There are undoubtedly lots more practices that tell people they don’t matter in the business world—as well as everywhere else in our mega-scaled contemporary environment.  Will correcting any single one of them be enough, all by itself, to enable people to feel significant again?

Probably not.

But since we can’t know in advance which approach(es) will ultimately make the most difference, we need to keep our eyes open to all possibilities.  We should bear in mind that Edison went through a long list of materials and techniques before he finally found a way to make a functioning light bulb.  It would be foolish for us to despair of finding a solution to people’s sense of insignificance at this point, when as yet, hardly anyone has even recognized that it’s a significant problem.

What we do need to be concerned about is pushing the problem aside because there’s no single, obvious, sure-fire solution currently at hand.

Even if we had one, we wouldn’t be out of the woods—especially if it involves public policy or public funding.  Enabling people to stop feeling like nobodies will face stiff competition just for attention, let alone resources (which are always limited).  And let’s not forget the host of actors currently on the public-policy stage who are likely to ridicule the idea of enabling people to feel better about themselves as just some sort of airy new-age scheme, on a par with a program for all of us get our auras adjusted.  This is only to be expected, when for decades, putting an abundance of goods into consumers’ hands at affordable prices has been considered a much more important, practical, and serious objective.

But once we’ve recognized the full destructive impact of making people feel like nobodies, to continue doing nothing about it is indefensible.  We need to start a search for causes and remedies that’s every bit as robust as the Space Race in the twentieth century, or the expedited research and development effort we undertook to create vaccines for COVID-19.

The circumstances we now find ourselves in are threatening at such a fundamental level that any social policy which imagines we can avoid an ever-increasing array of looming calamities without giving priority to improving our human scaling is what is actually impractical and other-worldly.