in the natural world, we realize how small we are. The stories our egos tell us—You’re so important! Your worries are so urgent!—seem suddenly trivial.

Our ego, our sense of self, always has both these qualities—protective, and imprisoning.

Oh, I’ve got to work more, because my self depends on my status and my achievement. You internalize that. It’s a kind of form of internalized oppression.”

There’s a house fire inside many of us,14 Vincent had come to believe, and we’ve been concentrating on the smoke.

when their status is threatened (like Soloman, when Uriah struck), and when their status is low (like poor Job all the time).

This evidence suggests if we return to seeing our distress and our joy as something we share with a network of people all around us, we will feel different.

If you can move to a job where you are controlled less, and have more autonomy, or are doing something you believe matters—do it.

Scientists measure the depth of someone’s depression using something named the Hamilton scale, which was invented by a scientist named Max Hamilton in 1959. The Hamilton scale ranges from 0 (where you’re skipping along merrily) to 51 (where you’re jumping in front of trains). To give you a yardstick: you can get a six-point leap in your Hamilton sc

They both, he said, break our “addiction to ourselves.”