Belonging is the cure

One hundred and fifty-seven mornings since we began. One short piece a day, from the day Vault Human began, and from here they continue one day at a time, the way a key is meant to.

The key is Alfred Adler, and he's the right one to arrive on. A Viennese physician, Freud's early colleague and then his first great dissenter, Adler built in the 1910s a psychology he called individual, and its center is a single idea that every key this year has been circling: belonging.

Adler said that every person begins in a state of inferiority, small, dependent, surrounded by people who can do what they can't, and that the whole of a life is the striving to overcome it. The striving can go two ways. Toward superiority over others, which is the neurotic path, and which never satisfies, because there's always someone above you. Or toward what he called social interest, Gemeinschaftsgefühl, the feeling of community: the sense that you belong, that you contribute, that your life is useful to others. He thought that was the measure of mental health, and that most suffering was a person who'd lost the feeling of belonging and was compensating badly.

His therapy was encouragement, almost literally: giving courage. He asked about earliest memories, because he thought they revealed the story a person had decided to live by. He asked about birth order. And he asked, always, what the person would do if the problem vanished, because the answer showed what they were avoiding.

It's the last key before tomorrow because it's where this year has been heading. The first month asked what's yours. The second and third months built the body and the attention. The fourth month made meaning. The fifth month honors what was hurt. And the sixth month, which comes after a rest, is Circle: your people. Adler would say that's not a chapter. It's the point.