When psychologist Gordon Flett was hospitalized with liver failure, a nurse sat with him for hours in the dark. She didn't just check on him. She talked to him, like he was a person and not just a patient in a bed.
That experience shaped Flett's research for years afterward. Now a psychologist at York University, he's spent his career studying what he calls mattering: the felt sense that you're noticed and significant to the people around you.
When that feeling is missing, Flett's research links it to depression and loneliness, and in extreme cases, to violence. Some researchers who study school shooters have found loneliness and alienation running through many of their histories, along with a grim pattern: when every ordinary path to feeling significant seemed closed off, a few chose infamy instead.
But the need to matter is universal, and meeting it doesn't have to be complicated. Sometimes the simplest thing you can do for another person is let them know you see them.