"I think people have lost the art of joy and play."
"The real superpowers we need are the superpowers to heal our people who are suffering terribly."
"The people who benefit from us fighting each other aren't the voters or the taxpayers; it's the politicians and their rich benefactors who've been capitalizing on our fear and infighting for decades."
"The majority of people got mental illnesses, the majority of people including attractive people have got depression, huge levels of insecurities, traumas as children."
"Understanding through the lens of narcissism can help us see the lack of empathy and entitlement in societal power dynamics."
"The idea that you can just bully people out of being fat is stupid and it doesn't work. If it did, nobody would be fat because nobody wants to be fat; it sucks to be fat."
"The real epidemic, the pandemic if you will, isn't just COVID or heart disease or diabetes; it's loneliness and depression and isolation."
"We have to fight this together as one people, as the United States of America."
"It's not just an individual mental illness; it's actually a social illness."
"This generation is suffering from loneliness, depression at rates that are not only alarming but unprecedented."
"This lack of intimacy, this disconnection that humans have from each other, is driving not just the addiction epidemic but our epidemic of declining mental health and depression and suicide and the like."
"We're particularly equipped to fix these systemic problems that have plagued the United States forever."
"Why would any species want to come down and hang out with us, seeing all the crap going on down here?"
"I think these are symptoms of a deeper hunger for purpose and meaning in our country."
"Diseases of Despair tell us there's a group of people who seem to be despairing in life."
"Politics without principles... wealth without work... science without humanity... these kinds of leadership are destroying our world."
"Our community... is suffering. It's traumatic for our community as well when these incidents happen."
"To say that cancel culture doesn't exist would be dangerous, but also, on the other hand, to blame everything on cancel culture is very dismissive of bigger issues."
"Empires fall for a number of reasons, including economic turmoil, political division, and social and cultural decay."
"We're worth more when we're addicted, distracted, outraged, polarized, and disinformed than if we're a living thriving citizen."
"The American dream is getting further and further out of reach."
"The real losses came from those who didn't have millions to lose."
"Inequality is what is truly tearing society apart, not identity politics."
"The most the greatest threat in this country right now is white supremacy."
"Some of the biggest addictions that people suffer from, every one of them is targeted one after the other in the Quran. It's not just solving a Muslim problem; it's solving a human problem, a societal problem, and solving a global problem."
"Taiwan's young voters fret over material and existential issues; for one key constituency, elections are as much about more material issues such as wages, inflation, energy security, equality, and social justice."
"We are a nation that has lost its way, but we are not going to allow this horror to continue."
"People say to me all the time... there's some moral confusion out there. People don't know who the good guys and the bad guys are."
"Her books are not only lauded as important fantasy works, they were also great introductory metaphorical discussions of the issues of fascism and supremacy narratives within our society today."
"We need more focus on what the actual problems are."
"Let's set this up as a problem to solve, how can we make the things we don't like less likely without necessarily having to find bad guys and punish them."
"It's like our dirty secret; there are far more suicides than there are homicides, yet homicides are what tend to make it on the news."
"Placing the responsibility of burnout on the individual is a very subtle scam that's happening society-wide."
"Parents are the biggest fucking problem in society because parents use children as collateral for their own self-esteem and it needs to fucking stop."
"We have a big wealth gap, we have a big opportunity gap, we have big gaps that are issues."
"People neglect their health to make money, to then spend that money on health."
"Systemic racism is systemic for a reason and that it can't necessarily be solved on the individual level."
"The Quran is a healing for society's diseases, the Quran is a healing for our emotional diseases, the Quran is a healing for our relationship diseases."
"We live in a world where most people are ill-equipped on how to be there for a friend who's struggling."
"This is a reminder that structural racism is so sinister; it actually doesn't care who the perpetrator is. The only thing that matters is the victim who is oppressed."
"Open borders, rigged elections, and grossly unfair court decisions are destroying America. We are a nation in decline."
"Our foundation of society is cracking; there are moral screws that are loose in this society."
"Is it personal responsibility or is it really bad policy? And I realize it's bad policy."
"We bring guns in places they don't belong and use violence to solve our problems or to express our frustrations."
"This has always been a taboo topic, so I think the current discourse...is endlessly interesting."
"Racism is really a question of power. That's all this is, whether or not one race has more power to inflict punishment on another."
"The reason that I wrote the book is because in 2016, I kind of looked around and... there's a certain level of hatred and tribalism that's building up in American politics that I hadn't really seen before."
"There's something deeply wrong here. We don't trust our institutions anymore by poll data. Most of us don't know or trust all of our neighbors. All of this stuff speaks to a dissolution of the social fabric."
"The scariest thing about the world we live in today is that there are people out there who do not think other people should have opinions."
"The value of work, the enemy of how vocational and technical schooling at the high school level has all but disappeared in a mad rush to push people into a college track."
"The miracle of modern plumbing, the miracle of affordable electricity, all these things now we're just not sufficiently gobsmacked and when we lose our sense of wonder and our basic appreciation that sets the ground work for the eventual disconnect that leads to vocational education vanishing from high school, a widening skills gap contemporaneous with spiking unemployment and all of these seemingly dichotomous things that leave people scratching their heads."
"Higher Wisdom is incredibly important, especially right now, when we're at this very polarizing time."
"I don't want her to grow up in a world where women are hated."
"To look back and ignore these things in favor of nostalgia continues to be dangerous."
"Having the luxury to think about these problems is like a nice thing; it shows progress."
"The trust issue is a significant one...trust has been substantially damaged."
"Obesity is now a bigger problem than lack of hunger and lack of food."
"The crisis of whiteness is what he terms the effect of the meritocracy being undermined by people being privileged enough to be given positions without earning them."
"We have a lot of problems with our society today being like in some ways more interconnected than it ever has been and in other ways like more isolated than it ever has been."
"Lack of confidence is the one thing that plagues the potential of the majority of the population."
"The dehumanization process allows us to shift our story set so that we bring another set of values and beliefs into the space."
"For every one that comes forward, 44 are sitting in silent suffering. That needs to change."
"I don't think there's enough actual discussion and changing of minds going on."
"For too many people in this country no matter how hard they work, there are structural barriers working against them."
"The discrepancy in what committing criminal activity means for the wealthy versus the poor is an incredible societal problem."
"As we approach the 2023 elections in less than three months' time, it's crucial to address education, healthcare, poverty, and human capital."
"It's a better system and it's not like an SJW thing; it's also a really good way of addressing the problems experienced by non-marginalized communities."
"I think they would have really wanted Senen to go through with committing suicide. I think they absolutely would have preferred that... it's [expletive] horrible to even think about something that evil."
"There's so many societally important problems to solve right now."
"The most powerless person is the one without a voice who cannot complain or understand what is happening to them."
"The problems we're complaining about are so much more grounded. Like, Fox News talks about gender-neutral Mr. Potato Head and pride parades."
"It's interesting that you need everyone to have an insight about one thing. It's like if everyone, well I guess this is one of the reasons why COVID and masks and vaccines and stuff was such a popular talking point because you know that everyone knows what you're talking about."
"Free speech allows all to explore and debate openly the issues most important to us, our families, and of course the British people."
"Only by studying and understanding issues like this in depth can we grapple with these problems."
"The Gilded Age...although things look great on the outside, on the surface, there are many societal issues and there's a huge gap between the rich and the poor."
"Muckrakers...wanted to expose scandal, corruption, and societal ills."
"Deception is real, and here's the biggest issue with deception: you don't know you're being deceived."
"What has led to a situation where one of the most popular porn categories is the teen category, and guys are like hyper fixated on super young women?"
"Welcome to my theater tonight I want to give you a completely new way of thinking about one of the most incendiary issues of our time."
"All of the big issues we're dealing with right now with an uneducated population, the biggest one is climate change."
"We can see cycles of poverty and inequality play out in real time with no clear answer of how these cycles will be interrupted."
"What we have in jail are the most traumatized people in our society."
"We're seeing this type of labor strife...because...there's been a massive increase in income and wealth inequality."
"No amount of billionaire-donated money will ever address the underlying societal problems that require people to need charitable assistance in the first place."
"This country sucks, but like, I think that's a great process."
"I do not believe this is good for the world."
"The biggest problems and biggest threats to the world are centralized corporate and state power."
"You can tackle societal issues and improve yourself at the same time."
"The conditions are getting far, far worse and far less livable for so many people in that country that the government had to shift."
"The whole legal system we have, if no one going... then, this whole medical system we have, is no one going."
"We need to have a very serious conversation about what constitutes consent."
"This is how empires crumble; it's how countries crumble."
"It's complete antidote to the mess we've got ourselves into."
"Our simplistic definition of racism as intentional acts of racial discrimination committed by immoral individuals engenders a confidence that we are not part of the problem and that our learning is thus complete."
"It's not about inevitable; it's about making people aware."
"I think this is a really big problem that we as a society need to address."
"The fear of the other and that's a very interesting fear that a lot of us can have and it can range from a number of different things, whether it's politics, immigration, whatever, people sometimes can fear what is other than themselves."
"We're seeing the rise of hate in ways that we've never seen. It's not natural."
"Those who accuse Rowling of punching down against her critics ignore the fact that she's sticking up for those who have silenced themselves to avoid the job loss, public vilification, and threats to physical safety that other critics of recent gender orthodoxies have suffered."
"Tolerance for one group does not mean intolerance for another."
"Defending those who have been scorned isn't easy, especially for young people. It's scary to stand up to bullies, as any Harry Potter reader knows."
"Absolutely despicable. Like, lock them up, take away the children."
"The problem is there's no mechanism for solving this. Twitter is this corrupt, broken, evil machine."
"Our sense of perspective has been changed in this crisis...we're neglecting all the other important issues we have to deal with as a society."
"We are debating trivial issues passionately, but important ones not at all."
"We have a greater issue than what happened in the past, and if we don't address that, we're shorting ourselves."
"If feminists are going to say they're enough to talk about men's rights, okay, what are you doing about unequal pension ages? What are you doing about conscription? What are you doing about circumcision?"
"Amidst the political division, the economic pain, the psychological, medical toll of the virus, masterfully crafted educational content feels like one of the beacons of hope that we can hold on to."
"I want to emphasize this: the biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse."
"I wish we had less guns, I wish we had less need for guns."
"I just don't understand it from either way... I really don't understand it from a racist perspective but I really don't understand it from racism that's condoned because it's racism against white people."
"The only point of protest is to raise awareness... there's a lot of things that go unseen in this country."
"Never before in history have we seen more rights, including constitutional rights, being taken away... it's causing social chaos throughout our society."
"Immigrants are being scapegoated for issues they have nothing to do with in our economy."
"You can't make a law against stupid; you can't make a law against hate."
"The true struggle right now is mainly economic."
"The biggest problem facing us right now is that we have a really hard time working with each other."
"The divisions we have amongst ourselves are the biggest problem that we have right now."
"There's a whole group of people in America who believe that a culture of free speech and discussion is really about power differentials and preventing people who are dispossessed from speaking. That's an absolute lie."
"One of the greatest epidemics in this world today is not physical but spiritual."
"The most detrimental epidemic on Earth is unbelief."
"Narcissism isn't popular by accident; it's a real and widespread concern that worries many."
"Narcissism has become a cultural pathology, the routine of a fake life promoting a false self, a plastic and artificial world of redundant superficiality."
"These works showed us a grim visage of a dark future: metropolises flooded with toxic rain, bright neons, and an underbelly of crime and poverty."
"So I wish I had good news, but for our, my generation, a boomer generation, we're in serious trouble."
"We have so much poverty in America not in spite of our wealth, but because of it."
"I want people to open their eyes and just see the other side of things and see what's really going on behind the scenes."
"The mental health effects of social media... it's a big story."
"God didn't envision any one of us living in a tent on the street with a needle in our arm."
"We need an open public debate about what is going on here... identify those factors, take them away, and stop people dying."
"Black fatigue is defined as exhaustion born of the same day-to-day acts of aggression or small acts of disrespect a black person endures."
"If this happened to a man with power, money, and influence, how many men has this happened to? How many women has this happened to?"
"It's thing after thing after thing and you're like, where, why are we not treating people like people anymore?"
"If people had any idea what was actually going on... they would be rightfully outraged."
"Systemic racism plays such a big role is that it isn't an individual racist malice or evil cop; it's an entire system that is leading."
"We glorify the same circumstances we're trying to escape."
"Actions speak louder than words. We give people something to do about the issues."
"Please leave fitness and getting healthy out of the polarization we see in every aspect of American life."
"Why, if we have more self-help and therapy, do we have more mental health issues?"
"You know who keeps killing people? Other people."
"The real problem, the place that I think we should stand, is that race becomes an issue when the structures that are supposed to cause us to cohere as a multiracial society breakdown as a result of artificial scarcity."
"The next election will be about Muslims and will be about the taking away of civil liberties in this country."
"Trust in institutions has totally broken down."
"There is a spiritual malnourishment in the country that manifests itself in certain ways, one of which is racially."
"Racism is not an anomaly separate from us; rather, it is woven into the fabric of this country."
"It's the great replacement theory, absolutely."
"The world is full of unfairness; it's a hero's job to try to combat that unfairness."
"We've been teasing the importance of humor, the importance of the smile, the realization that the most important issues are often illuminated by that."
"The denial of racism is a crucial part of racism."
"I couldn't be more worried about America. It seems like our country is falling apart."
"Learning how economics truly works is like taking a bite of the forbidden fruit; you can't go back to when you naively believed you could solve the world's problems."
"Our politics are increasingly divided, and we have stopped respecting those that we disagree with."
"Wow, people will blame the [expletive] cancel culture on suicide but not the actual issues of mental health care and the abuse people face attempting to get it, and while getting it."
"Access to education is the single most important issue of our time."
"You make us feel so inadequate as a country and so inadequate in who we are, and we have to destroy you because we can accept an idea of people being superior to us as long as they're white and a little bit inbred."
"You are aware of the fact that an unprecedented way, life expectancy is actually going down in America because of diseases of despair."
"A lot of people are suffering...not when we just change the culture but when we address the root cause of everything that's happening here."
"For all of the conservative crying about the 63 genders or whatever, this is nothing. This is what they think, this is what they get outraged over, while Bernie supporters are getting outraged over minimum wage and health care."
"Corporate America hasn't just failed to help the black community; it is complicit in generating the disparities we see today."
"The fact of the matter is that people get overly upset about products and I don't really know why. I think it's very much a first-world problem."
"There is a sense in which men, particularly young men, probably men our age haven't necessarily experienced it, but younger men, 20-year-olds, there's an enormous problem."
"We are losing an aspect of what made Silicon Valley great...it's important we try and figure out sustainable housing."
"We have wolves in sheep's clothing that are masquerading as patriotic Americans."
"For the past year, many of us have been concerned about two viruses: the coronavirus and the racism virus."
"I feel like these topics and conversations need to be had more openly."
"We need to be able to talk about these things openly."
"I live in a system that perpetuates racism, and as a result, there are times where I perpetuate it too, often unwillingly or unknowingly."
"We ignore mental health issues, and mental health issues are what drive people to do mass violent acts."
"There is an epidemic of loneliness in the country."
"The age of philosophy is in a sense, again, that we are confronted more and more often with philosophical problems in everyday level."
"Neuroinflammation, I believe, is the most troubling issue that we're facing as a society, but it's a hidden, overlooked issue because the brain is so protective. We don't really know that this is going on until oftentimes it's too late."
"If we design our cities to meet human needs, you don't have most of the problems that are prevalent today."
"Justice does matter. Those questions, they matter."
"Hundreds of millions of people are besieged by anxiety about their present and future security, dignity, and prospects of well-being."
"Crime isn't always just bad people doing bad things. Sometimes it's just people trying to survive."
"Children from fatherless homes account for 90% of all homeless and runaway kids, 71% high school dropouts, and 63% of youth suicides."
"The decline in critical thinking in education too, that's an issue as well."
"We just have to kind of think around the problem societally."
"A huge number of Americans do not possess even the most basic life skills."
"The biggest problem in China now is the dissatisfaction of the middle class, who are the most pessimistic middle class in the world."
"Immigration is a tough subject. It's hard to tackle, but now she finally got her permanent residency, and she is here for good."
"Especially with everything else that's happening out in the world today, there is somehow this tendency to think of the worst-case scenario."
"Most people in therapy are there because the people in their life who actually needed therapy refused to get it."
"People are being kicked out of their homes, children are starving, there's no testing and tracing that meets the needs, schools can't open, and not another dime. Let America suffer so our right-wing ideology can prevail over the needs of America and the American people."
"Our current criminal justice system needs reform."
"The problem with Congress isn't Congress itself, it's the division of the American people."
"Freedom has its complications, a problem that, due to its core nature, is very heavy to balance and difficult to change."
"That feeling of ownership is something that's being taken away more and more every single day."
"The largest precursor for crime happens to be poverty itself."
"We need to actually say these are political questions, and they, by their very nature, will require political solutions."
"A renewed labor movement could actually solve a lot of these problems."
"In some ways, we've gotten way, way, way better, but in other ways, I think we're kind of flying apart at the seams."
"No one wants to be pulled over by the police."
"A lot of this climate of hate might be coming from these extreme groups on both sides, and we have to be cognizant of that so that we don't fall prey to it."
"People love hip-hop, people love black culture, and people love black things on people, but a lot of times, they don't like it on black people."
"You have massive skyrocketing worse than Gilded Age inequality which has only gotten worse during the pandemic."
"America needs to get back to being able to have a conversation with people who don't agree."
"Violence does not solve violence. Violence does not end the problem of violence."
"We need violence to stop, because if we don't, then we are losing the plot."
"We're polarizing further and further on these issues and not listening to each other."