What does it mean to be important? What does it mean to matter?

An object is important to someone if it holds some function that serves a need. Food is important to human survival. Connection is important for optimal mental health. Completing work on time is important for the company's goals and survival. Importance lives only in relationship to a purpose. Importance cannot live in a vacuum.

In the cosmic soup of infinite space, nothing is important. Our sun can explode and consume all matter around it; there is no importance or unimportance of this event in relationship to the cosmos. The cosmos, as far as we know, does not have a sense of consciousness that would lead it to have needs and desires in the ways that we humans do. It is in a constant state of flux, a mixture of order and chaos. Nothing is important to the physical, unalive universe.

Importance is then a human construct. Other living beings may deem objects or events important; a significant traumatic event, for instance, may stay in an elephant's mind and nervous system for its whole life. Even if the animal does not make a conscious distinction or mental articulation of importance, its physiology and mental makeup have their own mechanisms for registering events that are important to physical and psychological survival. Importance is therefore not purely a conscious choice but innate in our physiological makeup. We do not always choose what is important to us.

Humans have notable faculties of intellect and spirit that can override default settings of importance. A monk may deem their cause more important than survival and override all physical instincts to set himself ablaze in an act of protest. Hunger strikes, acts of war, and other behaviors that may compromise one's own health and safety are in service to something more important than the individual. Perhaps this too is an innate feature, arguably not intellectual nor spiritual but social. Ants, bees, and other colonial insects will instinctively sacrifice themselves for their colony, hive, or collective structure. They are part of a larger whole and their importance is tied to the needs of the whole.

Perhaps importance outside of oneself and in service to others is what I'm after here. When people say they want to be important, they are expressing an ingrained need to matter to the larger collective of humans. At its most base state, this impulse is indeed a self-serving call for attention; we can all recall those who seek importance for their own psychological satisfaction. This lesser form of the need for importance is more often a result of a wound or an immature psychological state. When one does not need importance to satisfy the ego, there remains an impulse to matter. This may be why wealthy entrepreneurs find themselves empty and dissatisfied after an exit and some period of self-indulgence. While we can meet all our physical needs, and even all our social needs for connection, there is still a need for purpose that is best satisfied through service to others.

I recall Alice Miller's book Drama of the Gifted Child, where she aptly notes the fateful pattern of deeply sensitive individuals to mistake approbation and praise for love and consequently follow a socially upward spiral of accomplishment after accomplishment. The individual pursues this path relentlessly, seeking achievement after achievement, bump after bump, because society gives them cues that signal love and importance, filling that need for a sense of being larger than oneself. This filling, however, is temporary, and dissolves back into the emptiness that drives the cycle of accomplishment forward.

There is a difference between this psychological wounding that drives overachievement and the soul-driven need to serve a collective greater than ourselves. Service to others is the vehicle to being important, to mattering to our tribe and larger world. That service can be in a vocation -- doctor, dentist, lawyer, artist, social servant, you name it. That vocation, however, is not innately in service to mankind. It must be oriented by one's spirit to be in service. Art can be self-serving or it can be connective for human spirits.

Importance is a human need. The art lives in how we manifest our importance.