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Jennifer B. Wallace is a journalist, an author, and the founder of The Mattering Institute. I loved her new book, which is called Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose.
The topic might sound a bit obvious at first, but I learned so much from it. Today, Jennifer shares the key ingredients to feeling like you matter, and to making others feel like they matter, too. We talk about how mattering gives us a language, and a practical way of meeting the needs in our lives that often go unmet.
Jennifer shares some of my favorite stories and stats from the book, along with the tools, habits, and small things she does in her own life to feel and share a sense of mattering—and to actually build in time for connection and friendship.
We talk about the importance of putting a bow on things; how we can use the mattering lens to approach life transitions; the benefits of ego extension; and something called “the beautiful mess effect.”
And, importantly, Jennifer explains how she’s approached what might be the hardest but most profound part of this, which is figuring out—how do I matter to myself?
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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:
ELISE:
All right, well first, you do such a good job. I love a book with stories. Obviously I know you’re a story person and a reporter, but it was so fun. You picked great stories and I always take fewer notes on books like that. I’m just swept along in the narrative, but I just loved every single person that you wrote about. So nice job with that.
JENNIFER:
Oh, thank you. The people that I met on this journey were just extraordinary, so I feel grateful to have met them.
ELISE:
Alright, so take us to the beginning, and I hope you take this the right way. People say this about my book and it’s my favorite compliment, but they like to say, your book is so obvious. And then I’m like, yeah, and yet nobody put it together in that way before. And so I had a similar feeling about this idea of mattering and the mattering core where I was like, oh yeah, duh. Obviously it’s just a new lens on a collection of symptoms that we’ve been talking about, but it coheres it into something that makes so much sense. So thank you.
JENNIFER:
Thank you. And I take that as a very high compliment, and I will say mattering is an idea that’s been studied in academia since the 1980s, but no one has really put it in the hands of people who could use it. And what I found personally so useful about mattering is that it offers a lens with which to see the world and a language to describe some of the pain that we are feeling as a culture, but also as individuals feeling so lonely and anxious and disengaged and lacking a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives. And mattering really gives us language and a practical way of meeting those needs that are going unmet today.
ELISE:
Yeah, I love words and I love etymologies and matter and matter. Ring is such an interesting word actually in the sense of matter comes from matter, which is mother. And I don’t know what happens with the ing, but it is, I feel like it’s one of those words that we use. And then when you stop to actually think about it, you’re like, oh, that’s such a profound idea, this idea of belonging and beyond belonging, a need an inherent, there’s a service component that you write about. There’s a being seen component and celebrated component. So let’s start there. Will you take us through the mattering core?
JENNIFER:
Yeah. So again, researchers have been studying it for decades and they have found key ingredients to feeling like you matter and to making others feel like they matter too. So I’ve organized it under something I call the said framework, SAID, and that stands for feeling significant and important, appreciated, invested in and depended on. You want me to go through them a little bit?
ELISE:
Yeah, please.
JENNIFER:
Feeling significant. We all know when we’re being toasted at a milestone birthday or when we receive an award at work, we feel significant and important, but as humans, as social beings, we crave to matter. In the every day, we crave to matter in the mundane, in the details of life. And so what does it mean to feel significant? It means that somebody remembers you, someone remembers something that you loved and they circle back to it. I describe my mother in this as being masterful at collecting what people like these little details about their life, little treasures, and she circles back to them, and that’s how people feel like they are important and significant in her life, feeling appreciated. There is a way of expressing appreciation according to the research where it builds a sense of mattering in us. So let’s say a friend buys you a beautiful sweater, you could thank your friend and say, thanks for this gorgeous sweater.
You’re so generous, very nice. Or you can say something like, oh man, you went to my favorite store and you got my favorite color blue, and you know how much I hate a crew neck and you know me so well. You are the most generous and thoughtful friend. I am so lucky to have you in my life. So again, it’s about the doer, not just the deed feeling invested in is having people in our lives who are invested in our goals, who our joys become their joys, our setbacks feel like their setbacks. We really feel like we have somebody in the ring of life standing there next to us, supporting us, dependent on is feeling relied on and dependent on in ways that are sustainable. So feeling like you are an important part of the world around you, but not mattering too much so that your needs are never prioritized. So that’s the set framework, significance, appreciation, invested in, depended on.
ELISE:
It’s so simple, and yet as you were listing them out, you can feel how lonely it is to be with people who don’t really know you. For example, you can have a hundred friends, but if it feels like they don’t actually see you or care about you or remember those small details, what’s the point? Right? It actually, I feel like in those situations I leave lonelier and that feeling of, oh, this person really wants me to win. I think that that’s often lacking from so many of our encounters in the world as well as this idea of service. I love that you open the book talking about this fire chief because you think about jobs that matter, right? I mean, I’m sure that’s why you chose it, that I think universally we all say those jobs matter, right?
JENNIFER:
That’s exactly why I did,
ELISE:
Yeah. A universal, the most mattering, service-oriented, life-saving job, fire, police, ambulance drivers, but yet they struggle with this too. Can you talk a bit about their world and why? Because that was fascinating and not surprising.
JENNIFER:
So I had no idea before researching this that firefighters are often the first to arrive at the scene of a car accident or a medical emergency. I knew they fought fires, but they do so much more than that and then they will stabilize someone or take somebody out of a burning car and then EMS takes over and they take that person to the hospital, and firefighters never know what happened next, did their efforts make a difference? And so it’s easy to burn out, it’s easy to burn out when you don’t know that your efforts are making an impact. So I spent time with this fire chief in North Charleston, South Carolina and his crew. He created a system to change that. He tracked the outcomes of rescues so that his firefighters would know when their actions saved a life or ease someone’s suffering because he knew it’s not enough to do purposeful, meaningful work.
We need to know that work makes a difference, that we are connected to our impact, and this is not just in firefighters. This disconnection from our impact is felt in so many roles. Sometimes as a caregiver where you put in so much effort and you really don’t find out until two decades later if those wings work and so we can feel very disconnected or at work, we are in this crisis of disengagement where something like 70% of employees feel disengaged from their work. And the way I look at disengagement is that it is a protective mechanism. So if you feel like you don’t matter at your work, if you feel invisible, like your efforts are going unnoticed, that you don’t have a voice that is very painful, that is a psychic pain, not mattering is painful to us. And so the way to protect is to disengage. And so that’s what this fire chief was really solving for. They were struggling with disengagement and lots of firefighters were leaving the force, and so he was trying to find a way to keep them connected, keep them resilient, and it’s worked.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, it’s beautiful. I’m thinking too of other instances in all of our lives too where you don’t get that just how important the bow on it is to understand, oh, someone got this, something good came of it. You can’t give a lot of examples like that organization welcome home, which I thought was so beautiful and I want to ask you about that in a minute. But just even thinking about some of the more thinking about philanthropy, for example, and many of us on the daily or being asked for money, whether it’s for AmeriCares or Save the Children, and I try to, my late brother-in-law said, you need to be generous to the point of making yourself uncomfortable. And I take that to heart, so I support a lot of things, but there’s always this like what happened and what’s happening, and I know that a lot of charities work hard to make that more perceptible, but one of my favorite things to do, which will surprise no one, it’s everyone’s favorite thing to do, is to knock off wishlist for Christmas for specific kids in foster care, to donors choose and buying specific requests for a school teacher where you know exactly what they need and you’re meeting that need.
I’m surprised now that I think about it, that there isn’t more very specific. This is exactly your donation bought a quarter of a ventilator. You know what I mean? Yes. Why don’t charities do a better job of closed looping that for people?
JENNIFER:
I think some people, some charities do a good job, especially at benefits where people are donating and this X dollars will support this fund and things like that, but it’s even just in our every day that we don’t close the loop,
Speaker 3:
Right?
JENNIFER:
We’re sick and a friend brings over a pot of soup and we think to ourselves how kind That was so nice. Instead of sending the text that says, you know what? I didn’t even know I needed it somehow you always are able to meet my needs before I even know them. There are so many closing the loop, going to your favorite coffee shop and just saying to the person This week has been rough, but I come in here every morning and you have such a way of just warming my day. People are starved from mattering today and there are lots of reasons for this that I’m sure we’ll go into and just closing the loop and connecting people to their impact even in small ways. There’s something I talk about in the book if it weren’t for you, I mean this is something a charitable organization could do, but it’s also something we could do with the people in our lives. If it weren’t for you a simple text, I wouldn’t have had the courage to go for that big interview. Thank you for lending me your courage when I didn’t have it for myself or to a cousin. If it weren’t for you, our family gatherings wouldn’t be as strong or as funny, so thank you for making us all feel closer. So these small moments, we crave to matter in the mundane and we can connect people to their impact and feed that sense of mattering that’s going unmet.
ELISE:
It’s like a little bit of a variation on gratitude, which I feel like is a word that’s obviously incredibly important, but that has lost a lot of meaning, but does have life extending qualities. The more grateful you are, the longer you’re likely to live. But it’s almost a spin on that of how do you express mattering? It’s a frame right through which you can approach every day.
JENNIFER:
It is, I think of mattering as a lens that I have been given because what I know about the research in mattering and what I’ve seen in my reporting is that when people feel like they matter, they show up in positive ways to the world. They want to connect and engage and contribute, and when they don’t feel like they matter, they can withdraw and become anxious. Abuse substances or lash out in anger, be online attacks, political extremes, road rage, school and workplace shootings. All of these things are desperate attempts to say, I’ll show you I matter. People will go to great lengths to meet this universal human need to matter. And if we can start meeting it in small ways, we can hopefully start to soften so much of the rage that we are seeing today. So much of it, if you look at it through the lens of mattering, I’m not saying it will alleviate all of your anger around it or discomfort around it or disappointment about how certain people are behaving in this world today, but it can give you another way of understanding it. The researchers say, if you really want to know somebody, find out if they feel like they matter.
It is a deep question, did you feel like you mattered growing up? Do you feel like you matter at work? Do you feel like you matter to your community? Do you feel like you matter to your society? It tells you a lot about what that person is struggling with if they say that they don’t.
ELISE:
Yeah, and I’m sure many people don’t or feel like they’re making insignificant or maybe even worse, just unseen or unappreciated contribution. Which leads me to my favorite story in the book, which is I do not want to mispronounce his name, but Rehan.
JENNIFER:
Yes. Han. So fabulous.
ELISE:
Okay. Can you tell us the story of Rehan?
JENNIFER:
So Rahan such a great guy. So Rehan grew up in Maryland, very middle class mother left the family to move to her native countries. Sri Lanka father suddenly lost his job. All of the resources the family had really, they couldn’t even afford heat or food. Rahan started struggling in school. His dad was so involved even though he was working very long shifts and found him a free tutor. That free tutor invested in him, made him feel like he mattered, told him he was a strong student, could do anything that he wanted. He was building up this sense of mattering in Rehan, and then all of a sudden he was a NASA scientist and was called on another project and had to stop the tutoring and Rehan then fell behind again, was put on a track for special needs kids. Fast forward, Rehan started meeting people in his life who were, as he described them, he found a lot of his self-esteem working as a boxer in high school, almost went pro.
And then something else happened where he couldn’t go pro, but he learned how to take people in his life and he welcomed the investment so much so that he graduated high school with no academic prospects, became a sanitation worker, felt the love of his colleagues, who again invested in him, encouraged him to go back to school. He wound up ending his academic career at Harvard Law School. He went from no college to University of Maryland to Harvard Law School. And as he would put it, he sees no honor in the narrative of the self-made man. He takes his worth and his sense of mattering by the people in his life who had deeply invested in him. He came through extraordinary hardships and he said he probably would’ve given up had it not been for the people around him. He didn’t want to disappoint them. And so Rahan taught me this idea that is a critical ingredient to mattering, which is called ego extension.
And I love this idea. This is the investment part of mattering ego extension. I visualize it in my own head as this idea of extending my ego so that it takes in the egos of others and so that my ego is the success of the people I have invested in so I can relish. I mean, I say this to my kids all the time, most of the joy I get out of my life is not my own accomplishments, but it is the accomplishments of my friends because I have so many wonderful friends and I get to invest in them. And then I feel this joy of when they are succeeding. It is like my success too, so often in this individualistic world, that sense of wanting to invest in other people and get joy from their joy is beaten out of us. But we have been wired as social beings to want to add value and add value to the people around us. This is not what I’m recommending here in this mattering idea is not some revolutionary ideas. Other cultures have a word for this. We call it ego extension here in the us. So nobody talks about it, but it’s the idea that our lives are enhanced because we can invest in the people around us. So our achievements, our personal achievements are just a sliver of the success that we get to enjoy because of the people that we invest in around us.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, I loved his story and I loved how he, as someone who felt invisible as a sanitation worker, stinky, that people would walk around him or look through him, that when he was at Harvard Business School, he started a whole movement to recognize all of the people who make that school possible and are largely invisible to students. And that it still goes today. And there’s an award ceremony.
JENNIFER:
Yes, it’s amazing. He started this award ceremony of staffers and what they will say to him is, I never won an award in school. This is the first award I’ve ever won. And they can bring their families and they are nominated and they are seen and valued. And like you said, they were feeling invisible. I spoke with one gentleman who’d worked for 20 years at Harvard Law School, and he said, the students don’t realize when they look out the windows that they’re clean and that there’s a person behind them or in front of them cleaning their windows so they can see out When it snows heavily up in Boston, they don’t realize that the workers are working through the night so that the students can make it to class. They don’t notice the work behind all of that. This is the gratitude, the idea that they are given so many gifts by the staff that they don’t even realize it. And so what Rahan was doing was he was not just helping the staffers, but he was helping the students there realize the gifts in their lives by the efforts of the staffers that were making their lives better in countless ways.
ELISE:
And this is true of course for all of us who completely take for granted in part because these things inherently are intended to be invisible. They do so many happen under the cover of darkness or at 5:00 AM when the trash is being picked up and don’t have to think about it where it goes right after you put it in your bin. And I think it diminishes the sort of valor, the nobility of all of those jobs, which we’re so completely reliant on if a CEO loses a job, I don’t care. But if the sanitation workers go on strike, that would be profoundly felt by everyone in the city, right?
JENNIFER:
Yes, it they essential workers during COVID, they were the essential workers. They were the ones who were keeping a society together. And Rehan, when he first started, he felt a real sense of pride in being able to keep his community clean. He felt a deep sense of purpose, but he was, as you mentioned, he was met with such disdain by people. He tells the story of he was refurbishing dumpsters and he overheard a mother and her son walking and the woman said, don’t wind up like him. And he said those words, they stick with you. I mean, he’s now, that was 10 years ago, and those words stuck with him.
ELISE:
Yeah. Well, and the irony, right? Because I’m sure she would love for her son to end up just like him. No, you have this great quote from social psychologist, Heidi Grant, which is human beings are basically wired to want to give help. It’s one of the richest sources of self-esteem. And I think we all feel that nothing feels better than doing for others, particularly when you kind of need it or want it to be acknowledged. That’s the unfortunate conundrum. Not that that’s a driving force, but that that’s the impact.
JENNIFER:
Well, and to go back to the quote that you just read by the sociologist Heidi, that I firmly believe that we humans are wired. I mean, and the research backs me up, that we are wired to want to do good, that we are wired to want to contribute. That’s how we’ve been able to survive. And so through mattering, what I’ve started to do is that if someone isn’t behaving well, if a colleague is being rude or a friend is being unkind or whatever it is, instead of feeling that slight personally mattering has enabled me to have a bit of context. And I get curious now instead of furious. So if there are people around me who are not behaving in positive ways, I wonder what part of their mattering has taken a hit. Because really if you start to look at it this way, the world becomes so simple that people just want to know they are valued and that they add value. And when they don’t feel that way, that’s when they hurt. And so if we can assume that people have positive intentions, a positive intent, and I know we can’t assume that of everyone, but I don’t know, to me that has just been a way of making my connections and repairing even casual relationships so much stronger to get curious and not furious when people are not being their best selves.
JENNIFER:
To look at it through this mattering lens because it really tells you a lot.
ELISE:
Yeah. I want to read to you from your book, if you don’t mind, but this is the part in the middle that’s about transitions, which is often the upheaval planned or not, where the game board changes, your kids grow up and move out of the house and you’re no longer primarily a parent, right? Or you retire or change jobs or someone dies, God forbid. But I thought these are really powerful questions. So you write, this is where the mattering lens becomes so powerful beyond just the ache of feeling left out or unimportant. The mattering lens invites us to get specific and ask, what aspect of my mattering has taken a hit? Am I feeling unseen, a loss of recognition? Am I missing the feeling that others depend on me? A loss of reliance? Do I sense that I am not a priority to my boss, my friends or my family, a loss of importance?
Has my sense of being understood and deeply connected to another being, been shaken, a loss of attunement? Do I feel like no one is invested in me or that I’m not deeply invested in anyone else? A loss of ego, extension, the such good questions, because I think so often when we’re in the middle of life, it’s hard to understand. I don’t know why I feel like this, right? But that research is so helpful in terms of being like, there’s a very good reason why you feel like this. And then that offers solutions for how you can start to matter more.
JENNIFER:
I mean, I wish I had known about mattering through so many of my painful life transitions. I remember moving to London, newly married with my husband at 32 or 31, however old I was, and leaving my decades worth friendships, my family, my full-time job that enabled me to add so much value. We picked up, we moved to London. I didn’t know anyone. I felt completely invisible. I didn’t feel like I was adding value to anybody because my work wasn’t steady as a journalist. If I had known about the mattering lens, I could have set myself on such a stronger pathway and not personalized and instead giving myself more context. So instead of using mattering, I personalized it. And I felt ashamed. I felt ashamed that at 32, I couldn’t figure why am I so lonely? At 32, I had all these friends, why am I so lonely?
Of course, I was lonely. No one knew me. I was invisible. I wasn’t adding value. So luckily with the mattering lens, I’m able to use it in life transitions. I recently lost my dad. I’m facing an empty nest coming up, and those are still painful. But mattering gives me grounding. It gives me a path forward. So for example, the empty nest, I’m not the only one that has gone through it. And so are there role models in my life? And blessedly, I have lots of wonderful role models who have gone through this before and I’ve been taking notes and asking them how they’ve gone through it. I also know from the research to harness the power of invitation. What I mean by that is when we are going through a painful transition, when we are feeling lonely or fired and so shameful or whatever it is, this transition, we often retreat inward and feel like we have to get our lives in order before we can invite people back into our lives.
But I’m here to tell you that that is not the way that we can get through hard things, that our resilience rests on our relationships. We cannot self-help our way out of these really painful transitions. And so accept invitations from others. And I interviewed a woman who was going through a divorce and she felt like a fifth wheel going out with her couple friends. And so she stopped going, and then she was complaining to her therapist that she felt so lonely. And so the therapist said, well, why don’t you start issuing invitations, invite people into your house. You have agency. So what I am realizing, what I didn’t know when I was so lonely in London was that I have the agency to build back my sense of mattering again, to look for role models, to harness the power of invitation, to invite people into my lives.
There’s something I think you would like this research, the Beautiful Mess Effect, which is the idea, right? The idea that we often feel like we have to get our lives in order and to present as put together in order to invite people into our lives. But researchers find actually it’s in the messiness of our lives that inviting people, and I’m not saying reveal everything to everyone, but when we show up and we reveal a bit of our authentic selves, our who we are, what we are struggling with at our core right now, it brings people closer to us. It makes us appear more authentic and warmer. So the very thing that we think will push people away our messy lives actually brings them closer. And not only does it make the relationships closer, it enables us to get the help we need to move on to move through.
I mean, one of the real things I learned in researching this book, and I’ve been researching this book for seven years. When I first wrote my first book, I was already starting on this book. I realized the first book was about young people and mattering, and that we cannot let our young people know they matter if we don’t feel like we matter. So this is the book I frankly should have written first. What I have learned, one of the biggest lessons is that when I don’t ask for help, when I am going through something hard, not only do I deny myself the support I need and deserve, I also deny my friend the chance of being a helper, of letting her or him know how much they matter to me. And so in this way, asking for help inviting people in is not a sign of weakness or selfishness. It can be an act of generosity. It is how we can show the people in our lives that they matter, that we value their wisdom and support and help.
ELISE:
Yeah. No, that’s beautiful. And I think it’s great advice and still hard to take, right?
JENNIFER:
Practice. It’s a practice it
ELISE:
It’s a practice. Yeah. And I think, I don’t know why we’re conditioned to feel like that’s an imposition when I think most of us know being asked for advice is so fun mostly. I mean, there’s a point with all people where you’re like, you’re not actually intending to take this advice. I mean, we all hit that limit. But in general, it’s a lovely request that most of us are honored to fulfill.
JENNIFER:
It’s the most generous way of extending a sense of mattering. I think the reason we find it so hard to do is twofold. I think one, we have always been self-reliant as a culture, but we have become excessively self-reliant over the last several decades where we have pulled away from community life, we’ve pulled away from religion, we’ve pulled away from joining four H clubs, from bowling leagues, these ecosystems that used to provide a sense of mattering for us. Those have now disintegrated, and we are tasked with being one family villages within our homes. And so we just believe that people don’t have the bandwidth to help us, that everyone is just struggling to get through life. So I think that’s why we feel like it’s selfish. And then as you write so beautifully in your book that as female caregivers, we are socialized to not have needs.
And if we do have needs, they have got to be the last on the list. After we’ve come through all the to-do list met everybody else’s needs, then maybe we can meet our own needs. That is also, other than asking for help, it is mattering to myself. That has become a profound practice in my life. And bizarrely, countercultural and bizarrely was a hard lesson to learn how to matter to myself. I remember I was giving a talk at a national conference of very successful women in finance, and I got off the stage, we were talking about mattering, and there was a line of women, and each one asked a version of this question, but how do I matter to myself, but how do I matter to myself? I know how to matter to my colleagues. I know how to matter to my family and my neighbors and my friends. How do I matter to myself?
So that is something that I have struggled with, and especially as a young mother, boy do. I wish I had known how important mattering to myself was for the wellbeing of my kids. That our children’s resilience rests fundamentally on our resilience and our resilience rests on our relationships. We are sold a bill of goods by the multi-billion dollar wellness industry, soak in a bubble bath light and expensive candle. You’ll be resilient and strong. Those are great stress reducers, but they do not give us the resilience that we need day in and day out to be the first responders to our kids’ struggles. The only thing that does that are our relationships. And it’s not that we women, we caregivers don’t have friends, we have friends, but so often we don’t have the time or the bandwidth to invest in those friendships so that they could be sources of support when we need them. And so that is a practice that I have instituted in my life looking at the research researchers find we only need, and I need more than this, but the researchers find we only need one hour a week with one or two or three people in our life outside of our home who know us intimately, who can see when we are struggling, and who will put the oxygen mask on for us.
So that is how we matter to ourselves, is by prioritizing the relationships that remind us we are worthy of care. The second way that we matter to ourselves, and I’ve just started doing this and it’s really, really been helpful, is every morning when I brush my teeth, I think about what is one need that I need to fulfill in my day to day? What is one need I have so that I can be my best self for the people who are depending on me, my colleagues, my neighbors, my family, my kids. So not when all the to-do list is done, not when everybody else’s needs, and I’m exhausted, but to radically prioritize my needs. And it’s just one need. And often for me it’s waking up early and having a cup of coffee and doing my writing for myself in peace. For a woman I interviewed, it was taking a one hour walk in the rain or in the snow or on a sunny day every day, a walking meditation. So I would ask you if you’re listening and wondering how to matter to yourself, find one need that you need to have met every day, and it could be a different need every day, and it could be a small need or it could be a bigger need on some days and radically prioritize it and then find those relationships and invest in them that remind you of your mattering when your bandwidth is low.
ELISE:
Yeah, I mean the part about, I can’t remember the exact statistic, but thinking about the lack of investment in each other and friendships and socially, the research around social inertia. I mean, I’m definitely guilty of this, but that we don’t entertain and we don’t go out and we don’t go to parties. We don’t have parties that this is just dramatically declined. Yeah,
JENNIFER:
This statistic is crazy. I mean, I looked at this stat, this is from, my goodness, is it the bureau of, oh my God,
ELISE:
Labor statistics or something. It was something really random where I was like,
JENNIFER:
They do that. Yeah, it was the American time use survey.
ELISE:
Okay, yes.
JENNIFER:
And the stat was 2023, only 4.1% of US adults went to a party or hosted a party on an average weekend or holiday, 4.1% in 2024, it’s 4%. I could not believe this. I actually called and spoke to the economist and I was like, what are we even talking about? And she said, we’re talking about birthday parties, we’re talking about graduation parties, we’re talking about showers. We are talking about anniversary parties, housewarming parties, that people are no longer getting together socially. My fact checker, I had an outside fact checker for the book, and she was like, there is no way this fact is true. And I was like, I’m going to tell you, I talked to the economist who did it. It’s true. That’s crazy. So only 4% of us on any given weekend are engaging in going to a party. And so there was this great article in the Atlantic by a writer, Ellen Cushing, I think is her name, and she talked about how we all need to party more and that we all need to party and invite, I don’t remember what she said, but something like 10 or 12 people, and then they have to feel like they have to throw a party.
And so we will create more parties in our lives, but it’s because tech has made life so frictionless. I think about how technology has magnified and accelerated what researchers have been documenting over the last few decades. Tech has made life frictionless meaning, and that is sort of the purpose of tech, is to be able to press a button and get food delivered to you, press a button, get any of your toiletries delivered so you don’t have to go to a store, press a button and get this and do that relationship. We have lowered our threshold, our tolerance for friction, and I even noticed this in myself. We were doing a little renovation in our house and it was prolonged as all renovations do. It kept going and going, and I was so bothered by it and I was like, oh my God, this is because I have no friction in my life right now. Tech has made my life so frictionless, and I feel the same way with our relationships, that we have a very low tolerance for human behavior. Humans are friction makers, relationships are messy. They are not frictionless, and it’s where the meaning and the mattering lies. And so we have to build up our tolerance and frankly, our kids’ tolerance for friction in their lives because if we don’t, we will be siloed, sitting on our couches, responding to people on texts and never getting together.
ELISE:
No. And then receiving deliveries via drone. We won’t even be engaging with delivery people.
JENNIFER:
I’m wondering why we’re so lonely and disengaged and disconnected and anxious and depressed because we are social beings and we’re pretending not to be.
ELISE:
It is interesting as the Instagram algorithm continues to change and it becomes ever harder to see actual friends content on the feed. I don’t know what happened a month or two ago, but I was like, this is nobody I even follow. I guess it’s like TikTok now, which is kind of good because I find myself deeply uninterested and barely on there anyway. But now I’m like, I guess I can’t rely on this as a way of being in touch with people in my life and I need to more proactively plan and get over my own inertia. I’m lazy and introverted, and those two things in combination are not always good for my social life.
JENNIFER:
I am very introverted as well, and I will tell you, my husband is the biggest extrovert. So on the weekends he will make four plans and I will commit to one. He will double book me. We will have dinner with a couple friends, and then he and the husband will go to a movie. He needs a lot of interaction. It’s crazy. But what I have said to myself is, I will commit to an hour and a half of any social plans, and if it goes later, great, but that’s how I get my introverted self out into the social world is that I just say it’s a finite time, hour and a half meal. And the people who know me know I like an early meal. I am well known in my friend group for being the geriatric five o’clock, six o’clock dinner
ELISE:
And
JENNIFER:
Then back into my bed by seven 30 or eight.
ELISE:
Best time. Yes, no, I have an extremely introverted husband to the point where people are like, are you married? Does he exist? And he trusts me that I have good barometer of what he can tolerate, and we always have an agreement. We will leave by nine, or if you use our code word, I will extricate myself. And so I try not to be sort of punishing towards him even when I might want to stay. And this is the beauty of Uber too. He is getting a little panicked because as our kids get older and can stay home by themselves, he no longer has that as an excuse. That was his thrill. I’ll stay home with the kids. You go out, but that’s no longer working.
JENNIFER:
No, he needs another. Maybe he needs to do what I do, which is true. I get up at 4:00 AM to work every day so my people know I can’t be out late.
ELISE:
Yeah, that’s
JENNIFER:
Right. Really nine 30, I become incoherent. Nobody wants to hang with me around nine 30 or 10, so it’s got to be early and I’ve got to get to bed.
ELISE:
There were so many other great stories in the book about these small interventions. I guess it was in London where there’s pub therapy and there’s a minister behind the bar. I was like, we need that, but it’s the site for mommy and me classes and bingo and all day that there are these third place uses of this space. It does feel like maybe the various crises, it’s hard to know where to start with the different crises that we’re experiencing in this country at least, but that it’s lovely to think about the fact that there are, what did you write, 4,500 repair cafes where people go and tinker together. It warms my heart when I read books like yours and I’m like, oh, there are so many people doing fantastic and important things to try to solve these problems of disconnection, but we need more, right?
JENNIFER:
We need more. And it is going to be solved on the ground. It’s not enough to have policy. It really needs to be solved. And I saw this in my reporting. It needs to be solved on the ground by everyday people
Deciding that you are going to be the neighbor who puts together a block party so that everyone could get to know each other. Since researching this book, I have become one of the people who puts together or accepts invitations of regular socializing, which I have found to be key to keeping my mattering going. So I have one group of friends where once a month we meet and we talk about an article. So we’ll get an article out of the Atlantic or a really long article that we could dig into. We eat lunch in each other’s kitchens. Most of them cook for us. I just order in because I don’t cook. And we sit around the table and we talk about the article, and then it spills over into the messiness of midlife, what someone else is going through. But what I have found is that having these groups in my calendar and really prioritizing that time, those groups become mattering spaces for me.
And I have found that in the people that I interviewed, people who really enjoyed a high level of mattering, it was not by accident. They were intentional about it. They carved time into their calendars. They put together once a month, Sunday suppers for many, many months. Dear friends of ours, when my son was going through, my oldest was going through the college process. We put together a Sunday night dinner with people whose values reflect ours and whose kids were also going through the college process. And it was just, we didn’t talk about college, but our kids got to see that life is about so much more than college. And so just that weekly Sunday supper was a release valve from the pressure for them. And I will say as an adult, having those release valves carved into your calendar and not leaving it to chance is what allows us to create more mattering experiences in our lives.
ELISE:
Yeah, no, for sure. I find with friends who are very dear to me, but if we don’t plan it, oh my God, it’s been 14 months and I love the idea of an article club because obviously I would theoretically do a book club, but then most people don’t read the book or didn’t like the book, or it becomes an impossible hurdle for busy people. So an article is a great bite. I have friends, they’re in San Francisco, so I’m not part of it, and they have a cookbook club, and so it’s essentially a potluck from one cookbook, and that’s a great idea I think. But anything that’s a forcing function regularly scheduled, and I think about the people, it’s like I go to Montana every summer and now the people who happen to be there that week have become great friends and we have this built in time every single year, and I end up seeing them more than I do other people. But it’s true. If you don’t architect it in, then it’s never going to materialize.
JENNIFER:
And we used to as a culture, architect it in. I mean, that’s what religion gave us. That’s what Bowling leagues gave us. That’s what four H clubs. We used to architect it in welcome wagons, remember welcome wagons when people, we don’t do that anymore. And so we have to individually start bringing more of it into our lives to really be architects of mattering. There are so many examples in the book of people who have done this designated their porch a third space, and they would sit every Saturday and Sunday morning sipping their coffee, and then all of a sudden neighbors would come and they’d bring their chairs. Other people went on Amazon and bought pink flamingos and in the neighborhood said, wherever the pink flamingos are, that’s what we will gather. Once a week, people meet for an hour wherever the flamingos are at a barbecue or maybe on the driveway.
And so what I will say is what has been helpful in carving out these times for really relationship building and community building is scaffolding. So it’s not just let’s get together, it’s let’s get together and talk over an article. Let’s have the scaffolding of food like your friends in San Francisco. Food is a great scaffolding. There was a men’s group in Boise, Idaho who live in a cul-de-sac and once a week when a lot of their wives go to a book club, they bring their lawn chairs around a little fire pit, and they sit and they come and go. It’s very casual, but really it’s creating the intention. That’s what I love about mattering really, is that we have so much input and so much output is demanded of us. I mean, it’s exhausting. Bandwidth is low. What mattering does is it forces us in a really wonderful way to look up and to notice the world around us. So it stops us from going through the world on autopilot and making us notice that people have mattering needs and that you have a mattering need and that the loneliness you’re feeling is not necessarily unique to you, it’s that you are reacting to this world that we have created, which is just not sustainable for humans. We need to really recreate the world, and that’s what mattering can allow us to do. It provides a pathway for doing that for individual to rebuild their own sense of feeling valued, but also for our communities.
ELISE:
Beautiful.
JENNIFER:
I will say that a challenge that I am trying to institute in my own life is imagining everyone I meet strangers or family or friends, wearing an invisible sign that says, tell me do I matter. And we can answer that with warmth, with eye contact, with a word of kindness, with compassion. Instead of judging people or our own children for acting out, we can instead meet it with compassion. Again, all of this takes bandwidth, all of this to meet the world with mattering takes bandwidth. So you really do need to prioritize your own sense of mattering and to surrender yourself with people who remind you of your mattering.
ELISE:
I want to leave you with two things. One, if you’re looking for a simple way to create mattering, this is a really beautiful idea that’s not mine. I did not come up with this. I was taking my youngest to a play date and outside of my friend’s house, they had these transparent plastic bins full of chips and treats and drinks and candy, and it said essentially like, oh, take whatever you need and please keep the lid down because squirrels like snacks too. And I was like, what is this? She was like, we get so many deliveries, and we started doing it during COVID for UPS and Amazon and FedEx and the mailman, and my kids loved doing it, and they really appreciated, and I was like, people take stuff. And she was like, oh, yeah, a hundred percent. I think they sort of look forward to it on their daily route.
I was like, that’s such a lovely, nice gesture. That’s an idea for you. Practically speaking. Then I realized after I let Jennifer go that I said that we would come back to this organization that she writes about and we didn’t, and I like to close all the loops, but she writes about this nonprofit called Welcome Home, that this woman Julie started, and I think hopefully I’m getting this right, but that the seed, the germination for this was when Julie’s mother passed and she had all of these beautiful things and that were full of memories for Julie, but she was in a bit of a crisis. She couldn’t take everything into her own home, and yet she felt, I think we all feel this urge, right, to rehome these really beautiful things with care. And so she started this organization called Welcome Home, and they have tons of homewares that are typically donated by people whose maybe whose parents have passed, and they create these home warming bundles for people who had previously been unhoused or just otherwise, maybe refugees, et cetera, people who really have nothing and are looking to furnish a home.
And yes, obviously there’s Salvation Army and Goodwill, but this is, I think it’s no charge and it’s delivered into the care of these families with a tremendous amount of love and story about who these items belong to, and I think that’s so touching. So I loved that. If anyone wants to recreate that, I think that’s a beautiful idea. Alright, friends, you all matter to me and thanks for listening. That matters too. I’ll see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.