The Depression Epidemic: A Purpose Problem

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Depression rates have reached historic highs. According to the Gallup poll’s annual survey, both current and lifetime prevalence of depression in the United States hit all-time highs in 2023. We’ve responded with more medications, more therapy options, ketamine clinics, psychedelics, transcranial magnetic stimulation. Yet as Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer notes, these treatments “just kind of sort of work. They don’t work for everyone and they even fail to work for most people.”

Perhaps we’re treating symptoms while missing the disease.

Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that people with meaning and purpose lived seven years longer. Seven years. For free. No prescription required.

But purpose isn’t just about longevity. It may be the most effective anti-depressant we have, because unlike pharmaceutical interventions, purpose addresses the root cause of much modern unhappiness: disconnection.

Purpose Is Never Solitary

Here’s what we misunderstand about purpose: it’s fundamentally relational.

You can’t have purpose in isolation. Purpose requires other people. It requires community. As Johann Hari discovered during his years-long investigation into depression and anxiety, “All human beings have natural psychological needs. You need to feel you belong. You need to feel your life has purpose and meaning. You need to feel that people see you and value you.”

These aren’t separate needs. They’re intertwined.

When Mark Manson talks about purpose on the Young and Profiting podcast, he cuts through the mysticism: “Purpose is not found. It’s created through action that feels useful… through finding useful and meaningful reasons and motivations behind the things that you do.”

Useful to whom? Useful to other people. To your family. To your community. To your tribe.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study on happiness and health ever conducted, tracked people for over 85 years. The single clearest finding? Dr. Robert Waldinger puts it simply: “Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.”

People with strong relationships at age 50 were healthiest and lived longest. Relationship satisfaction in midlife predicted physical health better than cholesterol levels. And critically, research consistently shows that one of the most nourishing things for us psychologically is connection to other people.

Purpose without community is just ambition. Purpose with community is meaning.

The Tribal Model: Status Through Contribution

For most of human history, we understood this intuitively.

Dr. Michael Morris, author of Tribal, describes how status worked in tribal societies: “You started having valiant hunters who would sacrifice themselves so that the tribe could bring down a woolly mammoth, or you started to have people learning how to make spears that were better spears even though it took years of work to figure it out, or building shelters to protect the elderly for the first time.”

These contributions had personal costs. But they served the greater good. And crucially, “you eventually got paid back by the respect that people gave you.” Respect, in turn, usually meant a larger share of the group’s resources, more influence over the group’s future and better mating opportunties.

This is what Morris calls the “hero instinct”: our yearning for status and tribute, our quest to contribute. Far from being shallow, “status-seeking drives most of the contributions to the world. Why do people like you and I work so hard? Because we want to be respected by other people.”

But here’s the critical difference: in tribal societies, you gained status by proving your usefulness to the tribe’s future. You invented better tools. You shared knowledge. You protected the vulnerable. You passed on skills to the next generation.

Status came from contribution. Respect was earned through usefulness.

Compare this to modern industrialized society, where status is increasingly signaled through consumption rather than contribution. We’ve replaced “what can I do for the tribe?” with “what can I buy to impress strangers?”

The Industrial Age Inversion

Dr. Michael Platt, a neuroscientist studying status and decision-making, describes the fundamental mismatch: “Our brains are designed for 200,000 years ago… We lived in small groups with face to face contact somewhere between probably 20 and no more than 100 people. You knew all of them, you talk to them every day. Things didn’t really move faster than antelope or change faster than the seasons. There was very little wealth inequality.”

Today? “We’re in these industrialized societies. We have money, we’re in markets, we’re interacting with thousands of people, perhaps millions of people, their behaviors, their thoughts, everything are impinging on us, stuff is changing super, super fast.”

We went from earning status through tribal contribution to pursuing status through material accumulation. From proving usefulness to signaling wealth. From building shelters for elders to buying luxury handbags.

But material goods don’t meet psychological needs. You can own everything and belong to no one.

The Cost of This Inversion

The consequences of replacing contribution with consumption are measurable and devastating.

Male suicide provides a particularly stark window into this crisis. Research shows that 50% of men who kill themselves have no history or evidence of mental illness. As one psychiatrist specializing in male psychology notes: “Most of the suicidal men that I work with, their mind isn’t malfunctioning. They genuinely have a life that is no longer worth living.”

The number one thing that correlates with male suicide? Not depression. It’s “thwarted belongingness”: trying to connect with others and being rejected. Trying to contribute and finding no community that needs you.

This isn’t clinical depression. This is the natural human response to purposelessness.

The loneliness epidemic reflects the same dynamic: 57% of Americans reported feelings of isolation in 2025, with 1 in 4 men under 35 struggling with severe loneliness. Loneliness increases the likelihood of premature death by 26%, comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes daily.

As research on cynicism shows, cynical people who can’t trust others and “are unwilling to be vulnerable and open up, it’s almost like they can’t metabolize the calories of social life. And so they end up psychologically malnourished, which is toxic at many different levels.”

We’ve built a society that maximizes individual consumption while minimizing communal contribution. We’ve optimized for wealth accumulation while decimating the structures that provided purpose through usefulness.

Moving Beyond the Industrial Age

The path forward isn’t backward. We can’t return to tribal living, nor would most of us want to.

But we can reclaim the tribal wisdom about status, purpose, and contribution.

This means:

1. Redefining Success as Contribution, Not Consumption

What have you built that will outlast you? What skills have you passed on? What community is stronger because you’re part of it?

These questions orient us toward contribution rather than accumulation.

As author Morgan Housel observes about mid-century happiness: when everyone lived in similar houses and drove similar cars, “it was easier to feel satisfied.” Today we have more material wealth than previous generations and are measurably less happy.

The problem isn’t that we lack things. It’s that we’ve defined success by things rather than by contribution.

2. Building or Joining Communities of Purpose

The structure that tribal living provided was automatic: you were born into a web of obligation and contribution. Modern life requires intentionality.

This looks like:

  • Joining community groups built around shared purpose (not just shared interests)
  • Volunteering for causes that genuinely matter to you
  • Participating in religious or spiritual communities
  • Building businesses or projects with clear missions beyond profit
  • Mentoring others in your field or craft

The specifics matter less than the structure: regular face-to-face interaction with people who share a commitment to something beyond themselves.

3. Seeking Status Through Service

Michael Morris explains that our drive to contribute and yearning for status is not weakness: “Our strongest motivations come from these tribal instincts.” The question is whether we channel status-seeking into consumption or contribution.

When you reorient status-seeking toward service, you align ancient instincts with modern needs. You want respect? Earn it by being genuinely useful. You want to feel valued? Do things worth valuing.

4. Measuring Life by Relationships, Not Revenue

The Harvard Study’s 85-year finding is unambiguous: quality of relationships matters more than quantity, and relationship satisfaction predicts health better than medical metrics like cholesterol.

Yet we optimize for career advancement and material accumulation while treating relationships as secondary.

What would it look like to invert this? To prioritize depth of connection over income growth? To measure years by friendships strengthened rather than assets acquired?

5. Creating Usefulness Where You Are

Mark Manson’s insight is critical: “You can have useful action doing the most mundane stuff. You can have useful action doing the same stuff that you’ve done for 20 years. A lot of it is just simply how you choose to think about it and the value you choose to perceive in it.”

Purpose doesn’t require quitting your job to save orphans in Africa. It requires recognizing how your current actions contribute to others’ wellbeing and leaning into that.

The teacher who sees their purpose as shaping young minds rather than just grading papers. The engineer who frames their work as solving real problems for real people. The parent who understands they’re raising the next generation of humans.

Same actions, different frame. The shift from “what am I getting?” to “who am I serving?” transforms labor into purpose.

The Path Forward Is Social

Dr. Jonathan Haidt’s research on social media and mental health reveals something crucial: when young people moved their social lives primarily online, “both sexes got really lonely.” Digital interaction cannot replicate the physiological and psychological benefits of face-to-face connection.

Purpose, like mental health, is fundamentally social. It cannot be achieved alone, purchased online, or optimized through apps.

The best anti-depressant is purpose. And purpose is always about people.

We don’t need more medications. We need more community. We don’t need better brain chemistry. We need better social structures. We don’t need to eliminate status-seeking. We need to redirect it toward contribution instead of consumption.

The industrial age taught us to value what we own. The path forward requires valuing what we give.

Our ancestors knew this: status came from proving usefulness to the tribe’s future. From building shelters that protected the elderly. From crafting better spears that fed the community. From passing knowledge to the next generation.

They gained respect through contribution. They found purpose through community. They earned status by being genuinely useful.

Perhaps the most ancient wisdom is also the most relevant: we become whole by making ourselves useful to each other.

References

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