Radio Mano, Papa Tchango.

All right. So here's how this one happens.

I had scheduled a conversation with Johann Hari, who's a British journalist and author

through his publicist at his hotel in Beverly Hills this morning.

And I went in there and he was kind of a tight schedule because he had stuff going on before and stuff happening after.

He was on a Fox News show with Tucker Carlson. He's on Bill Mar, this coming Friday.

He's running around promoting his new book, which is called Lost Connections.

You might have heard of his previous book called Chasing the Scream.

Both books are about how things get bad for people.

Trauma of various sorts is generated when we stray too far from our prehistoric lifeways. Sound familiar?

He doesn't necessarily view it in explicitly those terms, at least I don't think he did until today.

But clearly there's a lot of overlap between what he's thinking and writing and what I'm working on.

His Chasing the Scream was about addiction and he largely came to the conclusion that addiction was, as Gabor Mate says, not the problem, but an attempt to solve a problem.

The problem being a lack of meaning, a lack of community, a lack of dignity in the surroundings in which one is trying to live one's life.

You have a meaningless job, you have empty friendships, empty relationships.

It generates problems and one of the ways that people deal with problems, of course, is with addictive, compulsive, self-destructive behavior.

His latest book that's just out two weeks ago, I think, three weeks ago, maybe, is Lost Connections.

It's about how depression and anxiety are generated by the same absences in our lives, the absence of community and dignity and meaning and so on and so forth.

When I say dignity, I don't mean individual dignity. It's very hard to live a life imbued with dignity in a society that doesn't really offer you a lot of options for that kind of life.

For the average person who doesn't have the time or energy or opportunity or privilege to design a custom built life that works just perfectly for you, it's tough.

What are the options? What are the options? An office job where you just move in pieces of paper from one desk to another or a warehouse job where you're trying to survive and have a job.

You can survive and have some kind of an interesting life on 12 bucks an hour driving a forklift to move in boxes around.

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