Gordon Flett

And

I also look at the state of the world in terms of where we are right now and so many people out there feeling alone and insignificant and knowing that there are people out there who need to get a sense of mattering and a sense of significance through connections with other people and the roles that they might be able to assume.

I do.

I think they're all interconnected.

It certainly plays a role with so much of it.

And let's just take loneliness for an example.

Loneliness and this concept of anti-mattering are associated so robustly that we started to talk about

the double jeopardy of feeling alone and feeling insignificant.

It even hit me in terms of famous songs, the Beatles song, Eleanor Rigby.

You know, Father McKenzie giving a sermon where nobody will hear it.

Eleanor Rigby picking up the rice in a church buried along with her name, Nobody Came.

And it hit me that back in the 60s, the Beatles figured it out that it wasn't just the loneliness of, oh, look at all the lonely people.

It was all the lonely people who actually felt insignificant.

and unimportant, unnoticed, invisible.

So it's been around as a concept and the Beatles were always way ahead of everybody else.

But when I look at the numbers and the increasing numbers, I see that it's definitely an issue of not mattering, which I think can also be through comparisons through social media and the like.

One study I'd cite here that I did with a French colleague who contacted me

was focused on not mattering in society.

And he was showing me that the link between not mattering in society was linked with criminal sentiments and violence, not believing in the justice system.

And then I said to him, but can you just tell me how many young people in your sample of around 400 French adolescents felt like they don't matter in society?