487. “Start Choosing the Life You Want Today” | The Power of Mattering with John R. Miles

It's interesting because the data's very clear.

Overwhelmingly, people are not satisfied with their work.

It's punching a clock and coming home, but they, they don't get any feelings of passion or sense of purpose from what they're doing.

And then you compound that with what we know about social media, and that social media by design is made to...

It hooks us, right? I mean, it's the same chemicals are released when we like a post as when we take a hit off of a cigarette.

It's biologically addictive.

And yet the things that we're feeding ourselves is, "Oh, my neighbor has...

Look at my neighbor's amazing vacation.

They're more successful than me.

Their family's better than my family," right? We're, we're constantly being bombarded with signals that tell us we're not good enough.

We don't matter.

So when this revelation hits you that why is it that billions of people don't matter, what was the antidote that, that, that, that you discovered?

The first thing as I was trying to figure out what this was, was, um, uh, through the work of John Morgan, I discovered this exercise that really has gon- been such a grounding exercise for me because it helped lead directly to my mission.

A- and I was trying to come up with, you know, what are people experiencing? Because to me, the word not mattering is one thing, but it, what I felt was invisible.

So I think what so many people are feeling today is invisibility, and what I learned from this is it's not just what's happening inside us.

You know, feeling that we matter starts and ends inside of us, but what influences that is what I refer to as systemic unmattering.

It's what's happening around us in our workplaces, institutions, algorithms, in social media like you just described, our schools, consumer culture, even in our families.

And what I learned the more I got into this is that we're building systems and environments that are extraordinarily good at measuring what we produce, perform, and deliver, but are far less capable of reflecting who we are, and that ex- is exactly what systemic unmattering is.

So that is, uh, the problem that it led me to, and the repercussions of this are devastating.

As you were preparing to create this book, John, and was there anything you discovered in terms of research or as you were delving into this topic that, that surprised you?

I'll say one thing to be very vulnerable here to your audience.

When I was given those people to help, part of my issue in understanding it was that at the time, I didn't see myself in any of those groups.

And so the first thing I had to admit is that I was one of the very people that God had called me to serve.

I was burnt out.

I was disengaged.