Being important is a fundamental need of humanity. This often manifests itself according to the needs and beliefs of the immediate society.

Today, our society has meshed commercial gains and importance as indistinguishable.

Being a manager at our job can help us feel important. Being a good investor can help. Being a good showman of it can make us feel important to many en mass. And our title rewards make this feel like an inescapable loop of self-reassurance. We can even gain more importance by showing what we have and being proud of what we lost to get it.

If we can buy something nice, or receive a word of validation, the cost to our being is worth it. And our grandiosity is feeding our success in the eyes of those watching.

Importance in the eyes of others in certain ways is a good thing. It means we have proven to be reliable. But what if we’re reliable at the cost of self-importance?

What if good sleep, deep human connection, and taking care of ourselves become a lesser focus in favour of looking important?

Any good thing taken too far becomes a potential for states of illness and disconnection.

Importance is also relative, therefore must be managed responsibly and balanced with our immediate biological, psychological and spiritual natures.

If we ignore optimizing and maintaining the Self, it inevitably leads to disaster.

The more important external imposed demands are, the less important we become to ourselves.

We skip meals to get to the next meeting. We skip a moment of needed leisure for another chance at looking good. We miss a life event that cannot be replaced by the promise of a shiny new means of demonstrating our ‘success’.

Importance matters, but what is important is much more difficult and complex to apply the same rules to everyone.

Being a good person, a good parent, a good friend, and a good partner are all things that make us important to everyone around us – not the status or the stuff we leave behind when we die.

Once we realize this, what we love becomes more important than what we want and what we want will be to be holistically important.