Hello, this is Chris Anderson, the guy who gets to run TED.

You're about to hear a talk from TED 2019 featuring the New York Times columnist David Brooks.

If his way of thinking appeals to you and invite you to take a listen to my podcast,

the TED interview, where David and I spend an hour diving deeper into the ideas you're about to hear.

We talk, for example, about how individualism has created a crisis of isolation

and what he thinks the fix might be.

That's the TED interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

So we all have bad seasons in life, and I had one in 2013.

My marriage had just ended, and I was humiliated by that failed commitment.

My kids had left home for college or were leaving.

I grew up mostly in the conservative movement, but conservatism had changed,

so I'd lost a lot of those friends, too.

And so what I did is I lived alone in an

apartment, and I just worked. If you open the kitchen drawers where there should have been utensils,

there were posted notes. If you open the other drawers where there should have been plates,

I had envelopes. I had work friends, weekday friends, but I didn't have weekend friends.

And so my weekends were these long, howling silences. And I was lonely. And loneliness

unexpectedly came to me in the form of, it felt like fear, a burning in my stomach. And it felt

a little like drunkenness,

just making bad decisions or just fluidity,

lack of solidity.

And the painful part of that moment

...