Top 140 Johann Hari Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The truth is that you are living in a system that is pouring acid on your attention every day, and then you are being told to blame yourself and to fiddle with your own habits while the world’s attention burns.”

— Johann Hari

102. “In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that’s a little bit difficult. What’s happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that’s with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.”

— Johann Hari

103. “You don’t get what you don’t fight for.”

— Johann Hari

104. “In situations of low stress and safety, mind-wandering will be a gift, a pleasure, a creative force. In situations of high stress or danger, mind-wandering will be a torment.”

— Johann Hari

105. “It could be that reading fiction, over time, boosts your empathy. But it could also be that people who are already empathetic are simply more drawn to reading novels. This makes his.”

— Johann Hari

106. “What does it mean to be a society and culture so frantic that we don’t have time to dream?”

— Johann Hari

107. “There’s a scientific debate about the precise scale of our sleep loss, but the National Sleep Foundation has calculated that the amount of sleep we get has dropped by 20 percent in just a hundred years.”

— Johann Hari

108. “Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” This is because of the “fundamental structure of the brain,” and it’s not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time.”

— Johann Hari

109. “The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated – because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.”

— Johann Hari

110. “After studying all the hidden data – the stuff that Facebook doesn’t release to the public – the company’s scientists reached a definite conclusion. They wrote: “Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” and “if left unchecked,” the site would continue to pump its users with “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.”

— Johann Hari

111. “Tristan taught me that the phones we have, and the programs that run on them, were deliberately designed by the smartest people in the world to maximally grab and maximally hold our attention.”

— Johann Hari

112. “The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.”

— Johann Hari

113. “After carefully analyzing all the options, Facebook’s scientists concluded there was one solution: they said Facebook would have to abandon its current business model. Because their growth was so tied up with toxic outcomes, the company should abandon attempts at growth. The only way out was for the company to adopt a strategy that was “anti-growth” – deliberately shrink, and choose to be a less wealthy company that wasn’t wrecking the world.”

— Johann Hari

114. “We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.”

— Johann Hari

115. “You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.”

— Johann Hari

116. “In our normal lives, many of us try to seek relief from distraction simply by crashing – we try to recover from a day of overload by collapsing in front of the TV. But if you only break away from distraction into rest – if you don’t replace it with a positive goal you are striving toward – you will always be pulled back to distraction sooner or later. The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.”

— Johann Hari

117. “We don’t let them play freely; we imprison them in their homes, with little to do except interact via screens; and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, contains drug-like additives that can make them hyper, and doesn’t contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It’s not a flaw in them that causes children to struggle to pay attention. It’s a flaw in the world we built for them.”

— Johann Hari

118. “It said that we are, collectively, experiencing “a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.”

— Johann Hari

119. “As a culture, in the Western world, we work longer with each decade that passes. Ed Deci, a professor of psychology who I interviewed at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, has shown that an extra month per year has been tacked on to what, in 1969, was considered a full-time job.”

— Johann Hari

120. “So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.”

— Johann Hari

121. “If you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn’t kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.”

— Johann Hari

122. “He explained that when you’re very young, if you get upset or angry, you need an adult to soothe you and calm you down. Over time, as you grow up, if you’re soothed enough, you learn to soothe yourself. You internalise the reassurance and relaxation your family gave to you. But stressed out parents, through no fault of their own, find it harder to soothe their children because they are so amped up themselves.”

— Johann Hari

123. “Fragmentation makes you smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes you bigger, deeper, calmer. Fragmentation shrinks us. Flow expands us.”

— Johann Hari

124. “She believed she had uncovered a key truth about focus: To pay attention in normal ways, you need to feel safe.”

— Johann Hari

125. “If you want to think about thinking itself, he told me, you should see it as being like a symphony. “You’ve got two violin sections, violas, cellos, basses, woodwinds, brass, percussion – but it operates as a whole. It has rhythms.” You need space in your life for the spotlight of focus – but alone, it would be like a solo oboe player on a bare stage, trying to play.”

— Johann Hari

126. “I was for the first time in my life living within the limits of my attention’s resources. I was observing as much information as I could actually process, think about and contemplate. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.”

— Johann Hari

127. “Silicon Valley sells itself by articulating “a big, lofty goal – connecting everyone in the world, or whatever it is. But when you’re actually doing the day-to-day work, it’s about increasing user numbers.”

— Johann Hari

128. “It’s always tempting to mistake your personal decline for the decline of the human species.”

— Johann Hari

129. “We live in a gap between what we know we should do and what we feel we can do.”

— Johann Hari

130. “Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.”

— Johann Hari

131. “The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention – to focus – was cracking and breaking.”

— Johann Hari

132. “It’s the twenty-first-century version of Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake.” Let them be present.”

— Johann Hari

133. “It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.”

— Johann Hari

134. “I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your mind’s own ability to focus deeply? I remember what Mihaly taught me are the main components of flow, and I say to myself: What would be something meaningful to me that I could do now? What is at the edge of my abilities? How can I do something that matches these criteria now? Seeking out flow, I learned, is far more effective than self-punishing shame.”

— Johann Hari

135. “The science is so clear on this that a recent summary explained: “It is now obvious that stress can cause structural changes in the brain with long-term effects.”

— Johann Hari

136. “In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters.”

— Johann Hari

137. “We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours.”

— Johann Hari

138. “There’s nothing naive about believing that concerted democratic campaigning can change the world. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead said: “It’s the only thing that ever has.”

— Johann Hari

139. “The truth is creepier. It’s not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.”

— Johann Hari

140. “I have been around a lot of addiction in my life, and I knew what I was feeling – the addicted person’s craving for the thing that numbs their nagging sense of hollowness.”

— Johann Hari

141. “We can change habits. The way we change a habit is by understanding what the internal trigger is, and making sure that there’s some kind of break between the impulse to do a behavior and the behavior itself.”

— Johann Hari

142. “I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.”

— Johann Hari

143. “Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.”

— Johann Hari