Why People Feel Empty, Lonely, and Like Nothing They Do Matters - Jennifer Breheny Wallace

0:00When 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. 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. We need to figure out how we are going to protect what it means to be human, and that is to matter. We evolve to meet this need. Welcome to Open Book. Joining us today is Jennifer Wallace.

0:42She's an award-winning journalist, best-selling author, and what a great book. I read it over the winter break, by the way, and it's called Mattering, The Secret of a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. Well, first of all, do you go by Jenny or Jennifer? Jenny. Jenny's perfect. All right. Okay, good. So Jenny, I've read a lot of self-improvement books. You know, I'm a reader. Okay, but this really hit me in a different way. You know, you are identifying an operating system that we need for our time. And so I want you to tell us about the culture that we're living in right now. and let's talk honestly the mental health crisis as a result of that culture and what is the message inside your your your book about mattering yeah so i mean mattering just to give everyone a simple definition i define it the way researchers who study it define it and that is feeling valued for who you are by your families your colleagues your neighborhood society as a whole and then having an opportunity to add value back across those areas of your life.

1:56And what I argue in the book is that we are going through a mattering crisis. This has been evolving since the 60s and 70s. And Robert Putnam in bowling alone did a wonderful job of tracking this. Mattering, this idea of feeling valued and adding value used to be baked into our everyday life. We knew our neighbors. We relied on them. After a storm, they'd check in to make sure the electricity was still on. We had workplace social contracts where if you were loyal to your company, they'd be loyal to you with a pension. We were a more religious society. And I'm not saying we should go back to religion.

2:33It 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. By the way, I read part of this book, but I also listened to the audible version of the book, which was in your voice. and what resonated to me is that you care a lot about people who feel lonely, burnt out, anxious, disconnected. And you say something in the book, which I want you to share here, that these are symptoms of something deeper.

3:22What is it? What is it that's got everybody so stressed out, Jen? 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.

4:09I think about this with political extremes. I think about it, with road rage, online attacks, even, you know, 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.

4:54We need to figure out how we are going to protect what it means to be human. And that is to matter. I mean, we evolved to meet this need. Bisa, I want you to slice it up for me, okay? Because mattering is, to me, the way you describe it in the book, is very different from just self-esteem or it's very different from status and it's very different from job success. Okay. So go ahead, drill into it for me. Yeah. So it's so interesting, but the sociologist who created the self-esteem scale that everybody uses was actually the same person who conceptualized mattering in the 1980s, what I believe he saw is that self-esteem isn't enough, that we need to know our actions make a difference.

5:43We need, as humans, that social proof that we matter. So mattering has these ingredients. It's actually, what I love about it is that it's so practical. You know, we know the importance, for example, of belonging, but belonging doesn't go far enough. You can belong to a table or the accounting department, a neighborhood, a family, and not feel like you matter to the people there. So what does it mean? What is that experience of feeling like you matter? I've put it under a framework I call SED, just so I can remember it easily. It stands for feeling significant, appreciated, invested in, and depended on.

6:21Those are four ingredients that send the signal that you matter. I can break them up really quickly for you. Yeah, please. So I interviewed hundreds of people around the world and I asked every one of them, tell me a time when you felt like you mattered. And it was never the big moments. Like you said, it was never the job promotion or the award at work or the toast at a milestone birthday. We as humans crave to matter in the everyday, in the mundane of life. So it's having a neighbor come over with a pot of soup when we are sick. It is having a colleague check in after a particularly rough week at work.

6:56We crave to matter in the everydayness of life. Feeling appreciated is, in my mind, it's appreciating the doer behind the deed. So not just thanks for this action that you did, but because of you, what it is about you that I appreciate that led to this. Feeling invested in is knowing there are people in this life who are invested in our goals and well-being, and that we have people too that we're invested in. And then depended on is knowing we're relied on and that people rely on us. It's what gives us that psychological safety that we are not going through this world alone. So, I mean, it's a simplistic question and you can give me a more in-depth intellectual answer, but are we wired to help each other?

7:43Yes. Yes. We are wired by evolution to want to be pro-social. I mean, there's been this myth that took hold that we are hyper-selfish as human beings. But the whole reason we evolved is because we mattered to the people in our group. We felt valued by them and we added value to them. And so we have evolved with this motivation to matter. And researchers who study it say that after food and shelter, it is this need to matter that drives our behavior for better or for worse. I want to talk about our achievement culture for a second. Okay. So, uh, you know, and this is across families and schools and workplaces, people are praised for their performance.

8:31Um, is this hurt ourselves? I feel like when I got done reading your book, I felt like, okay, the war is really the first war starts with inside of ourselves. At the end of the day, if we think we matter, then we matter. If we don't think we matter, then no matter what external force comes upon us, we don't matter. But just talk about this whole culture of the way we are training the kids and we grow up as adults and we think about ourselves in a certain way. I'm so glad you asked that. So mattering is the story we tell ourselves about our place in the world. So you are absolutely right. Mattering starts from within.

9:13My first book, Never Enough really unpacked achievement culture, why it's reached such a boiling point today. And what I found in the young people that I interviewed was that the kids who were really struggling the most today in our society feel like their mattering is contingent on how they look, on how they perform, the brand name college they go to. And I've been touring with this book, Never Enough and Mattering Now. And I've spoken with hundreds of parents who have described feeling caught up in this achievement culture themselves. They've internalized what the Dutch theologian Henry Nouwen describes as the three great lies of our society.

9:54I am what I have. I am what I do. I am what people say and think of me. That is how we build a very, very fragile sense of self that can come crumbling down when our image takes a hit, when we fail, when we have setbacks, which are inevitable in life. And I just want to be clear that I'm not saying don't go for achievement and success. I am a high achiever. I enjoy it. It fills me up. I love it. But my worth is not tied to my achievements. And what I actually found in studying healthy strivers across the age groups is that they had this deep sense of mattering that allowed them to reach for high goals because they knew that their worth was never in question.

10:48So they could reach for really high things. I could put out these two books because if I crashed and burned and they weren't well received, I knew I mattered no matter what. So it gave me the, you know, the foundation to reach for high goals. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. For me, you know, I think it's the hardest thing. And I have five children. So I always try to tell my kids the fight is on the inside.

11:21You know, I've had good things happen to me, Jenny, and I've had bad things happen to me. uh you know and when i'm getting like fired and torched from the white house and lit up by the late night comedians you either have to make a decision that that doesn't matter and that you matter or you can internalize that right you either can reflect it and push it aside or you absorb it it's one or the other uh and i think you've made such a very strong case that we have to learn to think like that um something i just said in the book which i didn't expect and that is about social media. Okay. And so social media often gets blamed for this disconnection that we're having and we're, we're blaming it on social media, but it feels like you're making the argument that this sort of started even before social media.

12:06And while it may be exposing something, we were already losing this, uh, connective tissue. So tell us a little bit about that. I mean, I wish as both a parent of three kids and also just as a human on this earth, I wish I could say to you, it's all social media. Just shut it down and we will go back to being a healthier society. As you point out, what I say in the book is that social media certainly is a factor. It is a magnifier and an accelerant of what we are seeing in the real world, but it is not the root. And I fear that particularly parents who put so much emphasis on social media as the root of their kids' problems, I fear they're going to take their eye off the ball and realize that this problem goes deeper.

12:57I mean, when I think about teenagers and the crises and the 20-year-olds today who are really in crisis, I think of them as canaries in the coal mine. They are calling out this sick culture that all of us are living in. Parents, according to research out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Making Care in Common, parents are struggling at equal rates as their children. We just aren't talking about it. And what I know from decades worth of resilience research is that children's resilience rests on the resilience of the adults in their lives, their parents. And our resilience rests on the depth and support of our relationships.

13:35And I wonder when you were going through all the nastiness in the press, if you found your resilience in your relationships, Yes, we can fortify our sense of selves. We can believe in ourselves, but we are social beings and we crave that social proof from others that we matter. Listen, there's no question. I always tell people that, you know, your grandmother told you to be nice to people on the way up, Jenny, because let me tell you, when you're getting hit and you're sliding down the ladder, you're meeting the same people. And one of the most gratifying things that happened to me was my buddies came to my aid.

14:13and bought me a beer and told me to worry about it. And that's a good feeling, right? Can I tell you a study that's one of my favorite studies of all time? Oh, please. Which basically tells the scientific version of your story that researchers were looking at, they had individuals standing at the foot of the hill and asking them to estimate the incline. Then they had the same individuals stand there with a friend and estimate the incline. The incline looked less steep when they were standing there together than it did when they were alone. And that's because we are wired to be resilient in groups, to be resilient in relationships.

14:54And I think part of the male loneliness crisis that we hear today is that men have internalized this idea that you need to be self-sufficient, you need to be stoic, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I mean, if you've ever tried to do that, it's literally impossible. the idea that that's even a thing. Our resilience is in our relationships. And I think that's a conversation we need to start normalizing. When I think about being relied on, because, you know, try to be a good provider for my kids or my family or whatever, but you write something that's so interesting to me. You say, you know, you want to be relied on, but not too much.

15:35And that there's a balance. Okay. Tell us a little bit about that. What do you mean by that and how do we matter without becoming overwhelmed or depleted ourselves? Yeah, so many of the people that I interviewed for the book said, oh, the problem isn't that I don't matter. It's that I matter too much at home, at work. I'm a caregiver. And so true mattering, according to the research, requires balance, mattering to ourselves and mattering to others. So fulfilling our own needs as humans while also fulfilling the needs of others. There's this balance. And often with caregivers or leaders or people working as first responders, it is very easy to let that sense of matter and get out of balance.

16:20But we are not resilient when we do that. That is what causes burnout and disengagement. And so we need to focus on prioritizing ourselves, even just in small ways every day. I have a buddy of mine that I know you're familiar with. His name is Scott Galloway. And, you know, we have, we think we have a male crisis going on. We did this like limited series called Lost Boys. And when I read your book, I was like, okay, how do I get my sons to read this book? Okay. So let me knock on this camera here. Can you hear me? How do we wake up men? Okay. To read a book like this? Well, I'll tell What has shocked me in the 12 weeks that this book has been out is how many letters from men I've received.

17:06So actually, I do think men are reading this book. I'm one of those men, by the way. I wrote to you right away in February. Yeah, I so appreciate it. And I think it's because mattering offers a way of talking about the feelings that is palatable. I think some men shy away from the idea of vulnerability. but mattering, wow, this is a human need we all have and it's going unmet. My boss doesn't make me feel like I matter or I just retired and my mattering has totally disappeared. I don't feel like I matter to anybody anymore. No one wants to hear from me. And so, or I don't have male friendships that are making me feel like I matter.

17:46I'm lonely in my friendships. So it's given this framework, this palatable way of talking about the pain and not mattering is very painful. It's very, very painful. So I would love any ideas you have for reaching more male readers. And the male readers that are reading it, it is impacting them. Listen, I sent it to my two adult sons and told them to read it. My daughter had already gotten to it before I could get to her, so I give her credit for that. But I would say to you that we can do more about this just by raising the awareness that I think it makes people feel more comfortable that they're even being talked about.

18:30You mentioned all this stuff about grandparents and people that are on their way to retirement, that there's some invisibility to that. And I appreciate all those comments. But I want to talk about Jennifer Wallace for a second. So Jenny Wallace, mother of three, living in New York City, which is arguably ground zero, Jenny Wallace, for what we're talking about, right? A hundred percent. How do you implement this in your own household? And, you know, take Never Enough with your first book and mattering and say, okay, you know, it's like the physical trainer. You know, you got to have like a fit trainer, right?

19:10Otherwise, right, you want a fat chef, but you want a skinny fit trainer, right? So how does Jenny Wallace put this into practice? Yeah, I appreciate that question. So I started writing Never Enough when my oldest, who's now 20, was in eighth grade because I was noticing this achievement culture and wondering why my children's childhoods were so different from my own. And so that's what led to Never Enough. And so what I've learned in research in the book is so much. I've learned to lead with mattering. I've learned that our children are growing up in this achievement culture. We put them in environments like the Upper East Side or affluent communities, you know, what some researchers call super zip codes.

19:50The idea that like people with similar definitions of success, similar means are all in one place competing for limited spots in colleges and having a similar definition of success. And that makes us vulnerable. And so, you know, there's lots of stuff that has changed from researching these two books. But one of the things that I really focus on is something I learned about in book one, and that is how our values impact our well-being. So living on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, certain values are activated day in and day out. So let me just give you a quick little summary on what I found in the research.

20:29So researchers who study values say that all of us roughly have the same core values, and they separate them into extrinsic values and intrinsic values. Extrinsic values are things like wanting the big house, the high status job, a certain image or popularity. Intrinsic values are things like wanting to be a good friend, wanting to be pro-social, good to the environment, grow spiritually. Values operate like a zero-sum game. So the more time and energy you spend pursuing those materialistic goals, those extrinsic values, the less room you have in your life for pursuing the intrinsic ones. And here's why this matters.

21:03Because extrinsic values, like those that are activated often on the Upper East Side, are linked with negative mental health and substance abuse disorder. And intrinsic values are linked with the well-being that we want for ourselves and our kids. And here's the bottom line. It's not that people in high-achieving communities have bad values. It's that our extrinsic values are constantly being activated. So one of the things that I really do in my own house is focus on the intrinsic values, on balancing the seesaw that is necessary to do for mental health. I just think it's so well said. I find that there's a paradox to wealth.

21:44Don't get me wrong. I started with no money. I remember one of my old bosses, I said, I want to have money. He said, when you have money, you're going to still want to cook pasta and open up a jar of sauce and eat the pasta. You're not going to, oh, that's, I said that to him. Oh, that's because you have money. I don't have any money. But he was right. You know, there's a paradox to the wealth. You got to be very, very careful. The wealth can like weirdly make you lonely, right? I mean, it could, it could, it could cause almost like a desolation crisis. Do you know what I mean? Oh, absolutely.

22:20And I think it makes you lonely because you have less time to invest in your friendships. You have less time that you feel like is your time. So you lack the sense of agency. All of these needs go unmet. And that is what can lead to these negative health outcomes. And I'll tell you what's interesting. When you think about kids, there's something I talk in the book called the encore effect, which is the idea that there is this special, now trust me, I know this is a 1 % problem, But that there is this sense for young people that they need to replicate their parents' lifestyle, if not do even better than their own parents did.

22:59But we are in a different economic reality where that's nearly impossible. And that does put a specific strain on young people who are growing up in this achievement culture. I am not saying, you know, that we should care about these young people with all the resources more than we should care about kids living in poverty. But as one researcher put it to me, we're not putting pain on a scale. A young person who grows up in any environment is subject to that environment. So they don't have a choice. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Okay, so we're down to the five words that my producer and I have come up with.

23:38And then I need you to give me a word or two. Are you ready? Yes. Connection. Top priority. Evolutionary, right? It's like you're wired for it, right? Okay. So what about disconnection? You have agency. I hear depression when I hear disconnection. You got to be connected, right? Yes. Yes. But I want people to know that you have agency if you're feeling disconnected. You're one decision, one action away from reconnecting again. Okay. That's too many words. Sorry. No, no. It's good. You're doing good. You're doing good. Grading you. I'm grading you, Jenny Wallace. Okay. I mean, this is extrinsic, okay?

24:13Not intrinsic. I'm grading you. Okay. Purpose. Adding value. Yeah. Helping, right? Helping others, right? What if I say the word life? Meaning. Okay. Last word. And I'll give you the last word. I say the word mattering, which I think you've made into a new word for me. Feeling valued. All right. Can I sneak one more word in there, do you mind? Oprah.

24:43masterful this is cool right she's amazing i i enjoyed your interview with her a great deal i i uh i think she gets it you know on a lot of different levels you know i mean she's a real person i think she she has given us uh the license to express our vulnerability which is also part of the condition right we trust each other more uh when we're capable of being vulnerable with each other. Right. And that's, that's also part of mattering, right? If you go to somebody and tell them what's going on and you can feel that they're listening and care, that's part of that connection, right? It is. And it's also part of the mattering for the other person.

25:22You know, when you ask somebody for help, you're saying you matter to me. I, I, and they feel like they matter. That's one of the greatest sources of self-esteem is to be asked advice. All right. Well, listen, you wrote an amazing book. It's a bestseller, second bestseller, by the way. So you have a gift, Jennifer Wallace. The title of the book is Mattering, the Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. Thank you so much for joining us today on Open Book. I'm so grateful.

26:03Thank you.