Any excuse for a party. They’re always finding some reason to have a celebration, with all their patients invited.Sam calls this approach social prescribing,3 and it’s spurred a real debate.The potential advantages are obvious.Sam suspects that social prescribing can get the same or better results for significantly less money.But little research has been done so far.It was the same story I had been hearing everywhere.Social prescribing, if it is successful, wouldn’t make much money.So none of the vested interests want to know.Another study of young women suffering from severe anxiety found similar effects.This suggests, at the very least, that it is a good place to start5 planting the seeds of research.I went back to see Michael Marmot, the social scientist who first discovered that meaningless work makes us depressed.He told me that what they are doing is simple.When people come to them with a physical problem, they treat the physical problem.When people come to them with a problem in living, he said, they try to address the problem in living.Sam, the doctor who helped transform this clinic, told me he suspects that a century from now we will look back on the discovery that you need to meet people’s emotional needs if you want them to recover from depression and anxiety as a key moment in medical history.Until the 1850s, nobody knew what caused cholera,6 and it killed enormous numbers of people.As a result, cholera outbreaks in the West stopped.An antidepressant, they have learned, isn’t just a pill.It’s anything that lifts your despair.The evidence that chemical antidepressants don’t work for most people shouldn’t make us give up on the idea of an antidepressant.That’s the woman who teaches people how to paint windows, he said to me at one point.That’s the man who used to be a police officer, who came here as part of his job, fell in love with it, and now works here.It’s funny, he says, to see the teenagers come and ask his advice for what somebody should hypothetically do to avoid a hypothetical crime.As Sam waved to yet another person, he told me something.Sam looked at her, and he smiled back.This isn’t a molehill.It’s the mountain at the center of almost all our lives.This is where our time goes, and our lives go.In the four hours when they collapse onto the sofa and try to engage with their kids before they clamber into bed before it starts all over again?But that’s not the obstacle I was thinking of.The obstacle is that meaningless work has to be done.It’s not like some of the other causes of depression and anxiety I’ve been talking about, like childhood trauma, or extreme materialism, which are unnecessary malfunctions in the wider system.I thought about the jobs all my relatives have done.All of these jobs are necessary.If they stopped being done, then key parts of our society would cease to function.It felt like a necessary trap.On an individual level, a few of us might escape.Your anxiety and depression levels will likely dip.But in a landscape where only 13 percent of people have jobs they find meaningful, that advice seems almost cruel.Telling her she needs a more fulfilling job when she’s battling to keep a job at all would be both mean, and meaningless.It is a small store in Baltimore that sells and repairs bikes.They told me a story.The day that Meredith Mitchell handed in her resignation, she wondered if she was doing something crazy.Sometimes she would have ideas about how they could do things better.If she tried to put them forward, she was told to get on with what she’d been assigned.She had a boss who seemed like a nice person, but she was volatile, and Meredith never really knew how to read her moods.Meredith knew that in the abstract her work was probably doing some good, but she never felt any connection to it.It wasn’t a life where she would ever get to write her own song.Around this time, Meredith started to feel a pervasive sense of anxiety she couldn’t quite understand.On Sunday nights, she’d feel her heart pounding in her chest,2 and a sense of dread about the week to come.Before long, she found she couldn’t sleep during the week, either.She kept waking up feeling cripplingly nervous, but she didn’t know why.Yet when she told her boss she was quitting, she wasn’t at all sure she was doing the right thing.Meredith’s husband, Josh, had a plan.But working in bike stores, he learned, is a really hard way to make a living.You don’t get a job contract, or sick pay, or vacations.It can be monotonous at times.And you’re pervasively insecure.If you ever wanted a raise, or a day off, or to stay home when you were ill, you had to beg the boss.Josh had been working for a few years in a typical bike store in the city.You could bear it as a teenager, but as you got into your twenties and started to think about the future, you found there was just a big hole ahead of you.At first, Josh’s solution was to try something that has largely faded from life in the United States.It took some time to persuade people, but Josh is an enthusiastic guy, and everyone who worked there agreed to sign on.They drew up a list of pretty basic demands that they felt would make their lives better.They wanted written contracts.They wanted pay raises for two of the workers, to bring them up to the level of everyone else.And they wanted annual meetings to discuss salaries.It wasn’t much, but it would, they felt, make them less anxious, and more secure.We’re people, with needs.We’re partners, and we deserve respect.Josh felt they were in a strong position, though, because he knew the business couldn’t function without them.When he was presented with the demands, Josh’s boss looked really surprised, but he said he’d think about it.The workers couldn’t afford any kind of lawyer.His boss started to bring in new workers to undermine the unionized ones.That’s when Josh had an idea.