problems…
The Salt Path by Raynor Winn
February 23, 2020 at 4:04 pm | Posted in mental illness, miscarriage of justice, optimism, Simplifying, wild camping | 2 CommentsTags: Charlie Byrnes Bookshop Galway, cortcobasal degerneration, Rayor Winn, Shankill Castle, South West Coast Path, The Salt Path, www.shankillcastle.com
Nothing left to lose
I’m travelling through Ireland, en route to a writing residency in County Kerry and the bookshops here are brilliant. A favourite one is Charlie Byrnes Bookshop in Galway. My favourite book from there is The Salt Path by Raynor Winn (Penguin, 2018).
Sitting before roaring log fires in Shankill Castle’s drawing room (my landlord Geoffrey calls it the withdrawing room), I couldn’t put this book down. But I didn’t want it to end.
The Salt Path was a Sunday Times Bestseller and it’s easy to see why. The author and her husband, called Moth, decide to walk from Somerset to Dorset, via Devon and Cornwall, a distance of 630 miles. They carry rucksacks and a small, lightweight tent, with no money to back them up except a minimal weekly pension and even that uncertain and diminishing for no reason they can fathom or do anything about.
It was an impulsive decision, made when the bailiffs were literally banging on the windows of their farmhouse. They’d lost their home of twenty years, their livelihood from it, and their animals. After three years of endless battle with the courts (using up all their savings), a clear miscarriage of justice had landed them in this position.
Drinking the days: biographies and oysters
January 28, 2020 at 10:36 am | Posted in Australian memoir, Christina Stead, Democracy, Dennis Glover, Kay Schubach, Living creatively, mental illness, optimism, value of the arts | Leave a commentTags: David Leser, Derry Girls, George Orwell, Greta Thunberg, Jonathan Self
‘Set wide the window. Let me drink the day.’ American writer Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote that. I love it and would often think of it after opening the curtains first thing.
But her words took on a tragic tone in the mornings after the bushfires began. We could no longer open windows. Canberra’s air quality suddenly became literally the worst city in the world.
Actually it wasn’t as sudden as it seemed. Canberra’s air quality has been gradually worsening in the past few years, along with the rest of the country’s, thanks to our Government doing less than nothing about vehicle and other emissions responsible for raising CO2 levels.[1]
But I was aiming at an uplifting, positive post, damn it! I normally slant towards the upbeat, the whacky, the whimsical, but before veering in that direction, a serious point needs to be acknowledged. Continue Reading Drinking the days: biographies and oysters…
Reinventing our lives: surviving with the help of literature
December 28, 2019 at 6:11 am | Posted in Andrea Goldsmith, Australia behind, Bookshops, capitalism, Charlotte Wood, creativity, depression, Inequality - Australia, mental illness, optimism, value of the arts, writers' health | Leave a commentTags: David Wallace-Wells, Hidden City: Adventures and explorations in Dublin by Karl Whitney, How to Be Right (in a world gone wrong) by James O’Brien, Invented Lives, Michael Gustafson and Oliver Uberti, Michael Winterbottom, Notes from a Public Typewriter, restore sanity and improve everyone’s well-being by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Inner Level: How more equal societies reduce stress, The Uninhabitable Earth: A story of the future
When I was in Dublin in September I bought some wonderful books. A favourite is the intriguing, personal and beautifully written Hidden City: Adventures and explorations in Dublin by Karl Whitney (Penguin, 2014). (I’ve lent it and others to friends and can’t take a photo of its cover or some other favourites at the moment!)
Stitched Up: The anti-capitalist book of fashion (Pluto Press, London, 2014) is a compelling account of how the fashion industry exploits and damages both the environment and individuals. Tansy E. Hoskins’ exposé was an eye-watering shock to me on both counts.
I had no idea about the toxic chemicals involved in high-fashion clothes production, or how, for instance, models are sometimes treated as they are in the pornography industry – dispensable and beneath contempt.
Continue Reading Reinventing our lives: surviving with the help of literature…
A struggle with mental illness – I Am Brian Wilson: A memoir
February 5, 2017 at 11:24 pm | Posted in creativity, depression, mental illness, song writing, writers' health | Leave a commentTags: Beachboys' Pet Sounds, Campaign to Change Direction, Love and Mercy film, Michelle Obama
Pet Sounds
When I was fourteen my older brother gave me the new Beachboys’ Pet Sounds album for Christmas. It was and remains my favourite. I’d never heard anything like those sophisticated, layered compositions and sublime harmonies – and neither had anyone else. No one had ever put together sounds like that before. It had a massive influence on future music. Without Pet Sounds the Beatles would never have made their Sergeant Peppers album.
I’ve been thinking about Pet Sounds a lot lately because I’ve been reading I Am Brian Wilson (with Ben Greenman, Coronet, 2016), a story of early success and mental illness, of creative genius and tragic loss, of addiction and second chances. I love this book. Continue Reading A struggle with mental illness – I Am Brian Wilson: A memoir…
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