“So bottom line is this has to be a public health priority that we consider on par with tobacco, with substance use disorders, with obesity and other issues that we know profoundly impacted people’s lives.”about his own personal experience with loneliness and feeling isolated for several years, said the pandemic has brought the disruption of social cohesion to the forefront.
“It’s a normal part of the human experience and loneliness, in many ways, is like hunger or thirst,” Murthy said. “It’s a signal our body sends us when we’re lacking something we need for survival.” “There’s a very simple reason: it’s hard to hate people up close,” he said. “But when we don’t know one another, then we fall prey to the caricatures that people put out about groups that disagree with us.”