This Post Talks About Kids and Psychedelic Drugs

Well, we're just about wrapped up on discussing Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections. I still strongly encourage anyone that's been following this series to get the book. If you don't have enough money to buy it, hit up your local library. It's a very good book.

Chapters 13 and 20 will be discussed here. In chapter 13, Hari put two reasons for depression in one chapter. Genetics, and changes in the brain.

If you suffer from depression and anxiety, you've probably asked yourself, "Am I broken?" I've often asked myself that when wondering why I was depressed. I've had friends and family members talk to me about their depression and ask that. What we really mean is, "Am I just genetically predisposed to suffer from depression and anxiety?" And the answer is, well, kind of.

We're not actually broken. As I've written already and as Hari's book discusses in detail, we have perfectly good reasons for being depressed. Very legitimate reasons. Yet there is two factors that can make us more predispositioned for depression and anxiety.

The beginning of Chapter 13 discusses a concept called "neuroplasticity". Neuroplasticity is the brain changing over time as new experiences happen. Hari interviewed a neuroscientist named Marc Lewis about the concept. To quote:

If you look at a brain scan of a depressed or highly anxious person, Marc explained to me, it will look different from the brain scan of somebody without these problems. The areas that relate to feeling unhappy, or to being aware of risk, will be lit up like Christmas tree lights. They will be bigger, and more active.

Basically, if you do suffer from depression and anxiety, your brain is wired for it.

I can relate to this big time. I once told my therapist, "One of the perks of having General Anxiety Disorder is that you're always preparing for the worst case scenario." I said that completely unironically. My wife and I had signed up to National Debt Relief about six months prior because we were in debt up to our eyeballs, and they asked us if we wanted to pay an upcharge to keep a lawyer on retainer in case one of our creditors decided to sue us. Of course I did. I prepared for the worst case scenario. And then one of the creditors did. Good thing we paid for that lawyer, as he got that shit settled quick.

I'm always preparing for the worst case scenario, because having depression and anxiety has my brain hard wired to always be scoping out threats. When you suffer from those, your brain is in constant survival mode. Detect the threat. Prepare to defend against the threat.

It's kind of ironic that in those moments, anxiety feels less like a burden and more like a warm blanket.

The other part of chapter 13 talks about the genetic component of depression. When I saw that there was a genetic link to depression and anxiety, I was, to put it mildly, alarmed. My oldest daughter has shown symptoms of extreme anxiety, and not just in a "kids being kids" way. There's times when she expresses fear in a "this is not normal, even for a six year old" manner. And come to think of it, my parents have suffered from depression. My dad's medicine cabinet is full of pretty much every anti-depressant on the map. From what my parents have told me, my grandparents likely suffered from depression. But it's not that simple. A group of scientists did study the genetic component of depression and anxiety and, to quote:

Years into their work, they found something striking. They discovered that having a variant of a gene called 5-HTT does relate to becoming depressed.                                                                                                                                                                                   Yet there was a catch. We are all born with a genetic inheritance-but your genes are activated by your environment. They can be switched on, or off, by what happens to you. And Avshalom [the leader of the team of scientific researchers conducting the study] discovered-as Professor Robert Sapolsky explains-"that if you have a particular flavor of 5-HTT, you have a greatly increased risk of depression, but only in a certain environment." If you carried this gene, the study showed, you were more likely to become depressed-but only if you have experienced a terribly stressful event, or a great deal of childhood trauma.

So there is a mental component to depression, but it's only activated as a result of the perfectly good reasons why you're depressed or anxious.

So how do we deal with this? Well, according to the book, by doing lots and lots of drugs!

I'm kidding, but not really.

Ronald Griffith is a man that rose through the ranks of psychology and has become a veritable god in the field. After trying to find studies on meditation (more on that later), he found that there were studies done in the 50s and 60s on the effect of hallucinogens that caused people to not only be less depressed, but also quit smoking and drinking. The studies ceased after that, because, well, President Nixon. But in the 1990s, Dr. Griffith had enough political clout to try it again. He decided to do experiments with patients under the influence of psilocybin, the chemical in magic mushrooms. The patients were placed in a room under the supervision of a medical professional, and given the drug. The effects were magical.

Like I keep saying, get the fucking book and read it (Lost Connections by Johann Hari, at your local library if you can't afford to buy it, otherwise it's literally anywhere books are sold), because the results were spectacular, and the experiences detailed in the book are far too long for me to quote. Yet the patients had their anxiety replaced by a feeling of deep connection to people and their emotions.

When I read about this, I did look into where I could have this same treatment. Do drugs, end your depression. I found one retreat out in California that cost thousands of dollars to attend, not including travel costs. So that's out.

So what can we do? That's where meditation comes in.

Or I should say, real meditation. Meditation exercises are pretty much everywhere these days, and a lot of it is just bullshit made to collect your money. Back when I worked at the oil refinery, I would listen to a meditation app on my phone that did nothing but have me doing some breathing exercises. For $5.99 a month, some asshole told me to "breathe in, breathe out" for ten minutes a day and it didn't do a thing. I was still depressed and hated my job.

Hari's book mentions two types of meditation. The first is "loving-kindness meditation". If you're the type of person that hates people out of envy, this is a good exercise for you. Just close your eyes, think of someone that you're envious of, and instead of thinking hateful thoughts, focus on thinking positive thoughts about the person. Do it for five minutes at a time, every day. After a while, you'll notice that not only are you happier, but you're also liking people a lot more.

The other is deep meditation, which does mimic the effects of being on magic mushrooms. One of the patients that had taken shrooms in the experiment given by Dr. Griffith ended up becoming a meditation coach because he knew that the psychological effects of taking the drug were temporary, and he wanted to continue having the mental state that he had after doing the experiment.

I've been trying to find a deep meditation coach ever since reading Hari's book, and it's not an easy task. I live in Southeast Michigan, where 2/3rds of the population lives, and finding pretty much any other thing is easy to find here. Yet finding an actual deep meditation coach, as opposed to a bunch of con artists, is hard. I'll still keep looking, though.

Well, this wraps up my series on Lost Connections. I might do a conclusion post in the days ahead to sum up everything in his book and my last few posts. There's also a lot of stuff I really want to write about if I can get the time. Either way, thanks for reading!

One Thing We Can Do For Ourselves

This post is going to be discussing chapter 11 of Lost Connections. Cause Six: Disconnection from the Natural World.

A little over a year ago, I got sacked from my job working security at an oil refinery in Southwest Detroit. I didn't know it at the time, but it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. Getting fired sucks, and I didn't take it well even though I hated the job. The main reason why I hated the job was the area itself. For miles around, all you saw was urban decay. The heavy industrialization of the area took its toll on the environment. You saw nothing but concrete, and the nearby River Rouge was so polluted that it didn't even look appealing. You certainly couldn't swim in it. Not unless you wanted to die a horrible death from cancer.

That environment took a toll on the employees of the refinery. Everyone was miserable there (I imagine they still are). That made management hard to deal with. Much of middle management would take their hatred of the area out on the workers. So the combination of a shit environment with shit bosses made the whole job a shit job.

Thinking back on how awful that job was, I'm tempted to ramble on about it. But this is about Johann Hari's book, and not my old shit job.

In this chapter, Hari interviews Isabel Behncke, an evolutionary biologist. In order to get the interview, Isabel made Hari climb a mountain with her. Hari did not want to climb a mountain-he's a city boy through and through-but he wanted the interview, so off he went. The chapter ends when they've finished climbing the mountain:

The cruelest thing about depression, she said, is that it drains of you the desire to be fully alive as this-to swallow experience whole. "We want to feel alive," she said. We want it, and need it, so badly. Later, she said: "Obviously, we were facing death, but you felt alive, right? You might have been horrified-but you were not depressed."                           No. I was not depressed.

Isabel studied bonobos for many years. She first studied them in zoos, and realized she'd have to go to a war-torn part of the Congo to study them outside of captivity. She found that when the bonobos were not in captivity, they sometimes would get depression. Like many primate societies, there's always a few members of the tribe that face ostracization, and those would show signs of depression. Yet, they only showed depression to a certain point.

In the wild, for bonobos, there's a limit to how far this depression goes. It's there-especially for the low-status ones-but there is a floor below which the animals won't sink. Yet in zoos, it seemed the bonobos would slip further and further down, in a way they never would in the wild. They would scratch until they bled. They would howl. They would develop tics, or start rocking obsessively. In their natural habitat, she [Isabel] never saw the bonobos develop this "full-blown, chronic depression," she says, but in zoos, it was quite common.

This chapter of Hari's book cites several studies that show the link between being away from nature and depression. One that really captured my attention was one that wasn't discussed very much, but gave a shout out to Michigan. Namely, the Jackson State Prison. Those of us that live in Michigan know that if you done fucked up bad, that's the prison you're going to. It's underdone different names and rebuilding over the years, yet it houses Michigan's most violent offenders. One thing that was noticed in a study done on mental health in that prison was that on one side of the prison, inmates can look outside of their cells and see farmland. On the other side of the prison, inmates see a concrete wall. When all other factors were accounted for, those that were on the side that saw the farmland had a 25% rate of decrease in mental and physical health problems.

One of the things I noticed about Hari's book is that there is no chapter on reconnection associated with this. Probably because the solution to this is simple: Get your ass outside. It would be hard to write a whole chapter just telling people to get their ass outside. While most of the problems with depression outlined in Lost Connections talks about a need for a collective solution, this is one that we can handle on an individual level. Go outside. Get in touch with nature.

One of the perks of my new job is that it has an impressive amount of vacation pay, and unlike every other job I've had that promised vacation pay, you don't have to wait a year to get it. A certain amount of hours are accumulated in every paycheck. So next month, I'll be going camping with my family in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. My wife and I love going up there. We've taken three vacations up there, including our honeymoon. Because of how security companies have done me in past employment, this will be our first vacation in six years. And like I said in my post Wanting Stuff Makes us Depressed, we really miss tent camping, so instead of taking the camper, we're taking a tent. I was discussing the UP with one of my coworkers who had never been up there and asked, "You know what's in the UP that makes it so great?" He answered no and I responded, "NOTHING! THERE'S NOTHING UP THERE, AND THAT'S WHAT MAKES IT SO GREAT! It's nothing but trees! You go up there, you unplug, and you enjoy yourself!" My wife and I are geeking out about our vacation next month where we'll see a whole bunch of nothing. Nothing but nature. We're going to see the Painted Rocks, make our third trip to Tahquamenon Falls, and visit a bear sanctuary. A whole bunch of nothing but nature, and we're thrilled about it.

One of the few things we can do for ourselves to fight depression is to get back in touch with nature. Get your ass outside. Go hiking. Go camping. Go ice fishing if it's cold. Or ice skating if that's your thing. Just get your ass outside.

Why Fixing this Shit Will be Hard

This latest post is going to be discussing chapters 10, 15 and 16 of Johann Hari's book, Lost Connections.

In chapter 10, Hari talks to a scientist named Robert Sapolski, who studied baboons in their natural habitat. Baboons have a hierarchical structure, and for the males, the strongest is on top. At the top of the troop of baboons he studied, there was Solomon.

Solomon was allowed to do whatever he pleased. He could take food from the other baboons, kick them out of the shade when it was hot and take the spot for himself, etc. At the bottom of the troop was Job. Job would have stress related seizures. His hair would fall out from stress. And as Solomon was allowed to do whatever he wanted to any baboon, it was permitted that the baboons could do anything they wanted to Job. And they did.

One of the tasks Dr. Sapolski had to do for his research was hit a baboon with a tranquilizer dart and draw their blood. The blood was tested for many things, including cortisol, the stress hormone. Solomon rarely had high levels of cortisol, while Job was filled with it.

Humans are the same way. To quote the book:

Some human cultures (like the United States) have very large gaps between the people at the top and the people at the bottom. In thos places, there is a small number of Solomons at the top, and most people are left like Job at the bottom. But other human cultures (like Norway) are quite different-with highly equal ways of living, where the top and bottom are close together. In those cultures, there are hardly any Solomon and hardly any Jobs-most people live in a middle zone, like Numbers 10 to 13 in the baboon hierarchy

And when sociologists did similar research on human societies, the results were similar to the study of baboons. When there's a high amount of inequality, there's a high amount of anxiety and depression. Lower amounts of inequality lead to less amount of anxiety and depression. The book states, "When the status gap is too big, it creates 'a sense of defeat that you can't escape from.'"

The book (and my previous posts) have discussed the solutions to this problem. Destroy the hierarchies. Create a system where all people have their basic economic needs met. Democratize the workplace. It should be easy to create this system, but it's not. Why? Well, that's where Solomon comes in.

Solomon rarely had high levels of cortisol when his blood was tested. Rarely. But when he did, it was when another baboon went gunnin' for that #1 spot. "It turned out-when his blood samples were tested-that when there is a war on for the position of alpha male, the most stressed baboons are the ones at the top", the book states.

Solomon's power was eventually challenged by a young baboon named Uriah. It took almost a year, but eventually Uriah took the top spot and Solomon ended up being number 9 in the hierarchy. All the other baboons that he had spent years fucking over enjoyed their sweet revenge until Solomon left the troop and never came back.

Just like the study with baboons, humans are the same way. Those on top get very, very stressed at the thought of losing their position within the hierarchy. And they're very, very invested in keeping their spot at the top of it. So much so, that according to the book, the thought of losing their spot in the hierarchy creates even higher levels of cortisol than those who live at the bottom of it.

We're a nation of hierarchies. Class hierarchies, racial hierarchies, patriarchal hierarchies, and so on. And people are scared of giving up their spot in one of those hierarchies, even if it'll make their life better. LBJ said it best when he said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

So what can we do about that? Well, chapters 15 and 16 help to give an answer.

Chapter 15 tells a story about a housing project in Berlin in 2011. Gentrification had raised the rents in the area, and one elderly woman was about to face eviction. Knowing she'd be homeless, she decided she would commit suicide. She posted a sign on her window saying she would.

This gave the community the kick start they needed to organize. The community didn't get along very well. It was filled with the outcasts of society-Turks, gay people, leftists, Muslims, etc. And they all had mostly segregated themselves in that neighborhood because of prejudice.

And I really hope that those reading my post get this book (even if you don't have money to buy it, find a local library and check it out), because I can't quote this chapter enough to explain how goddamn glorious this protest is. I can only sum it up by saying that all these people that had long been suspicious of each other, started not only working together, but liking each other. To quote:

"It wasn't a straight line toward greater tolerance. It had zigs and zags. 'Everyone should do what they want, so long as they don't try to convert me' Nuriye [the woman who posted the sign] told me. 'I'm not sure how I'd react if my children said they were gay-I don't know.' Sudblock [the local gay bar] offered to sponsor the Turkish teenage girls' soccer team. Their parents said it was a step too far-to put the name of this gay club on their daughters' jerseys.

One day, long into the protest, Richard Stein [the owner of Sudblock] was in his bar when one of the conservative Turkish residents-a woman who wears the full niqab-gave him some cakes. He opened the box. Out of icing, on top of one of them, she had made a little rainbow flag.

Chapter 16 follows up on this story. Reconnection One: To Other People, is the title of the chapter. The opening chapter says in part:

 In most parts of the Western world, Nuriye would have been told there was something wrong with her brain chemistry. So would everyone else in Kotti. They would have taken their pills and stayed alone in their little apartments until they were thrown out and scattered. I never felt more keenly that this story was wrong than at Kotti. They taught me that when people rediscover each other, problems that previously seemed insoluble start to look soluble....

What solved their problems? It seemed to me it was other people standing by their side, committed to walking on the path with them, finding collective solutions to their problems. They didn't need to be drugged. They needed to be together.

Fixing this shit will be hard, but if we're to do so, we need to find common ground by going out and talking to people. Not on Facebook, or other social media platforms, because we're at our worst there. We need to actually go out, and talk to people.

I work in private security. It's the only civilian job I've had in two decades. I didn't really choose this to be my career, but it was more or less forced on me. I started doing the job because they offered $7 an hour when the minimum wage was $4.25. Then I got home from Iraq in 2006 when we were just about to hit another recession and the only industry that would take me in was private security once again. I was unemployed by 2009 and in 2012, the only job I could get was, once again, private security. I've been doing that ever since. I make this point because private security isn't exactly a career path that one chooses if they're a leftist. My profession is filled with, to put it lightly, those right of center. Or, to put it more accurately, filled with reactionary assholes.

At my current job, that's not any different. I'd really like my current job if many of my coworkers weren't reactionary shitbags. But it's actually forced me to talk to these reactionaries in real life, instead of arguing them on social media. And that's where everything above that I've talked about comes in.

One of my co-workers is Pat. I argue politics with Pat on a regular basis. I have to keep it civil when I argue with Pat, because he's a Sergeant, so I have to tread very carefully with my words. He is, after all, middle management, so I can't insult him directly when we debate. He really likes Trump. He's also dropped the occasional racist or homophobic remark that I've called him out on. He's in his late 50's, so his casually racist and homophobic remarks are that of the stereotypical boomer. I imagine that if we were strangers on Facebook in a comment section, I'd find one of his comments towards minorities and proceed to rip him to shreds. But this isn't Facebook. This is real life. And despite his occasional comments, he's also very compassionate and professional in his dealings with minority patients.

And here's the real kicker: Like many in my profession, he's a retired cop. Not just a retired cop, but he was the president of his local police union when he was a cop.

Pat's right-wing on most issues, but when you bring up the topic of labor unions, he is Che Guevara. He is Walter Reuther. He is Bill Heywood. He is so goddamn leftist that during one of his rants on the need for labor unions, I held out a fist and said, "Are you ready to join me in the revolution, comrade?!" Of course he responded in the negative.

The security personnel in my company aren't unionized. And I haven't made any attempt to change that because my experience with organizing workers is, well, horrid (in this month of Facebook memories, I've seen my past attempts to organize get completely steamrolled while my fellow workers had been intimidated into voting no on a union through straight out illegal intimidation by management). But should we ever decide to change our minds on organizing, I know that Pat would be one of the fiercest soldiers in the effort to join a union. Capitalism be damned, Pat wants the right to collective bargaining.

Fixing this shit really will be hard. But the solution is to get out and talk to people, in the real world. When you do that, you'll find that we all have more in common than one might think. And when we find that common ground, we'll be more ready to do away with our previous prejudices.

I just realized that this is the end of this post, and I haven't posted any picture to bring in people on social media. Well, here's a picture of Bill Haywood I guess.

When Therapy Helps

My apologies to those following this series for going so long without writing. It's been a very busy few weeks for me. I got hired full time at my job, had to deal with a kid with a flu, got sick myself, got injured, and just had a broken tooth removed. Haven't had much time for writing.

So let's get started. This post discusses chapters 9 and 21 of Johann Hari's book Lost Connections. These chapters discuss childhood trauma. And let me do the content warning that we leftists like to do: Child abuse, rape (although if you're a victim of either, this post might help as well. Feel free to make your own decision on reading).

I don't know too many people without childhood trauma. The world is fucked up like that I guess.

Johann Hari was abused by an adult in his life that wasn't his parents. He names one example of the abuse. He was strangled with an electrical cord. And for most of his life, he thought it was his fault. He was being punished for being bad, and he went most of his life thinking it was his fault that a grown ass adult strangled him. To quote:

Why do so many people who experience violence in childhood feel the same way? Why does it lead many of them to self-destructive behavior, like obesity, or hardcore addiction, or suicide? I have spent a lot of time thinking about this. When you're a child, you have very little power to change your environment. You can't move away, or force somebody to stop hurting you. So you have two choices. You can admit to yourself that you're powerless-that at any moment, you could be badly hurt, and there's simply nothing you can do about it. Or you can tell yourself it's your fault. If you do that, you actually gain some power-at least in your own mind. If it's your fault, then there's something you can do that might make it different. You aren't a pinball being smacked around a pinball machine. You're the person controlling the machine."

When I decided to start this series, I mentioned that I stopped seeing a therapist because they couldn't help me. Even they knew it. I went through two therapists in a year, and after a few months, both of them asked me point blank, "What do you get out of this?" Which is therapist speak for, "Why are you still coming here? I can't fix you." And they were right. They couldn't fix me because I had very good reasons for being depressed. I had real world problems that they weren't capable of solving.

But this is one of those times when therapy actually does help.

Studies were done on the subject, and it was found that when you talk about childhood trauma with a therapist, it definitely helps. Therapists are trained to be kind and compassionate when you talk about trauma, and that's what helps to make things better. To quote the book again:

"In a smaller pilot study, after being asked these questions [about childhood trauma], the patients were given the options of discussing what had happened in a session with a psychoanalyst. Those patients were 50 percent less likely to come back to the doctor saying they felt physically ill, or seeking drugs, in the following year.

So it appeared that they were visiting the doctor less because they were actually getting less anxious, and less unwell. These were startling results. How could that be? The answer, Vincent [the doctor that performed the experiment on talking about trauma] suspects, has to do with shame. "In that very brief process," he told me, "one person tells somebody else who's important to them...something (they regard as) deeply shameful about themselves, typically for the first time in their life. And they come out of that with the realization-"I still seems to be accepted by this person". It's potentially transformative.

What this suggests is it's not just the childhood trauma in itself that causes these problems, including depression and anxiety-it's hiding away the childhood trauma. It's not telling anyone because you're ashamed. When you lock it away in your mind, it festers, and the sense of shame grows. As a doctor, Vincent can't (alas) invent time machines to go back and prevent the abuse. But he can help his patients to stop hiding, and to stop feeling ashamed."

So therapy helps if you have childhood trauma. Speaking to someone who is kind and empathetic to what happened to you helps to alleviate your depression.

If you have past trauma in this matter, please make an appointment to see a therapist. They can help you.

I still have to put up a photo to draw in folks on my Facebook feed. So here's someone that faced some hardcore childhood depression. Motherfucking Arya Stark!

Wanting Stuff Makes us Depressed

So, going on with Johann Hari's book Lost Connections, we have a chapter that might be hard to relate to, especially if you're struggling with money issues, but it's worth looking into anyway.

Chapters 8 and 19, the disconnection to, and reconnection to, meaningful values.

It's hard to imagine people talking about "meaningful values" nowadays without someone trying to sell you Jesus, and that's why I thought the title was weird when I began to read chapter 8. But, the chapters don't have to do with religion, but the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motives.

An intrinsic motive is something you do because you want to do it. You think it'll make you a better person. You learn to play an instrument. You learn how to be a better friend. You lift weights.

An extrinsic motive is something you don't want to do,, but you do to get something. You want money, recognition, sex, superior status, etc.

So we all have intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Studies have been done on the subject on extrinsic goals and happiness, and everyone of them says the same thing: Those that achieve extrinsic goals don't become more happy. If anything, they become more depressed.

For many people, the extrinsic goals is a manifestation of materialism. People who work to get the big house, the nice car, the fancy jewelry, they find themselves feeling depressed and anxious and they don't know why.

I thought of my dad when I was reading about this. My dad has plenty of money, and he spends it. Before he retired, he would take lavish vacations to Mexico with his wife every year. After he retired, he bought a luxurious motor home and they take cross-country road trips every year. Him and his wife have very expensive luxury cars. They live in a McMansion in a very well-off town. He also goes balls-to-the-wall every Christmas (as an example, my wife and I asked for a television for our bedroom and he bought us a 60-inch smart t.v.). My dad has spent his life chasing money and spent plenty to prove that he has it. If you wanted to envy someone with cash, he'd be it.

He also has a medicine cabinet full of antidepressants. He also never learned how to be a good dad or a good friend. He never really learned to be good with people at all. His "friends" were always his work subordinates, and after he retired, they retired him. And it pretty much goes without saying that his kids don't spend much time with him. When I do see him now that he's no longer working, he's lonely and miserable.

And then I thought of myself as a kid as I read more into the chapters. A lot of the chapters do focus on kids, as they make it a point to show how advertising warps our minds at an early age. A famous experiment they mentioned was one where they had two groups of toddlers. One group watched two commercials for toys. The second group wasn't given any ads at all. Then both the groups were told, "You're going to go play in a sandbox, and there's going to be two kids there. The first is a nice boy that doesn't have any toys. The second is a mean boy that has a toy truck. Which one do you want to play with?" The kids that saw the commercial decided that playing with the mean boy was better than playing with the nice boy. The opposite was true for the kids that didn't watch a commercial. So we're taught from an early age that material goods=happiness.

Two parts of the chapters really struck a chord with me. One of the people that was interviewed for the chapter decided to take his family out to the country, disconnect from all forms of materialism, and have mostly lived a happy life. His son was made fun of for his shoes at school. His son was confused by this, asking them, "Why do you care?" I remembered being in fourth grade and made fun of for my clothes. I also wondered why they cared.

When I was in the seventh grade, I became a lot more demanding of my parents to get me nicer clothes and better things, because I was tired of being made fun of for having clothes bought at K-Mart and wearing off-brand shoes. My mom was a single mom at the time, and she did her best to accommodate me. I remember her willing to go halves on me on buying a pair of the Shaq Shoes. Ah yes, The Shaq Shoes. The shoes to have if you were a teenager living in 1994.

These cost $120 twenty-five years ago

And I wanted a Starter Jacket. Starter Jackets, now remembered for being overpriced, overhyped shit, were so popular back then that people were actually murdered over them.

After I got both those things (thanks, mom), I got a few oohs and ahhs from my classmates, but after that, things went back to how they always were. And I didn't give a shit about either after a few weeks.

Fast forward to 2014. For the first time in my life, I have money to burn. I was working 70 hours a week and never seeing my firstborn or my wife, but I was paid. And I wanted to prove that I was paid. So I bought a camper and a brand new Jeep Cherokee. I didn't need either of these things. I already had a decent car that cost about $250 a month, but I wanted to show people that I had money, so I bought a car that cost another $200 a month, and a camper. Five years later and my car has 118,000 miles on it, I've had trouble making the payments (I was actually laid off from that job two months after buying both), and my wife and I miss tent camping. We always liked camping, just not in a trailer. Just like when I was a kid, there was a temporary high of getting the oohs and ahhs from people when I first bought them, but after a few weeks, I felt the same as before I bought them, except now I have an extra $400 a month in expenses.

When the wheels finally fall off of my Jeep, I'll probably just buy a Kia. They're ugly af, but they're at least affordable.

The chapters talk a lot about how advertising affects us and convinces us that buying stuff will make us happy. People that work in the advertisement industry have admitted for nearly a century that the goal of advertising is to make people feel inadequate without their product. Going back to the experiment above involving toddlers, it only took two commercials to convince them that the mean boy with the toy truck was better than the nice boy with no toys. We see way more than two commercials every day. We're told constantly that we're inadequate if we don't buy stuff. We have to work hard to defeat this mentality in ourselves, since we're bombarded with it several times a day.

Now don't get any of this twisted. I've already written extensively on financial distress and the toll it takes on mental health. There's a big difference between buying a big house because you think it'll make you happy and struggling to pay the rent. But we do need a reminder to be more focused on creating real human relationships and being better people than being focused on buying fancy shit.

It's one of the things that makes fitness so great for me. After I had bariatric surgery, I could have gone the route that many people take on their fitness journey and focus on the aesthetic-the extrinsic motivation. If I had gone that route, my fitness journey would have gone in an entirely different direction. I'd be hyper-focused on getting six pack abs, starving myself, and doing my best to make myself look good just to get the admiration of others. Instead, I decided to focus on meeting real fitness goals. I ran a half-marathon. I got started in power-lifting. Even now I'm on a diet not because I'm concerned with people calling me fat or whatever. I'm on it because I want to be healthy, and I don't want to go back to having diabetes and hypertension. I'm glad I chose the intrinsic path this time around. The extrinsic path would have resulted in demotivation, and ultimately, failure.

Two Weeks of Keto

Ahh yes, we're finally back to talking about dieting and fitness (I promise I'll write more on Lost Connections later). 

During my last depression wave, I drank alcohol constantly, ate like shit, and barely made it into the gym. Because of this, my weight went all the way up to 310 pounds and I started feeling the symptoms of diabetes once again. So instead of going on a calorie reduction diet or a carb cycling routine, I just decided it was time to cut out carbs completely.

I didn't really intend to end up on the keto diet. In fact, for the first few days I wasn't doing it. I was just not eating carbs. I didn't know there was a difference between the keto diet, a low carb diet, or the Atkins diet until I started looking up low-carb recipes online for meal prep. Going down that rabbit hole I learned the differences between the diets and that the keto diet isn't just a very, very low-carb diet, but it's also a diet with only a moderate amount of protein and a very, very high amount of fat. It was said that the body will learn to burn all the fat you're eating for energy in the place of carbohydrates. This is in contrast to the Atkins diet, which doesn't regulate fat or protein, but also can leave you feeling very tired throughout the day. Not a feeling you want to have when you're doing squats in the gym. So halfway through my first week, I decided to give this diet a go. The liver takes the fat and converts it into well, whatever's going to be used in place of the carbs. Glucose, maybe? I'm not sure. I don't feel like looking all that shit up again. Just trust me that the fats do the job.

Those that describe the keto diet weren't kidding when they said you have to eat a lot of fat. It's determined that for every calorie you eat of protein, you need to eat three times as many calories as fat. I figured that on the low end of my protein requirements, I probably need at least 200 grams per day Because one gram of protein is four calories, that comes out to eight hundred pounds. So, 800x3=2,400, so I need 2,400 calories of fat on this diet per day. Since one gram of fat equals nine calories, that puts me at about 266 grams a day, or 66 grams of fat per meal, spaced out under four meals. Regardless of what I eat, my carbs should be under 30 grams a day, and definitely never exceed 50 grams.

This has been easy enough to maintain, but it has caused me to spend an insane amount of time in the kitchen. It almost feels like I'm meal prepping, or adding food to my meal prep, on a daily basis. 

I heard on the news a few weeks ago that the keto diet is considered one of the least effective diets because it's so hard to maintain. Two weeks in and I'm wondering why people have a hard time staying on it. The large amount of cooking this diet has required aside, it's not like you're missing out on a lot of your favorite meals. There is a keto version of every recipe you could possibly think of.

There's dozens of different ways to make low-carb bread. Fathead dough, almond bread, keto hamburger buns, keto hot dog buns, keto pasta noodles, etc. That's just the bread part. There's a keto recipe for every type of comfort food out there that you would miss eating on a calorie-restrictive diet. Keto fried chicken, keto mac and cheese, keto breakfast sandwiches, keto pancakes, keto crepes...

keto biscuits, keto pizza, keto ice cream, keto birthday cake...

I did a search for "keto chocolate cake" yesterday just to see if my theory of "keto version of everything" held up. Sure enough...

The keto diet is like the internet's rule 34. If a recipe exists on the internet, there is a keto version of it.

But I don't think it's the lack of food options that makes one quit the diet. I think it's got more to do with the infamous "keto flu".

The keto flu is a brief stretch of time that usually takes place sometime between the beginning of the diet and the end of the second week. During that time, your body hasn't quite figured out that it needs to burn fat in place of carbs, so you start feeling weak and lethargic. I had this happen at the beginning of the second week, but it passed after a few days. If you can get past those few days and wait for your body to adjust, it'll be much easier.

I also haven't had any alcohol since starting this diet fifteen days ago. That's the longest I've gone without drinking since 2016. 

After the first few days of the diet, I felt really good because my blood glucose levels had stabilized, after what was likely a pretty continuous hyperglycemic state. I lost six pounds after the first three days. Then, no weight loss as the keto flu kicked in. Then, five days ago, I started to lose about a pound every day. I'm now down to 299 pounds. I have 29 more to go before I reach my goal, and since I'm planning on being on this diet for a total of 8 weeks, it'll be easy enough to do if current trends hold. 

I'm also working out five days a week. Since I went too long without going to the gm, I'm doing Starting Strength again until I can get my strength levels back up. I'm doing karate twice a week as well.

I plan on at least writing biweekly to track my progress.

This is (Probably) why I'm Depressed, and Maybe why you are, Too

Going into the next section of Lost Connections, we dig into Chapter 7 of Johann Hari's book, titled, "Disconnection from Other People", and also the solution, which is discussed in Chapter 17.

Here's my photo for social media:

For years now, my wife has wondered why I'm always on Facebook so much. I didn't know the answer to that until I read this book.

Even before Facebook and other forms of social media, there were blogs. And I was hooked on them. Before that, internet chat rooms and USENET. Yeah, I'm showing my age. Fucking USENET, people. Back in the days when dial up modems were your only option, and it took fifteen minutes for a teenage boy to download a pic of a nipple.

But there was a brief period when I wasn't hooked on any of these. From about the time I was sixteen until the time I left the Army. Like many people, I used the internet to communicate with family when overseas (as well as meet women on dating sites for when I inevitably returned home, as I was single at the time), but other than that, the internet wasn't that big of a deal for me. I wasn't using it as some form of socialization.

In my early teenage years, in my days before karate and weightlifting, I was bullied a lot. Like, a lot. The internet was in its infancy and my mom got a computer with an AOL account, so I used that to socialize. It helped to deal with being an outcast in school.

In high school, things were dramatically different. I fell into a group of friends, I wasn't bullied anymore (because of the whole karate thing, mostly), so I didn't spend much time online unless it was to look up new bands or (hey, I was young, dammit!) to spend fifteen minutes downloading a pic of a nipple. Occasionally I'd look for martial arts wisdom as well. Nothing but using the internet for what it was intended. Looking up information and porn.

In the Army, you're forced to socialize. Privacy begins and ends when you take a shit in a bathroom stall. I'm not exaggerating. That's the only time you get to be alone. You're required to communicate with people. Because of that, you're also forced to make nice with all sorts of people as well. So the Army forces real life socialization.

Some time after leaving the Army, that changed for me. I started using social media more and more to communicate with people. Many of my best friends are on Facebook. The years passed and friends in real life drifted away, but my buddies online were always there.

And then I had kids, and I had no time to see friends in real life at all. And then my wife wonders why I'm spending all my time on Facebook, and I don't know. I just know that I don't want to be without it. Ever.

And now I get why I'm always on it, and why I'm constantly depressed. I'm lonely.

Before Hari starts talking about social media and internet addiction, he cites a scientist that studied the effects of loneliness on the human body. He found that feeling lonely causes the cortisol hormone in one's body to soar to the same level as being physically assaulted. As Hari put it, "It's worth repeating. Being deeply lonely seemed to cause as much stress as being punched by a stranger." It has the same effect on your health as being obese. It causes weakening of the immune system. It just sucks all around.

Not only that, but loneliness makes it even harder to make friends and break the cycle of loneliness. When you start to feel isolated, it causes you to to withdraw even further. It's a part of our evolution. If we're isolated, we begin to see threats much more easily, and often times when they're not even there. We feel insulted or judged when there was no intention to do either on the part of the other person. It's a cycle that causes more isolation and more loneliness. In fact, as the book says, for someone that has spent their life in loneliness and isolation, it takes even more love and respect from other people to bring them out of it than a more outgoing and social person would need. And that's a lot of emotional labor that most people don't want to spend on a stranger.

It wasn't just the creation of social media that caused this. Since the 1980s, there's been a steady decline of social engagement among society. Hari cites one example given by the researchers he interviewed: Bowling. In decades past, people would join leagues to bowl. Nowadays, the average bowler goes by themselves. Active involvement in community organizations fell 45%. 

So many of us have turned to social media as a sort of band-aid to deal with the lack of real-world socialization. But Johann Hari compares it to the difference between porn and actual sex. It creates a short term fix, but you need the real thing to be truly satisfied. Hari, when interviewing one of the first therapists for internet addiction, that we've become more accustomed to using the internet as a means of communicating with friends, but what we really need is face to face communication. The internet just isn't the same.

Hari outlined a solution in chapter 17. He talked to a therapist that told a story of a woman that came to him because she was depressed. She was very lonely. So he put her in an experimental program in which she would work with a group of people twice a week in a community garden. The people, who were all suffering from mental health issues, were to build a community garden entirely from scratch. They had to meet twice a week to learn how to garden, to plan the garden, and build the garden. The results were, well, I'll let Hari tell it himself:

So some of you may be wondering, "If this is why you're so depressed, why didn't you discuss this first?"

Well, I had to take the time to discuss how economic factors make people depressed because as I learned about social prescribing, I decided to look into it myself. Try to find like minded groups of people that I could meet up with. I'm still very passionate about politics, so I decided to look up my local DSA chapter to meet up with leftists and find people I have things in common with. I looked at things involving fitness. And I looked and I looked, until I realized, I don't have time for any of these things.

I work nights, and I work almost every weekend. Guess when most of these social gatherings take place? When I'm either stuck at work, or sleeping.

The workplace condition and the social decline in this country are intertwined. In the 1980s, a concept called "neoliberalism" began to take hold. It's what's commonly known as "trickle-down economics". It goes against human nature. We're tribal creatures. We learned to survive for millennia upon millennia by banding together in tribes and working together, but now our economic social condition teaches us that we're all on our own. We're supposed to be able to handle everything ourselves, and if we don't, it means we're weak. And so instead of banding together and demanding better working and living conditions as we did in the past, we try to do it all on our own. We hustle harder. We work longer hours and take the lower wage because we have no means to increase our wage, and that causes us to live at our jobs. We're socially isolating ourselves so that we can afford to pay bills and die. And when someone comes along and talks about a solution to work collectively to make things better, we're told it's just socialism.

I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but it almost seems like the people that pushed neoliberalism designed it with social isolation in mind.

Well, that starts to make socialism sound pretty good, doesn't it? I mean, you have one side that has embraced some of the absolute worst elements of capitalism screaming, "Fuck you! You're on your own! I don't care if you starve!", and then you have the socialists saying, "We should work together to make the world less shitty and make sure your basic economic needs are met." If millennials and generation z are starting to embrace socialism, the reason for that is pretty obvious.