Gordon Flett

But now there's just this sort of feeling of, well, something is missing here.

And I see this, you know, I said, I have four grandchildren and

two of them are babies that were born six weeks apart.

And the oldest is now like 10 months.

And I just watch how they're amazingly responsive to the attention that parents give them.

But they also have ways to signal and get the attention of the parents.

And when somebody says, oh, you know, people just think I need attention.

Well, we do need attention to some degree.

And it's just hardwired.

So I look at it in terms of

You know, we know that we need this at some level.

And we also, unfortunately, again, here we come through social media, as we can see that there's other people who seem to have lives that are just great and they're getting the attention and the sense of mattering that other people, a lot of these, of course, are crafted images of lives that don't actually exist, which has been discovered in some sad situations.

So we have the circumstance where people are going, well,

I don't feel it.

I don't see it in my own life.

When look at these people over here, it could even be a sibling, you know, where there's a favorite child amongst them and everybody knows it, although nobody will acknowledge it.

And you can say that you're not getting the attention even within your own family.

But the reason why it hurts is because people, when you go back to what mattering is, it was used as a guide for self-evaluation, reflected appraisal on the self.

So ultimately you can come up with the sense that, you know, you are just not somebody that is of interest.

or worth being pursued.