Gordon Flett

Giving to others as a way of keeping your sense of connection and importance and usefulness that can blunt a lot of the health challenges that come along.

I came up with this term after looking at some of the work, which showed that we had a link between anti-mattering and a measure that measures what's called psychic or psychological pain.

This is when you're having the deep, dark thoughts and really hard on oneself.

And again, there was this very robust correlation.

But immediately I thought,

what's going on from a person perspective, because this person's carrying around a feeling of insignificance and to say not mattering is not enough.

You know, so that's why I came up with the idea of unbearable insignificance because in there would be the loneliness as well.

And there's a version of loneliness called unbearable loneliness that has been studied and not as much as it should have been.

There's that sense of pain.

That's a sense of isolation where people are feeling so badly about themselves that

They'll say, you know, if I just stopped showing up in the world anywhere, nobody would even know that I was gone.

And the sad part is about this, that often this is a perception that people have that's not valid in terms of people in their lives, but people don't know they're carrying around this hurt.

That's why I say, you know, it's great to just check in on people.

And if somebody seems to be doing better than you think they should be, because life is difficult for everybody.

And everybody has bad days and good days.

And some people have a series of that.

If somebody seems to be doing too well, I'd want somebody to check in on that person and say, you know, is it the case that maybe you're just putting on the front that hides a lot of this pain?

Because wrapped into this sense of unbearable insignificance and loneliness is a deep sense of shame where people then say, well, there must be something about me.

People try to make it more controllable by convincing themselves that they're defective, that they're really

not somebody that other people want to be with and not realizing that people actually do.