Gordon Flett

He got back to me.

He said, I can't believe it.

It's like two thirds, two out of three say I don't matter in society.

So once you have that sense of disconnect from society where you're feeling alienated, it's all the more important to get the sense of mattering through your family, through your community, through school and whatever.

And it's another form of double or triple jeopardy.

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.