You need your pain. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world—they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It

You have to turn now to all the other wounded people around you, and find a way to connect with them,7 and build a home with these people—a place where you are bonded to one another and find meaning in your lives together. We have been tribeless and disconnected for so long now. It’s time for us all to come home.

Depression and anxiety might, in one way, be the sanest reaction you have.6 It’s a signal, saying—you shouldn’t have to live this way, and if you aren’t helped to find a better path, you will be missing out on so much that is best about being human.

instead of seeing your depression and anxiety as a form of madness, I would tell my younger self—you need to see the sanity in this sadness. You need to see that it makes sense. Of course it is excruciating. I will always dread that pain returning, every day of my life. But that doesn’t mean the pain is insane, or irrational. If you touch your hand

We had lost the ability to understand that there are some problems that can’t be solved by shopping.

your distress is not a malfunction. It is a signal—a necessary signal.

You are not suffering from a chemical imbalance in your brain. You are suffering from a social and spiritual imbalance in how we live.

Every human being has these needs, and in our culture, we’re relatively good at meeting physical needs—almost nobody actually starves, for example, which is an extraordinary achievement. But we’ve become quite bad at meeting these psychological needs. That’s a crucial reason why you—and so many of the people around you—are depressed and anxious.

You aren’t a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have a community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need