Gordon Flett

I think it's because it goes right back to our early experiences where we have to back up a bit and say that mattering, one of the key elements of mattering is the feeling that you have other people's attention.

And that's critical from a survival perspective early on, again, in terms of getting the attention of one's parents or caregivers for infants to be fed and get the nurturance and the nourishing that they need.

And I believe that there's a reward value that's set up for the attention and

the importance of somebody showing you that they're paying attention to you.

And I think that can be very hardwired for people so that when they get older and they lose that sense, they know at some level that it's what provided them with a sense of comfort, allowed them to survive and to thrive in the early days.

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.