Vivek Murthy

And so we discount, for example, what younger people are able to do and how they're able to function.

But I was blessed to have people, including a president who appointed me, who believed in my ideas and my experience and paid less attention to other issues like my age.

And I'm very grateful for that.

It wasn't the case that at the very beginning I thought I would work on loneliness.

In fact, when I testified before the Senate for my confirmation hearing, I was asked what my priorities would be, and I gave them a list of issues, and they did not include loneliness.

I needed to be educated, frankly, by people around the country who, through their own stories, helped me to realize that there was something deeper happening beyond the stories of opioid addiction, beyond the stories of violence in communities and disparities in health.

that there was something deeper going on behind those stories, something that was unsaid, that I came to realize was connected to this sense of loneliness and isolation that so many people were experiencing.

And I found that in these stories, not just stories of one particular group, these were moms and dads across the country.

They were people in remote fishing villages in Alaska.

They were members of Congress that I was talking to.

And in so many of their stories, I was finding that

The people were speaking to this deeper emotional pain that they were experiencing.

The pain was often coming up as a sense of being alone.

They would say, I feel that if I disappear tomorrow, it wouldn't matter, or I feel invisible.

And hearing that again and again reminded me of two things, Pooja.

It reminded me of my own personal experiences as a child struggling with loneliness in school and feeling this sense of dread when my parents dropped me off at school because I was a really shy kid who had a hard time building friendships.

The scariest time of the day for me was lunchtime when I'd walk into the cafeteria and

be scared that there would be nobody to sit next to.

And I was reminded of those experiences when I was on the road as Surgeon General.

I was also reminded of one other thing, which were my experiences in medicine, where I was surprised to find that so many patients came into the hospital alone.