Your need to feel important will run your life, and you’ll never feel satisfied

Yesterday’s team meeting at work provided one display after another of a person’s need to feel important. These eye-openers were the reason the scheduled 30-minute meeting lasted 45 minutes.

Although half of the forty or so attendees are under the age of 40, curiously, only two of them spoke during the meeting. I wasn’t among the older people who had something to say.

Not that I wasn’t tempted by the team-building exercise with its Skittles prompts:

Red – Tell us something you do well
Orange – Tell us something about your childhood
Purple – What could you live without?
Yellow – What couldn’t you live without?

Participation in the exercise was voluntary. Yes, I drew an orange Skittle.

Everyone knew there wasn’t enough time for each of us to speak and have the exercise become team-building, yet a dozen people piped up. Every one of the self-selected responses could have been prefaced with “I’m important because..”

There are many needs a person develops and tries to satisfy as substitutes for real needs that weren’t fulfilled. In this blog I’ve focused on the need to feel important.

I started with How do we assess “importance” in our lives? An example from scientists’ research choices and highlighted it on the Welcome page:

“Do you agree that an individual’s need to feel important is NOT a basic human need on the same level as nourishment, protection, and socialization? How does this need arise in our lives?”

I supported an explanation of the need to feel important with evidence and arguments on the Scientific evidence page and said:

“If the explanation is true yet someone rejected it, they at least wouldn’t have suffered from exposure to it. They’ll just remain in our world’s default mode of existence:

Unaware of their own unconscious act-outs to feel important;
Unaware of what’s driving such personal behavior; and
Uninformed of other people’s behavioral origins as a consequence of 1 and 2.”

Other examples of substitute needs include:

Do the impacts of early experiences of hunger affect our behavior, thoughts, and feelings today? “The painful impacts of our unfulfilled needs impel us to be constantly vigilant for some way to fulfill them.”
What’s a good substitute for feeling loved? “What I saw expressed in the TED talk was an exhausting pursuit of substitutes for feeling loved.”
Are 50 Shades of Grey behaviors learned in infancy? “Ever wonder how someone could become attached to their early childhood abuser?”
Beyond Belief: What we do instead of getting well “Why isn’t the internet flooded with 10+ million similar stories of people who have faced their realities, and effectively addressed the real causes of what’s wrong in their lives? Said another way: Why is the internet instead flooded with stories of 10+ million people
- NOT facing their realities,
- Doing things to prolong their conditions, and
- Avoiding getting well?“