Jennifer Breheny Wallace

And I'm not saying we should go back to religion.

It wasn't a panacea.

But it provided a kind of structure where every week we were welcomed and we would be missed if we weren't there.

So these everyday signals that we matter,

have gone away.

And what's replaced it is this loneliness, this isolation, this crisis.

So when we feel like we matter, we show up to the world in positive ways.

We connect, we engage, we contribute.

When we are chronically made to feel like we don't matter,

We can withdraw, become anxious, depressed, turn to substances to try to alleviate the pain.

I quote in the book, a study of suicidal men and the two words they must often use to describe their suffering is useless and worthless.

Those are words that describe feeling like you do not matter.

The other thing we can do when we feel like we don't matter is we can act out in terrible ways, forcing people to take notice of us, forcing us.

I think about this with political extremes.

I think about it with road rage, online attacks, even very destructive actions like shootings.

These, in my mind, are desperate attempts of people to say, oh, I don't matter.

I'll show you I matter.

And what I fear, honestly, what keeps me up at night is in this age of AI where the world is changing so rapidly around us, I fear that we are going to see this lack of mattering on a scale we have never seen before.

And that keeps me up at night because I know we are right to be talking about universal basic income.

I think it may be necessary, but it's not enough.