Someone should write a book: “Everything I Need To Know About Life I Learned Twenty Thousand Years Ago.”
Everything that makes us tick was hardwired countless millennia ago, when we were still evolving into hyper-social, hunter-gatherer primates on the African plains.
Life was brutal back then. Not fitting in was basically a death sentence.
Naturally, this made us very sensitive to whether we “belonged” or not, and made us very good at giving out and picking up the signals. As we still are.
Author, Dan Coyle, calls them “belonging cues” – the verbal and nonverbal signals we send to others that say “you’re part of the team, you’re valued.”
This is related to what people mean when they talk about “inclusivity.” It just means doing things that make the group better at sending out these signals, especially to subgroups outside the majority.
But, as this 2025 HBR article, “The Power Of Mattering At Work” points out, there’s a big difference between “belonging” and “mattering”.
Belonging just means you fit in culturally. Mattering means you’re essential to the team’s success.
According to this article, 30% of all employees feel invisible at work, 65% feel underappreciated, and 82% feel lonely.
Karl Marx wrote about this in 1844. He called it “Alienation”
What causes it? In our opinion, it’s not for a lack of belonging cues. You can be liked, be good at your job, and still feel removed.
Where Marx gets it right is that alienation is caused not necessarily because you don’t feel like you fit in, but by your lack of agency. In other words, you feel completely replaceable. A cog. Like the organization would hum along just fine without you.
In other words, you feel alienated because you feel you’re not mission critical.
You feel like you don’t matter.
This explains why engagement drops as companies scale. More people, fewer mission-critical roles, more bureaucracy. What the late anthropologist, David Graeber, famously called “Bullshit Jobs” a decade ago.
We’ve built systems that give us all the social cues of belonging while stripping away everything that makes us essential.
In the tribe, mattering was simple. If you didn’t make it back from the hunt, everyone knew exactly what they’d lost.
