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

“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?”

To end loneliness, you need to have a sense of “mutual aid and protection,” John figured out, with at least one other person, and ideally many more.

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

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.

“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.”

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

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

“The more you think happiness is a social thing, the better off you are,”

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.