Gordon Flett

And it makes an incredible difference.

And he told me a funny story.

He says, you know, he says my vitality in the nineties, he goes, I'm a volunteer for meals on wheels.

And he goes, I actually deliver to people who are younger than me because I'm better than them.

I said, it had to be that sense of,

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.