Mattering is key to fulfillment. Gen Z isn’t feeling it.

A Q&A with Jennifer Breheny Wallace about her new book 'Mattering,' and how to foster it in young adults

In 2016, American politics became inescapable. It wasn’t just something you followed, it spilled into campus culture, workplaces and boardrooms, brand statements and all-hands meetings, Twitter and group chats, friend groups and dinner parties.

Resistance and opposition became culture, while devotion became counterculture. Pro and anti-Trump identity seeped into everything — and set the tone for how Gen Z grew up.

That’s part of what made the first year of Trump’s second term feel different, especially online. The opposition may be just as deep, but it has been less mainstream and less unavoidable. Not because people suddenly care less or are numb, but because people started to compartmentalize. They mute and scroll past, avoid conflict to protect their peace, and treat politics as an exhausting and endless drain rather than a call to action.

Institutions that once performed politics as identity and values now treat it as a risk. And the internet, which was once the town square for outrage, now often pushes people into quieter, more insulated echo chambers.

That changed this month, after federal immigration enforcement agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs Medical Center, during a confrontation amid community unrest over ICE activity in Minnesota. It was the second fatal killing of a U.S. citizen by federal immigration agents in the Twin Cities in just weeks. Renee Good, also 37, was killed by an ICE agent shortly before. Both shootings were filmed and have been plastered across social media for all to see, and watch, on repeat.

For weeks, students have been walking out of school to protest the Trump administration’s ICE policies, and after this weekend, it seems like everyone, from everyday Americans, to celebrities, athletes, and influencers are weighing in.

I wrote at the end of last year about Gen Z’s compassion recession and the impact that growing up amid live-streamed conflict has had on young Americans. Watching violence on loop has become the norm. It’s how Gen Z, and now Gen Alpha, are being raised. And I don’t think we’ve reckoned with that at all.

Later this week, I’ll break down how our Gen Z community is feeling as the country continues to debate federal immigration enforcement amid community unrest. If you or someone you know is under 30 and wants to share your pov, you can do so here.

Mattering, a key ingredient to a happy life — and one that Gen Z is missing

Photo by Tiitus Saaristo on Unsplash

In an era marked by political division, a loneliness crisis, gender war, the rapid rise of AI, and what I call the ‘compassion recession,’ the unraveling of our social fabric is shaping young adults’ relationships, and their sense of self. But amid daily headlines and finger wagging about Gen Z’s social, academic, and career struggles, few leaders have offered tangible solutions for how to help young adults thrive.

In a moment that is often defined by cynicism, Jennifer Breheny Wallace offers a hopeful, and practical, framework with her new book, “Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose,” which came out today.

Through deep research, Wallace reimagines belonging and purpose in a tech-driven world, not just for young people, but their parents and grandparents, teachers and educators, bosses and mentors, too. I spoke with her to learn more about ‘Mattering’ and how it applies to the lives of young people.

Our conversation has been edited lightly for clarity and brevity.

What is ‘mattering,’ and how were you introduced to this school of thought?

Jennifer Breheny Wallace: Mattering is defined by researchers as feeling valued by our family, our friends, our colleagues, our community, and having an opportunity to add value back to the world around us.

To go even further, mattering is a meta-need, which means it’s a need that sits above other core needs, like belonging, connection, purpose, meaning, agency, self determination. Mattering goes deeper than these. So for example, you could belong to a workplace, or a class, or even a family and not feel like you matter to the people there. You can have a deep sense of purpose, but if no one is connecting you to your impact, if you don’t hear how your work is making a difference, you can burn out.

I came across the concept of mattering when I was researching my first book, Never Enough, which was about achievement pressure and young people and mental health struggles. And I looked at the young people who were doing well despite the pressure, and what they had in common. And it boiled down to this idea of mattering. They felt valued for who they were, deep at their core, away from their achievements and successes, and they had an opportunity to add value back. This need in young people is going unmet. I heard over and over again in my hundreds of interviews how young people feel like they only matter when their GPA is high, when the weight on the scale is low, when they have a certain number of likes, etc. So this sense of mattering being felt by them is very contingent on something outside of themselves. I heard over and over again in the adults, in these young people’s lives, how much they felt like they didn’t matter, whether they were doctors at major hospitals or educators, feeling like they weren’t being appreciated for the work they were doing.

To put it simply, back when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, mattering signals were built into everyday life. We knew our neighbors. We knew they relied on us, and we relied on them. My father worked at a workplace. He worked at Exxon for something like 50 years, where, if he was loyal, they would be loyal back to him with a pension. There was a social contract in place. We, as a society, were more religious. So on the weekends, we would be going to services where we would hear about our inherent worth as a child of God.

Those everyday signals have eroded, and what has replaced it is tech. So instead of going out and getting these everyday signals, we are sitting so often on our phones, scrolling. And I think what tech has also done, other than just kind of keep us away from each other in a meaningful way, is it has lowered our tolerance for friction. Tech’s whole purpose is to give us, the user, a friction free experience. But a meaningful life is built through friction, through getting off of our couch, braving the cold or a rainy night to go sit with a friend who’s going through a hard time, or to show up for a neighbor who is struggling. These are what make life meaningful, what give us a sense of purpose in our lives.

You mention the need for friction. I’ve written about the fact that Gen Z is the most rejected generation, but also the most afraid of rejection — a lot of which stems from a lack of resiliency that comes from technology. Thinking about Gen Z, what patterns did you notice about their sense of mattering, both what they feel and what they lack?

JBW: Gen Z is the first generation that grew up with parents who were not religious. And I am not saying that religion is a panacea. I am simply saying that as a society, we have replaced religion with capitalism. And who matters in a capitalistic system? The people who matter are the people who are contributing to the capitalistic system.

When it comes to mattering in our current society, that sense of mattering for Gen Z people feels very contingent on their grades, where they go to college, the job they get, the house. What religious values used to offer was an emphasis on intrinsic values, wanting to be social, good to our neighbors, good to the environment. All major religions talk about this unconditional inherent worth that we humans have.

When you are raised in a family where that sense of inherent worth is not a part of your conversations, you believe your worth just because of the signals that society is sending you. And I am not blaming parents, I am saying the wider culture is sending these signals that certain people matter more.

There’s great theologian Henri Nouwen who talks about the three great lies of our culture that I think Gen Z is hitting up against, and this is ‘we are what we do,’ ‘we are what we have,’ ‘we are what others say and think about us.’ So in the absence of some sort of spiritual tradition, we get sucked up into this vacuum, and I think Gen Z is right to be having an existential crisis. It’s developmentally appropriate in your late teens and early 20s to be contending with the big questions of life. ‘Why am I here?,’ ‘What is my purpose?,’ ‘What does this all mean?’ But we have not given them an environment to tackle these questions in a way that is healthy. Instead, they are internalizing it and feeling like something is wrong with them. They’re personalizing these big questions instead of having a venue, an environment, where they can tackle them and put them into greater context.

You’ve written extensively on achievement culture. And you talk about this shift in our society from intrinsic values to values that are contingent on something external. Specifically for Gen Z, whether it’s the college admissions process, an obsession with climbing rungs of ladder at work, or thinking about the future of work with AI, how does achievement culture play into mattering?

JBW: I’m not anti-achievement. I believe achievement energizes us. It is the focus of that achievement that can either be toxic or positive. There’s a great motto that I would offer you, which has been a guiding force in my life, which is the Jesuit motto, ‘Not better than others, but better for others.’ The healthiest strivers, achievers, were the people who could see that. Those that were the least healthy were those that felt like they were only valued when they achieved, and it created this kind of very fragile sense of self worth.

Thinking about how education is changing, if AI does more of the thinking or grading work that a teacher typically would do, what could schools and educators focus on to help students feel more valued, and needed, and like they matter?

JBW: It’s already taking place. There’s a movement towards the mastery model of education, where students are not graded, but rather they are evaluated. They are evaluated on their skills towards building mastery in certain domains. So schools figure out which domains they want the students to master, and they offer them real world projects. They have local community leaders coming in with something that they are struggling with.

I sat in the classroom of one school in Ohio, ‘The Mastery School,’ when a local politician came in to ask [students] for help to get voter turnout for the upcoming election, and worked in groups to create ideas and thought projects around how to encourage more people to vote.

There are so many real world problems that we are contending with today. Tasking students with them, helping them build skills that they will need in the real world not only feeds a sense of mattering, because you’re doing work that actually matters, but you’re making them feel valued, and you’re pointing out exactly how they are adding value. I do think that’s going to be the future of education. It’s working, it’s scalable. It just needs more schools adopting it.

Along those lines, what practical ways can schools, whether high schools, colleges, or universities, foster mattering and not just belonging among students?

JBW: One simple idea is to help create a mattering map around an individual student. So let’s say you’re in high school and you have freshmen in your advisory class, having each advisory student, mapping their relationships. So it’s them, and then it’s, ‘Is there an adult that makes them feel valued in their life?,’ ‘Are there one or two students that make them feel valued?,’ ‘And is there a clear way that this student is adding value, either to the classroom or to the wider school community or to the wider community?’ It’s a practical way of assessing student well-being.

Another way is to create what I call ‘mattering spaces,’ third spaces that foster a sense of mattering. I’m working on creating cultures of mattering at Harvard College, which is my alma mater, and I’m co creating it with students. And one of their ideas was something that I wrote about in the book called ‘chatty tables,’ which is a concept out of the UK, where there are tables that are designated places students or faculty want to go to chat. And so how to create in cafeterias, these chatty tables so that students feel comfortable sitting at them and meeting new students.

Shifting to work, one of the biggest concerns we hear in our research is young people worrying about their possible future roles and relevance in the workforce. As more roles become dependent on AI, how can a strong sense of mattering help Gen Z navigate this uncertainty?

JBW: Obviously we don’t know exactly what is going to come of AI. I am extremely hopeful that jobs won’t necessarily be replaced.

But Gen Z is going to have to get very good at pivoting and very good at re-skilling, and to look at those opportunities as opportunities of investment. The way companies frame it to employees, as ‘We believe in you. We are investing in you with these new skills,’ will go a long way in fostering a culture of mattering.

There is a framework that I’ve come up with that has the four main ingredients to mattering. I call it the ‘SAID’ framework: S.A.I.D. Significance. Appreciation. Invested in. And depended on. So we can foster those in ourselves. We can foster those in with our colleagues. And leaders can foster those and really must foster them in their employees. Even the least human-centered company is incentivized to lead with mattering, because it is mattering that drives engagement, and it is engagement that drives performance and profit.

So, what’s one of the things that an employee could do to foster their sense of mattering connect to their impact? Think about who are the colleagues, and how do you impact them on a daily basis. Think about how your role impacts the company’s bottom line. Think about how your department or your company impacts the wider society. So really getting clear about your personal impact. And you can create your own mattering map. I’ve visited lots of companies in researching this book who have made very specific shifts in where they put their attention so they can connect employees to their impact.

You write about how this is not something that affects just Gen Z. Mattering is multigenerational. What role can mentorship play in mattering?

JBW: Mentorship helps both the mentee and the mentor. So the mentee feels like they are being invested in, that someone else is invested in their goals, or there to support them through a setback. It’s this idea in their mind that they’re not going through this world alone. It offers a kind of psychological safety for the mentor. What we know through Erik Erikson and other psychologists, is that as an adult, we continue to develop throughout our life span and in midlife and beyond. One of the ways that we really develop is through an idea called generativity. Generativity is this idea that you are investing in the next generation. And so not only does investing in them make you feel like you’re adding value. It is solidifying this idea that you matter beyond yourself, that you are adding value in ways that will continue, even when you’re out of the workforce and off this planet.

I’ve recently been exploring what I call Gen Z’s ‘compassion recession,’ which was informed by recent data showing young adults’ acceptance of violence. In the book, you touch on the ramifications of what can happen when people don’t feel like they matter. How has that manifested in your research, and how can we resolve this crisis through your ideas of mattering?

JBW: When this need to matter goes unmet, and it is a fundamental human need, we can either turn against ourselves, become anxious, depressed, turn to substances to alleviate the pain.

When we feel like we don’t matter, we can lash out in anger. Political extremes, online attacks, road rage, violence in the workplace, incivility. These are desperate attempts to say, ‘I’ll show you I matter.’ And I will tell you I am seeing the rise in violence, in people acting out, in people desperate to prove that they matter.

What I would argue is that we need to go upstream, and we need to start creating cultures where people feel like they matter. And I think one of the most important levers we have for doing this is the workplace. If people belong to a workplace where they feel like they don’t have a voice, where they feel replaceable, where they are treated with incivility for 8,10, 12 hours a day, how can we expect them to show up in the world as full compassionate people?

The workplace plays a critical role in fostering a sense of mattering. Treat the people you work with as unique individuals, and connect them to their impact. Help them to be engaged in positive ways. Let them feel like they have a voice, let them feel indispensable, and if you have to, manage them because they’re not performing, speak to them in a way that really preserves their sense of mattering.

I focus a lot on Gen Z’s gender gap. Our research shows that young men and women don’t want to be at odds, but that they are often talking past each other. When I read ‘Mattering,’ it contextualized the gender gap. Did your research explore the current tension between young men and young women, or the fact that young men and young women feel like they’re on different tracks, and have different life goals? How did that show up? And what do you recommend?

JBW: Women are socialized to matter through their relationships, whereas men are socialized to seek their value through their paycheck and their work status. We do both genders a disservice by keeping them in those narrow lanes. Men need to matter across domains. Women need to matter across domains.

If we want to raise men who feel like they matter in their relationships, I argue in my work that we need to task the men in their lives with doing that, with showing them how to matter in relationships. It can’t just be women’s work to teach young men emotional resilience, emotional intelligence, how to matter in their relationships, how to repair relationships, all of these things that women are, on average, more socialized to be doing. In the same way, we need to be valuing women outside of the domains of caretaking. Eve Rodsky’s work on this is marvelous, ‘Fair Play.’ And it is, I would say, Fair Play for both genders.

Lastly, what is the biggest misconception about Gen Z and their relationship to mattering that maybe their parents, teachers, educators, employers don’t understand, but should?

JBW: I am a big Gen Z fan, and I think we Gen Xers and older have a lot to learn from them. They are mis-categorized as wanting to know what their grade is, and getting feedback, and all of these tropes we hear about their neediness in the workplace. What I am hearing from the Gen Z people that I’ve interviewed is that they want to be connected to their impact.

They want to know: Is what they’re doing making a difference? And all of us need to know that. They’re just the only ones willing to ask for it. So I would say we need to start listening.

Noteworthy reads

• Even MBAs From Top Business Schools Are Struggling To Get Hired, Lindsay Ellis for The Wall Street Journal

• What do young travelers want? Exclusive experiences., Christine Chung for The New York Times

• These Gen Z Trump Voters Don’t Want J.D. Vance in 2028, Samuel Benson for Politico

• Generational Breakdown: Gen Alpha, Lucy Maguire for Vogue