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personable—but I’ll let Gillian, Dr. Friedman, ask some questions. There’s a connection between the two of you that she’ll talk about in a second.
tions are often about, trying to understand what can real- ly drive health, happiness and fulfillment in our lives and how we can work together to make a better reality.
Dr. Gillian Friedman: I was an English and economics major who always thought as a kid that I would go to medical school, but then I also got sidelined for a while. Similar a little bit in that respect. I’m interested in the fact that you’re a Surgeon General with a podcast.
Because this work is hard to do on our own. But if we know that there are others out there who are trying to walk down a similar path, who are trying to define suc- cess through their relationships and their contribution to the world, as opposed to through how many followers they have on social media or how much money they have in their bank account, that makes it a little easier to walk that path.
Murthy: (laughs)
Friedman: Which is really good, the House Calls pod- cast. That’s unusual for somebody in sitting office of any kind. And the podcast is about wellness, not about medicine per se. I’m curious, how did that come about for you? How did you choose that platform?
Friedman: How did you start focusing on loneliness. I just want to highlight the significance of a Surgeon General putting out an advisory about loneliness as a public health epidemic. We think of the word epidemic as meaning really widespread, something we want everybody to be aware of. How did you hit upon that?
Murthy: I spend much of my job talking, but what I really like doing is listening. It’s something I did a lot as a doctor, spending time with patients and listening to their stories. Not only was it helpful for me in figuring out how to diagnose and treat them, but I also felt as though I learned a lot just by listening to people’s life experiences. The podcast was an opportunity for me to do some listening and to try to bring out some of the wisdom in lessons that other people had gathered through their life experience and to share that with folks across the country. That was why we started the pod- cast.
Murthy: It certainly wasn’t in the original plan, I’ll tell you that. When I first started as Surgeon General, I had a bunch of other public health issues I wanted to work on, and I did work on many of them: the opioid epidem- ic, the e-cigarette crisis we had among youth, and many other issues that came up along the way, like Zika and Ebola and then of course COVID-19. But one of the things I realized in having conversations with people around our country is that people were actually strug- gling with loneliness. It kept coming up in conversation after conversation, often in subtle ways, with people telling me how invisible they felt or how they felt that they were carrying so many burdens in their lives and had to carry them alone.
A lot of our podcast sessions focus on the broader topic of well-being and how we can create that, whether it’s through our relationship with technology, renegotiating that, or whether it’s how we refocus our lives on rela- tionships, how we deal with conflict, how we manage anxiety in our lives. The conversations go in many dif- ferent directions, but they’re all centered around how to create a life that is filled with good health, happiness and fulfillment in a world where sometimes that can be really difficult, where we’re pulled in so many different directions, where the pace of life is so incredibly fast, and where there’s so much pressure also to focus on a particular definition of success: how much fame do you have, how much money do you have, how much power do you have, how fancy is your job. These are the things we tend to associate with success.
I was talking to college students on campuses who were saying, “Yeah, I’m surrounded by thousands of other students, but there’s no one with whom I can really be myself, who gets me. I feel really alone.” Hearing that again and again made me realize that there was some- thing happening here. It reminded me of the many con- versations I’d had with patients over the years where I’d realized that they may have come in for pneumonia or a blood clot, but they were actually struggling with loneli- ness in the background. It reminded me of my own experiences struggling with loneliness as a kid and being too ashamed to talk about it. That shame is really important to recognize, because it’s what keeps loneli- ness in the shadows. It’s why one in two adults in Amer- ica report measurable levels of loneliness. But we wouldn’t know it because to all the outside world it looks like people are getting together all the time, that they’re surrounded by lots of people, that they’re laugh- ing and having a wonderful time, because that’s what people post on social media. That’s the exterior face we put on for the rest of the world. Yet inside, there are a lot of people who are struggling.
Over the years when I’ve sat with patients toward the end of their lives and talked to them in those final days about what truly made their lives meaningful, they would talk about their relationships, the people they loved, the people they wished they had shared more time with, the people who loved them. They didn’t talk about how much money they had, how big their office was, how fancy their job was, how long their curriculum vitae was. It struck me that we don’t have to wait until the end of our lives to understand what truly makes us happy. We can recognize and start living a life that’s consistent with that right now. That’s what the conversa-
So I decided to put that advisory forward, a Surgeon General’s advisory for the first time on loneliness and
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