If you believe that your depression is due solely to a broken brain, you don’t have to think about your life, or about what anyone might have done to you. The belief that it all comes down to biology protects you, in a way, for a while. If you absorb this different story, though, you have to think about those things. And that hurts.

People will be free to create businesses based on things they believe in, to run Kotti-style projects to improve their community, to look after their kids and their elderly relatives. Those are all real work—but much of the time, the market doesn’t reward this kind of work.

Imagine you play the piano. If you play it for yourself because you love it, then you are being driven to do it by intrinsic values. If you play in a dive bar you hate, just to make enough cash to ensure you don’t get thrown out of your apartment, then you are being driven to do it by extrinsic values.

The goal was to offer the patient two things at the same time. The first was an opportunity to describe the traumatic experience—to craft a story about it, so the patient could make sense of it. As this experiment began, one of the things they discovered almost immediately is that many of the patients had literally never before acknowledged what

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 you look at a house burning down, the most obvious manifestation is the huge smoke billowing out,” he told me. It would be easy, then, to think that the smoke is the problem, and if you deal with the smoke, you’ve solved it. But “thank God that fire departments understand that the piece that you treat is the piece you don’t see—the flames

depression isn’t a disease; depression is a normal response to abnormal life experiences. “I think that’s a very important idea,” Vincent told me. “It takes you beyond the comforting, limited idea that the reason I’m depressed is I have a serotonin imbalance, or a dopamine imbalance, or what have you.”

When you have a society with huge gaps in income and status, Richard told me, it creates the sense that “some people seem supremely important, and others seem of no importance at all.” This doesn’t affect only people at the bottom. In a highly unequal society, everyone has to think about their status a lot. Am I maintaining my position? Who’s

When you are a child and you experience something really traumatic, you almost always think it is your fault. There’s a reason for this, and it’s not irrational; like obesity, it is, in fact, a solution to a problem most people can’t see.