There’s no getting around it: people like to feel important. This basic human need can play itself out in different ways.

If you happen to be a megalomanic dictator, you’ll probably order twelve-foot-tall pictures of your face to be plastered on walls and bill­boards everywhere. You’ll have armies regularly drilling in perfect formation for your pleasure and exotic delicacies flown to your table at your whim. Everyone who comes near must kowtow in obedience to your will. All of this to prove to the world, and to yourself, that you matter.

Not everyone, of course, has billions, or even mere millions, of people to order about. For the rest of us, feeling important comes about through less obvious methods. And we have recourse to those methods all the time, often unwittingly.

Some years back there was a major power outage in New York that caught the city by sur­prise. People found themselves wandering sud­denly down pitch-black streets, stuck in eleva­tors and marooned on subway trains. For a long time after power was restored, the question on everyone’s tongue was, “Where were you when the lights went out?”

The same phenomenon appeared after the 9/11 tragedy. Whether anyone was listening or not, people talked obsessively about where they were when they heard the news. In the larger scheme of things, a single individual’s precise location during a blackout or any other catastrophe is of little moment. What does it matter where you or I happened to be when an earthshaking event took place? The answer is: it doesn’t.

But to the individual in question, it looms large. Connecting himself to such a monumental event, however tangentially, lends him a sense of being in the thick of things. In the picture.

In a word: important.

In the Know

I’m sure you’ve come across people who fit neatly under the label, “know-it-alls.” Whatever topic is up for discussion, they deem themselves an expert or at least quite knowledgeable. It de­lights them to be in a position to state facts and opinions assertively. And to kindly educate those around them who are less savvy than they are.

Whenever such individuals find themselves in the fortunate position of being able to lec­ture others on a subject, they experience some­thing akin to the feelings of the dictator we de­scribed above. It’s the joy of wielding power; in this case, the power of knowledge. A power that lends them a delicious sense of their own importance.

Similarly, there’s a certain thrill in possessing a piece of news that others don’t have. This is one of the factors that lies at the bottom of gossip’s pow­erful pull. Prestige comes with being able to demonstrate that you’re in the know. It makes you feel on top of things.

It makes you feel important.

In the Loop

This need also underlies our over­whelming desire to be always “in the loop.” It explains the pain we feel when we’re left out of things. Socially, it’s the equivalent of being stranded on a stalled subway. Events are taking place all around you, people are connecting and things are happening. But you’re standing still in the dark.

In our highly industrialized society, it’s hard not to feel like a mere cog in some vast, impersonal machinery. In an age of social media, it can be dif­ficult to maintain our sense of self-worth in the face of so much blatant success. More than anything, a person wants to feel that he or she has worth. That they matter.

In the olden days, you didn’t know much about people outside the circum­scribed limits of your town or neigh­borhood. All that’s changed now. Being exposed to the myriads of lives taking place all around the globe can reduce us to a sense of our own irrelevancy. A feeling that we’re not of much import in the great big world, as transmitted to us continuously by the world wide web.

The need to feel important also un­derlies the notion of exclusivity in clubs and the like. If my neighbor can’t get into a certain country club and I can, that makes me more important than they are. Ditto for classroom cliques and the like.

Leaving others out implies that we matter more than they do. Having the power to exclude others serves to en­hance our own importance… And feel­ing important is the name of the game.

Stand Up and Be Counted

There’s another way of looking at this, one which can leave us much happier and certainly more at ease. Instead of measuring our importance against that of the people around us, we can achieve true importance by attaching ourselves to the most important One of all.

In Hashem’s eyes, we possess a cer­tain stature simply by virtue of being in His world and striving to serve Him. This applies to everyone, but a thou­sand time more to Klal Yisroel.

When Hashem chose our nation to spread His light in the world, He el­evated us to an eternal level of impor­tance. Each time we sanctify His Name, either directly through our avodah or indirectly through our interactions with others, we are expressing our very important place in the scheme of things. No one is reduced to being a cog in the machinery or a throwaway on­line post. No one is minimized or over­looked. That’s because each of us has a supremely important job to do.

Our connection to Him lends us an intrinsic importance which, if only we could remember it, should make us delirious with joy all the time. Instead of straining to achieve recognition by our peers by knowing more than they do or striving to be forever in the loop, we can more profitably turn our focus elsewhere. Specifically, toward our Di­vine identity and our inborn elevated status as bni bechori Yisroel. If we do that, we’ll find that there’s no need to strain anymore, except in our eager­ness to serve.

The Torah tells us that Hashem counted us repeatedly in our early his­tory because of His deep and abiding love for us. Every single person was in­cluded in the count because every sin­gle person mattered. Though we don’t have a king or other divinely appointed to take a census of Klal Yisroel today, the same principle holds true for us.

Every aspect of our personality can and should be recruited to carry out our exalted mission. Every action we take becomes meaningful because we are His children and His servants, fulfilling His will. Because we all received the Torah, we’re all in the know. Because all of our neshamos were present at our elevation to the Chosen People, no one is left out. We’re all in the loop, all of the time.

With a little shift in perspective, we can feel more at peace and at the same time charged with fresh enthusiasm. At peace with those around us because there’s no need to compete. And filled with enthusiasm because of the goal we share, toward which each of us works using the unique tools we were given.

If we gaze in the right direction, ev­erything looks different. Everything makes more sense when we realize that we don’t have to twist ourselves into pretzels just to feel important. We’re al­ready there.

So, let’s stand up and be counted.

Because Hashem is counting on us.

And because we count!