A lot of us move through our days on autopilot, heads down, just clearing the to-do list. And somewhere in there, we stop noticing the small signals that tell us we matter. We stop sending them, too.

In this episode, Dr. Vivek Murthy sits down with journalist Jennifer Wallace, author of MATTERING: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. They get into why so many people feel invisible right now, how a culture built on individual success can leave us feeling more hollow than whole, and why the men who wrote to Jennie kept reaching for the same two words: useless and worthless.

It's also a personal conversation. Vivek opens up about feeling like a void would open whenever he left the hospital during residency. Jennie traces her own sense of mattering back to a church pew and a Spanish teacher who matched her with a struggling classmate. They talk about parenting, AI and what happens to our sense of purpose when work changes, and the small, almost mundane acts that remind us we're not alone.

If you've ever wondered whether your presence makes any difference in the world, this one's for you.

. . .

Every episode offers a reflection question inspired by the conversation. Share your thoughts and ideas with us at hello@stayinghuman.us, on our Substack, or leave us a message at 1-833-74-HUMAN.

IG @drvivekmurthy
Substack vivekmurthy.substack.com/
More about your host, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://www.vivekmurthy.com

#stayinghuman #VivekMurthy #JenniferWallace #mattering #selfworth #mentalhealth #mensmentalhealth #Loneliness #parenting #HumanConnection #purpose #wellbeing #artificialintelligence #values #podcast

What makes a good life? Is it accomplishment and wealth? Meaning and purpose? Relationships?

This is the question Dr. Robert Waldinger, a Harvard psychiatrist, has spent decades exploring as the fourth director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development – the world's longest-running study of adult life and happiness – following hundreds of people since 1938 and still running today. Robert is co-author, with Marc Schulz, of bestselling book The Good Life. He is also a Zen Buddhist priest whose spiritual journey has shaped how he thinks about thriving.

In this episode, Vivek and Robert talk about what the data reveal about happiness (spoiler alert: it has little to do with achievement or status). They discuss "social fitness" and the need to tend to relationships the way we tend to our physical health, along with surprising insights about marriage and loneliness, and why attention is "the most basic form of love."

Robert also shares how his Zen practice has helped him hold onto hope without looking away from the world's hardest problems. And what medicine could learn from all of this about caring for patients, and for each other.

If you're wondering what the research says about a good life, this episode is for you.

Are we paying too much attention to how long we live, and too little to how well we live?

For most doctors, the goal is to help patients live as long as possible. But more time and more life aren’t always the same things. In this episode, host Dr. Vivek Murthy and guest Dr. Atul Gawande, surgeon and author of the landmark book Being Mortal, discuss a question neither of them were trained as doctors: for a patient, what makes life worth living?

This conversation is part interview, part friendship, and part shared reckoning with what makes a life worth living. Atul reflects on how Being Mortal reshaped his own understanding of what it means to be a good doctor, and why the most important skill in medicine may be the simple act of asking patients what they actually want from life.

Along the way, Vivek and Atul get personal, sharing what it means caring for aging parents, the guilt that comes with it, and the loss of Atul's mother and Vivek's grandmother. They talk about belonging, the future of AI in medicine and the risk of human connection becoming a luxury, and the surprising things that make life meaningful — from chocolate ice cream and football to remembering the score in a ping pong game.

This episode is a conversation about what dying can teach us about living, and the questions worth asking the people we love before it's too late.

. . .

Every episode offers a reflection question inspired by the conversation. Share your thoughts and ideas with us at hello@stayinghuman.us, on our Substack, or leave us a message at 1-833-74-HUMAN.

IG @drvivekmurthy

Substack vivekmurthy.substack.com/

More about your host, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://www.vivekmurthy.com