But that comes at a cost. If you were responsible for being hurt, then at some level, you have to think you deserved it. A person who thinks they deserved to be injured as a child isn’t going to think they deserve much as an adult, either.

The real path to happiness, they were telling me, comes from dismantling our ego walls—from letting yourself flow into other people’s stories and letting their stories flow into yours; from pooling your identity, from realizing that you were never you—alone, heroic, sad—all along.

There’s a wider picture here, and I need to be part of that again. That’s how I felt sitting on the paving in this garden with my hands in the flowerbed.”

You are constantly monitoring yourself. Your ego will shriek like an alarm you can’t shut off.

Despair often happens, he had learned, when there is a “lack of balance between efforts and rewards.”

“The more you think happiness is a social thing, the better off you are,” Brett explained to me, summarizing

Disempowerment,” Michael told me, “is at the heart12 of poor health”—physical, mental, and emotional.

Lonely people are scanning for threats because they unconsciously know that nobody is looking out for them, so no one will help them if they are hurt.

What you really need are connections. But what you are told you need, in our culture, is stuff and a superior status, and in the gap between those two signals—from yourself and from society—depression and anxiety will grow as your real needs go unmet. You have to picture all the values that guide why you do things in your life, Tim said, as being l