Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions

To end loneliness, you need other people—plus something else. You also need, he explained to me, to feel you are sharing something with the other person, or the group, that is meaningful to both of you.

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

Loneliness isn’t the physical absence of other people, he said—it’s the sense that you’re not sharing anything that matters with anyone else.

“You can get real in-depth and intellectual with all that stuff, but when it comes down to it—doing anything, and not having a purpose behind it, and then feeling like you don’t have any other option except to continue: it’s terrible. At least for me, it turns into—well, what’s the point?”

A one-way relationship can’t cure loneliness. Only two-way (or more) relationships can do that.

He says he has learned, especially with depression and anxiety, to shift from asking “What’s the matter with you?” to “What matters to you?” If you want to find a solution, you need to listen to what’s missing in the depressed or anxious person’s life—and help them to find

If you worked in the civil service and you had a higher degree of control8 over your work, you were a lot less likely to become depressed or develop severe emotional distress than people working at the same pay level, with the same status, in the same office, as people with a lower degree of control over their work.

So every human instinct is honed not for life on your own, but for life like this, in a tribe. Humans need tribes12 as much as bees need a hive.

“When work is enriching, life is fuller, and that spills over into the things you do outside work,” he said to me. But “when it’s deadening,” you feel “shattered at the end of the day, just shattered.”