From Mattering, by Jennifer Breheny Wallace:
We lose our footing and our sense of where we fit. The world feels colder, unwelcoming. The human brain wasn’t built for this kind of world. We often describe what’s happening around us as a mental health crisis, but this language only provides a partial picture. In truth, we are living through a social health crisis, a profound breakdown of the relationships that once protected us. We’ve lost track of our most basic human needs for connection and contribution. Now we often feel tempted to fill that void with counterfeit forms of mattering—chasing attention over connection, prestige over purpose, and money over meaning. The rise in loneliness, burnout, and anxiety is the predictable consequence of a society that has forgotten how to make people feel valued.
And later:
There’s a growing tendency in our culture to treat responsibility to others as an inconvenience, an obligation to dodge or delegate. In trying to guard against burnout or preserve autonomy, we can begin to see every task as a threat, like one more thing to manage rather than a sign that we matter.
It’s hard to feel weightless but simultaneously anchored.