That quote is by way of a Johann Hari TED Talk, but the actual quote is from Tim Kasser, a psychology professor in Illinois. Here’s the full TED Talk:
Ironically, I used a Hari talk one other time on this blog. It was about addiction, and paradoxically I wrote that post while sitting at a bar eating Rocket Tots. Perhaps unsurprisingly, six years later I still struggle with some of these topics.
Now, I want to take you back quickly to August 2015. I had moved to Fort Worth in July 2014 (a year before), and I was working for this luxury travel company called Virtuoso. The first six months were pretty cool, and I even got to go to Belgium. After that, it started to wane. My deliverables were unclear, in reality I should have been managed by someone in Seattle, my marriage was falling apart, I drank too much, etc. It’s a mix of bad job fit and my own issues. I ended up getting piped out.
Before that happened, though, I went to a big trade show in Vegas in August 2015. I came downstairs one night to wander the casino, and I see my entire team, i.e. everyone on my team except for me, leaving in cabs for a “team dinner.” It was heartbreaking. I got drunk with a co-worker that night, and my team came back (all together) and tried to pretend nothing was out of the ordinary.
I was miserable for that whole night, just drowning sorrows and wondering what I did wrong. I certainly didn’t feel anything about belonging. If anything, I felt hideously disconnected, depressed, angry, and confused.
My boss, Elaine Srnka, did a review of me a month later. When she went into some of the negative review parts, I brought up the team-dinner-minus-me. She said, “Oh, that still bothers you? Whatever.” That’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever had a manager say to me. Yes, a violation of basic human tenets and needs should still impact you a month later.
I was gone 1.75 months after that.
Now let’s go back to the Hari talk above. Look at this section:
There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields. And one day, he stood on a land mine left over from the war with the United States, and he got his leg blown off. So they him an artificial leg, and after a while, he went back to work in the rice fields. But apparently, it’s super painful to work under water when you’ve got an artificial limb, and I’m guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up. The guy started to cry all day, he refused to get out of bed, he developed all the symptoms of classic depression. The Cambodian doctor said, “This is when we gave him an antidepressant.” And Dr. Summerfield said, “What was it?” They explained that they went and sat with him. They listened to him. They realized that his pain made sense — it was hard for him to see it in the throes of his depression, but actually, it had perfectly understandable causes in his life. One of the doctors, talking to the people in the community, figured, “You know, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer, he wouldn’t be in this position that was screwing him up so much, he wouldn’t have to go and work in the rice fields.” So they bought him a cow. Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped, within a month, his depression was gone. They said to doctor Summerfield, “So you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant, that’s what you mean, right?”
To a lot of people, this is a bad bar joke. “I went to a doctor for pills, and he gave me a cow,” with maybe a stamp of “You know, my WIFE!” Many people I know would not quite understand what’s going on here, but it’s pretty basic: this guy lost purpose and lost connection to people, vocation, and bigger notions. Then people sat with him (he was heard, he belonged), they listened (ditto), they proposed a new source of work and purpose, and he became less depressed because he was back to being part of something. It’s utterly logical.
Now you have Hari discussing “junk values,” which is basically chasing Instagram impressions, big house, money, etc. instead of these things that fulfill humans more. To wit:
And as I thought about this, I realized it’s like we’ve all been fed since birth, a kind of KFC for the soul. We’ve been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places, and just like junk food doesn’t meet your nutritional needs and actually makes you feel terrible, junk values don’t meet your psychological needs, and they take you away from a good life. But when I first spent time with professor Kasser and I was learning all this, I felt a really weird mixture of emotions. Because on the one hand, I found this really challenging. I could see how often in my own life, when I felt down, I tried to remedy it with some kind of show-offy, grand external solution. And I could see why that did not work well for me. I also thought, isn’t this kind of obvious? Isn’t this almost like banal, right? If I said to everyone here, none of you are going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the shoes you bought and all the retweets you got, you’re going to think about moments of love, meaning and connection in your life. I think that seems almost like a cliché. But I kept talking to professor Kasser and saying, “Why am I feeling this strange doubleness?” And he said, “At some level, we all know these things. But in this culture, we don’t live by them.” We know them so well they’ve become clichés, but we don’t live by them. I kept asking why, why would we know something so profound, but not live by it? And after a while, professor Kasser said to me, “Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life.” I had to really think about that. “Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life.”
As you can see, that’s where we get the Kasser quote that’s the title of this post.
I’ve written about some of these topics before — depression, for example, or leading a box-check lifestyle — and while my writing is certainly not far-reaching by any means, these are topics I think about consistently.
In general, I think people tend to prioritize what they want to prioritize, which tends to be a relationship, children, aspects of a job (not the full job), some hobbies, and leisure activities. What you choose to prioritize is going to be influenced by brain science and psychology, of course. If you get a massive dopamine hit every time you get a like on a baby crawling photo, you are going to prioritize more baby crawling photos. This is just life. Once the parameters of prioritization are set for someone, usually in their 20s or 30s, it takes a lot to break into that.
You might get a few texts back from that person, or a lunch here and there, or a comedy show once every six months, but if you’re not within their scope of what they focus on, you’re just a mid-level acquaintance, ultimately. I think that over-focus on immediate needs and people — which has likely intensified because of COVID — is why people feel less and less connection, belonging, inclusion, etc. And then somehow we, at work, want HR to fix these things. LOL. Or software. ROFL. It’s because of people’s circles slimming down, and it’s because of platforms and mobile, and it’s because of windows of time where you can have power, and it’s because self-absorption replaced self-awareness in many. That’s where the depression and anxiety is coming from.
Having kids is a tremendous example herein. I’m 40, I’ve been married twice, I ain’t got no kids. Someday I would like to, but let’s see where the God cards are. But through both women I’ve been with, they each had friends where a kid, or kids, was going to solve everything about how they felt: connection to spouse, connection to friends, connection to the world, Instagram prowess, etc. In so many of those cases, the woman (and often the man) end up feel overburdened and don’t find the connection they thought they might find in the process of becoming parents. I know women through my ex whose hair was literally falling out as they were posting the eight-month pic on social media. The last time their husband and them discussed anything remotely relevant was about 19 months prior. We think certain things will provide belonging and purpose, and they do in pockets, but other times it’s just hard, like life often is.
Maybe we should stop thinking about how we can “hack” or “disrupt” depression — talk apps, pills, tech, whatever — and start thinking about how we’re living in a machine that doesn’t allow us to focus on the right things, and maybe what we all need is a cow instead of rice, or someone to listen to us and hear us and realize where we’re at. Maybe that’s the next product release on The Machine of Modernity.
Yes/no?
