Shankar Vedantam

Gordon Flett is a psychologist at York University in Canada.

He studies the psychological conditions that people need in order to thrive.

Gordon, early in your own life, you were fortunate enough to have many experiences of feeling like you were seen and heard and valued.

But I understand that being around your grandmother in particular made you feel like a mini celebrity.

Tell me that story.

So when you went to this cafeteria guard, it wasn't just your grandmothers who were rolling out the red carpet.

It sounds like it was everyone who was there.

So many years after those memorable experiences at that cafeteria, you were sitting in a library reading a textbook as part of your graduate studies in psychology, and you came across this term that was new to you.

What was this term?

Give me the context, Gord.

One of the things that Morris Rosenberg wrote was, to believe that the other person cares about what we want, think, and do, or is concerned with our fate, is to matter.

So that's how he defined what mattering was.

One of the fascinating things that Morris Rosenberg and others have noticed is that there's almost a cyclical pattern in mattering.

So we can matter a lot when we're small children because, of course, we can be the apples of our parents' eyes.

But then when we hit adolescence, we sometimes might experience a trough.

And again, when we are adults and we have careers and the careers are thriving, we can again experience a peak.

But then as we retire and as we move into adulthood,

you know, our retirement years, we can experience another trough.

So it's not like mattering is one linear thing across the lifespan.

It often has this pattern of waxing and waning.