On the weekend, I went to the movies with my wife and son to watch the new Deadpool and Wolverine movie. I’m a big fan of both Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman, so I was fairly sure I would enjoy the film, but I didn’t expect it to be as sensational as it was. I can appreciate it won’t be everyone’s idea of the best way to spend a couple of hours, but I thought it was a blast.
There were many, many highlights. The one that struck me the most came right at the end of the movie. Wade Wilson (Deadpool) was sitting around a table with his friends, and, in his closing narration, he said, “Everyone wants to matter.”
Everyone wants to matter.
Just four words but I rolled them over and over in my mind. For some reason, I didn’t want to let them drift away.
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Everyone wants to matter. Do they? Do all of us, everyone on the planet, want to matter? Are we born wanting to matter, or do we learn as we’re growing up that mattering is an important thing? Who teaches us that?
If we want to matter, that must mean that we have something like a goal or an ambition to matter. It’s funny that, in all the discussions I’ve had with people about their hopes and needs and dreams, as well as the things that might be getting in the way, mattering has never come up in our conversations. Is mattering something we don’t talk about? Maybe it’s there, in the shadows of people’s minds, as a subtle but enduring force.
Could there be reasons why we don’t talk about the importance of mattering? Perhaps mattering isn’t equally important to everyone. And no doubt people differ in what they want to matter about. For some, mattering to their family might be of fundamental importance. For others, mattering to the organization they work for or the charity to which they volunteer their time might be a priority.
What if you found out one day that you didn’t matter? Suppose it occurred to you that you’re just a speck on this big rock hanging about in the universe. And then you realized, we all are. We live and then we don’t. Life, in general, goes on even though individual living stops. How do these ideas sit with you?
There’s something paradoxical about mattering that is like the paradox my good friend, Rick Marken, and I wrote about in our book Controlling People: The paradoxical nature of being human (Marken & Carey, 2015). The paradox in this case is that, even though it’s me who wants to matter, the mattering is determined by other people. I want to matter to them. That means it’s those other people who get to decide how much mattering they serve up.
The paradox means that, for as long as mattering to other people remains important to me, I give them permission to determine how I should behave. If there are certain people to whom I want to matter, I have to do the things that they think matter. Let’s say I win an “Employee of the Month” award. That might not register on my matterer’s mattering radar if they think I’m in a dead-end, pointless job. On the other hand, they might highly value education, so perhaps I have to get accepted into university and pass my subjects in order to matter to them. Or maybe my matterers admire people who have thousands of followers on TikTok. So, if I want to shift their mattering needle, I’ll need to go about the process of building a TikTok following regardless of my own attitude about the value of such a crowd.
Is it possible to want to matter only to yourself?
Could it be enough to matter to myself on my terms? Does it matter if I’m content with what I see when I eyeball myself in the mirror? Is sleeping soundly at night a sign that, to myself, I matter? Perhaps mattering to yourself can be just as satisfying as mattering to others. Maybe some people never even think about whether or not they matter but are able to live the life they want anyway.
As I’m crafting this short story, ideas in the form of questions are forming and then wafting around in my mind. I want to learn more about this mattering business. Here are some of the current wafters:
Do you matter?
More importantly, do you want to matter?
That is, does it matter if you matter?
What is it that matters about mattering?
And what matters about that?
To whom or what do you most want to matter?
How do you know if you matter?
Does it bother you that you might not matter?
What is it about not mattering that bothers you?
I wonder if it would be helpful to start mattering conversations. We could call these discussions “matter chatters.” Perhaps diving inside and exploring what mattering means and even talking about it with others could be enlightening and even liberating. Is mattering at all, in some way to somebody, part of your recipe for cooking up the life you wish?
Source link : https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/in-control/202409/does-it-matter-if-you-matter
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Publish date : 2024-10-09 09:44:06
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