I've been thinking and writing a lot about human connection lately, and I keep running into words that sound similar but aren't quite interchangeable.
Connection.
Belonging.
Community.
Purpose.
And then there's one I hadn't thought nearly as much about until recently: mattering.
At first glance, mattering might sound like another way of describing belonging. But I think there's an important distinction. Belonging tells us, I have a place here. Mattering goes a little further. It tells us, it makes a difference that I'm here.
That difference is something psychologists have actually been studying for decades.
Feeling Valued and Adding Value
Psychologist Isaac Prilleltensky describes mattering as having two complementary parts: feeling valued and adding value. He argues that people can experience these things in relation to themselves, other people, their work, and their communities, and that healthy mattering requires some balance between them.
I love this framework because it explains something about human connection that the word belonging doesn't completely capture.
Feeling valued means knowing that someone sees us, cares about us, notices our presence, considers our needs, and appreciates who we are. It's knowing that someone would notice if we stopped showing up.
Adding value is the other direction. It's knowing that we have something worthwhile to contribute. Someone benefits from our knowledge, kindness, humor, work, creativity, experience, care, reliability, or simply our willingness to show up.
We don't only want a place at the table. We want to know that bringing us to the table makes some kind of difference.
Mattering Seems to Be Connected to Wellbeing
A 2024 meta-analysis brought together 30 studies examining mattering and wellbeing. Across 39 samples and more than 18,000 participants, researchers found a moderate positive association between mattering and overall wellbeing. The relationship was even stronger for eudaimonic wellbeing, which deals with things like meaning, purpose, positive relationships, personal growth, and realizing one's potential.
There are important limitations here. Most of the studies were cross-sectional, meaning researchers measured people at one point in time. That makes it difficult to say whether mattering improves wellbeing, whether people with greater wellbeing are more likely to feel that they matter, or whether other factors contribute to both. The researchers themselves point out that longitudinal research is still limited.
Still, I find the association compelling, particularly because mattering isn't an especially complicated idea. We want to know that we're important to someone and that what we do has some significance beyond ourselves.
Mattering Isn't the Same as Being Needed
This is where I think the idea becomes especially important.
Being needed can certainly make us feel that we matter, but being needed isn't automatically the same thing as mattering.
Someone can be indispensable and miserable.
A caregiver may have several people relying on them while feeling completely unseen themselves. An employee can become the person who fixes every problem at work while receiving little appreciation, support, or recognition. A parent can spend years meeting everyone else's needs and gradually realize that nobody seems to ask how they're doing.
That person is clearly adding value.
But are they feeling valued?
This is why I keep coming back to the two sides of Prilleltensky's framework. Adding value without feeling valued can start looking a lot like depletion. Feeling valued without ever having opportunities to contribute may leave another human need unmet.
Perhaps what we're looking for isn't simply to be needed. We want to be known, appreciated, and useful without our usefulness becoming the price of admission.
We Don't Have to Do Something Extraordinary
Journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace explores this idea in her 2026 book, Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. Her work brings the research on mattering into everyday questions about relationships, purpose, loneliness, burnout, work, family, and how we build lives in which people feel significant.
One thing I appreciate about the concept of mattering is that it offers a gentler way to think about purpose.
Purpose has become such an enormous word.
We're supposed to find our purpose, which makes it sound like somewhere out there is one magnificent calling we're meant to discover. Perhaps we'll start a nonprofit, write an important book, build a successful company, change an industry, save a species, or otherwise leave an impressive mark on the world.
Maybe.
But mattering doesn't require an audience.
Adding value can be remarkably ordinary. It can mean teaching someone something you know, making dinner, helping a neighbor repair something, volunteering for an afternoon, caring for a garden, checking on someone who has been quiet lately, making people laugh, creating something beautiful, or being the person who remembers to bring the thing everyone else forgot.
None of that is particularly glamorous.
But I suspect most communities aren't actually held together by glamorous acts.
They're held together by people doing thousands of small things that make life a little easier, kinder, safer, more interesting, or more beautiful for someone else.
Who Would Notice If You Weren't There?
There is an older way researchers have described interpersonal mattering that I find particularly poignant. It includes not only being noticed and considered important, but the idea of noted absence—the sense that our absence would actually be noticed by other people.
That's a very different question from asking how many people we know.
Who notices when you aren't there?
Who wonders where you are?
Who knows when you're unusually quiet?
Who would miss your particular sense of humor, your cooking, your advice, your stories, your weird collection of knowledge, your ability to fix things, or simply the way you make a room feel?
And then there's the other direction.
Whose absence would you notice?
Perhaps part of helping other people experience mattering is making sure they don't have to guess.
Maybe We Can Get Better at Showing People They Matter
We probably can't manufacture a sense of mattering for another person, but we can certainly create more evidence of it.
We can tell someone we appreciate what they did instead of assuming they know. We can ask for someone's opinion because we genuinely value it. We can notice when someone hasn't shown up. We can invite people to contribute instead of only doing things for them. We can thank people specifically rather than generically. We can allow someone to help us when they have something useful to offer.
Maybe we can also get better at recognizing our own contributions without requiring them to be enormous before we count them.
The science of mattering is still developing, but I think the basic human experience is recognizable long before we get to the research.
Most of us want to know that we're loved.
We want to know that we're welcome.
But perhaps we also want something just slightly different.
We want to know that our presence has weight.
That somebody notices.
That we have something worth contributing.
That something, somewhere, is a little different because we're here.
Maybe a meaningful life doesn't require doing something extraordinary enough for the whole world to notice us. Perhaps it begins much closer to home: having people who would notice if we weren't there, and knowing that because we arethere, something is a little better.
Sources & Further Reading
Prilleltensky, I. (2020). “Mattering at the Intersection of Psychology, Philosophy, and Politics.” American Journal of Community Psychology, 65, 16–34.
Prilleltensky develops the framework of mattering as the complementary experiences of feeling valued and adding value.
Read the journal article
Paradisi, M., Matera, C., & Nerini, A. (2024). “Feeling Important, Feeling Well: The Association Between Mattering and Well-being: A Meta-analysis Study.” Journal of Happiness Studies, 25, 4.
The meta-analysis synthesized 30 studies and found a positive association between mattering and wellbeing, with the strongest association involving eudaimonic wellbeing.
Read the open-access study
Wallace, Jennifer Breheny. Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose. (2026).
Wallace brings research on mattering into an accessible exploration of connection, purpose, relationships, loneliness, and burnout.
Jennifer Breheny Wallace — Mattering