Gordon Flett
speaker
1,089 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2026
last heard 15 Jun
Gordon Flett’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 2.
Appearances
If you don't matter in society where you're from a marginalized group, then you really do need to get that sense of importance and connection and caring from others.
The other thing I'll say in terms of the loneliness link is that I did a study with colleagues in China
who now showed through this massive sample that they had with four age groups, that the strong link between loneliness and not mattering was there among kids in grades four to six in China.
And I was sure if that study was done in North America or in Europe, same sort of findings would be there.
So if you have that sense that very early on is established between not mattering and loneliness, that's going to carry forward with some that have chronic loneliness and
My daughter's dissertation research, because she's also in psychology, looked at developing a measure of chronic loneliness and showed that anti-mattering was especially strongly correlated with the loneliness that lasts because people see themselves as somebody who's not somebody that other people want to be with.
Often being incorrect about that because they just haven't put themselves out there for others to enjoy their company, but when it's associated with chronic loneliness and a
chronic sense of antimattering, that's when I get concerned about the health issues that go along with what we know about the loneliness epidemic.
Yes, and it's very troubling because as I've learned since I'm a grandparent now of four,
There are vital roles that are there for the older people in society.
And that focus has made it sort of away from what we call the collectivist orientation to more of an individualistic approach.
And the problem is, though, that the pressures that people are under, especially the younger people, you know, the quest for it to happen to be absolutely perfect is wrapped around this sense of not mattering and always having to strive.
But yeah, in general, the focus on older people
I have a paper that I wrote out of sheer frustration with my colleague back in the start of the pandemic, just to see the number of times there were accounts of older people who were treated as if they were expendable.
There was one, even one instance where they changed hospitals for the protection of the people and they forgot a guy and left him there all by himself and the entire institution in a Canadian example there.
And I just got fed up hearing, we even heard some accounts in terms of politicians saying, if we have to make a choice between the economy versus older people during the pandemic, we're picking the economy.
And that horrible sense, no matter what your age is, of feeling expendable and unimportant.
And the father of mattering research and theory, Rosenberg, in his original paper,
said that the two groups most susceptible are adolescents and all the identity issues that are going on and physical changes with adolescents and older people.
And he specifically talked about people who are retiring.
Showing 261–280 of 1,089 · page 14 of 55
← Previous
Next →