Jennifer Wallace

For too many, the answer was no.

A doctor I interviewed described feeling powerless now that insurance companies were denying her patients the care they needed.

A college student described feeling like she only mattered when her GPA was high and her weight was low.

An elderly man described feeling like he mattered less this way.

He said the hardest part of aging is that people stop relying on you.

What these stories and the scientific research make clear is that to thrive in life, we need to know we matter.

That is, to feel valued and to have an opportunity to add value to the world.

When we feel like we matter, we show up fully, we want to connect, we want to engage, we want to contribute.

But when we are made to feel like we don't matter, we often withdraw.

Some of us might turn to substances or self-harm to try to alleviate that pain.

Others lash out in anger, road rage, online attacks, political extremes.

These are all desperate attempts to say, I'll show you I matter.

And this is about to get worse.

As AI erases jobs that once gave people a sense of identity and purpose, millions more will face this crisis of mattering.

The job ahead for us is not just to keep up with machines.

It's to protect what it means to be human, to feel valued, and the responsibility we have to remind others that they are valued, too.

In my research, I found that the places where we live and work can either fuel this crisis or be a key to solving it.

I visited a factory in Phillips, Wisconsin, where each workstation had a card that talked about how the piece being made fit into the final product.

On that card was a photo and a story of the person who would one day use it.

That story card was a powerful reminder to workers that they weren't just assembling parts.