Lost Connections

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 to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated.

Depression and anxiety have three kinds of causes—biological, psychological, and social.

Reconnection Seven: Restoring the Future

Reconnection Six: Acknowledging and Overcoming Childhood Trauma

If you want to look at other people and be happy for them, you can be happy every single day, regardless of what’s happening to you.”

Reconnection Five: Sympathetic Joy, and Overcoming Addiction to the Self

Reconnection Four: To Meaningful Values

Reconnection Three: To Meaningful Work

Reconnection Two: Social Prescribing

As we talked longer, he started to compare the Amish to the groups out in the English world all around them, like Weight Watchers, where you gather together to lose weight and support each other. You’d never be able to resist all that food on your own; but as a group, banding together, checking each other, encouraging each other, you find you can. I looked at him, trying to process what he was saying.

“So,” I asked, “you’re saying the Amish community is almost like a support group for resisting the temptations of an individualist civilization?”

Lauron thought about it for a moment, smiled, and said: “That’s one big benefit, yes.”