Like corporate lawyers, they may have a harder time achieving the three pillars of self-determination—autonomy, competence, and community—and wind up with a higher rate of depression. By contrast, Amish society has an exceedingly low rate of depression because, it is theorized, many Amish remain utterly unassimilated into modern society—to the extent that they won’t even drive cars. “The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment… that maximize[s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being,” a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders concluded in
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