← Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
The Mattering Instinct: Why We Long to Matter | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein – EP 727
01:28:56
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- [00:01]
John Miles
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- [00:20]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Why choose a sleep number Smart bed? Can I make my site softer?
- [00:24]
Rebecca Goldstein
Can I make my site firmer?
- [00:26]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Can we sleep cooler?
- [00:28]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort comfort on either side your sleep number setting. Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. And now during our President's Day sale, take 50 off our limited edition bed plus free premium delivery with any bed and base ends Monday only at a Sleep number store or sleepnumber.com Coming up.
- [00:51]
John Miles
Next on Passion Struck.
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Rebecca Goldstein
We are so different by temperament. Belief systems, value systems, our culture, our talents, our passions and that individuality all goes into how we respond to this shared motivation that we have, deep motivation that shapes our lives. And we none of us want to waste our life. We want to respond in the right way to this instinct. And we all make the distinction that there are right ways and wrong ways. And we want people who in appeasing this longing and answering the question do I really matter? That motivates all this.
- [01:33]
John Miles
Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hey friends, and welcome Back to episode 727 of Passion Struck. Over the past several episodes, we've been opening a new inquiry here on the show, the youe Matter series, an exploration of how human beings experience significance in a world increasingly organized around performance, metrics and proof. We began last week with renowned psychologist Barry Schwartz examining how modern choice culture erodes agency and authorship. We continued on Thursday with psychologist Daniel Ellenberg exploring how inherited scripts of strength and emotional restraint shape who is allowed to feel, speak and be seen. Today, we go deeper beneath choice, beneath roles beneath culture itself to the instinct that makes all of those questions unavoidable. Why does a human life need to matter at all? My guest is Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein, a MacArthur Fellow philosopher and novelist whose work has spent decades probing how human beings search for meaning, value, and justification within a finite life. Her new book, the Mattering Instinct, argues that belonging to matter is a defining feature of human consciousness, rooted in our capacity for self reflection and our need to justify the attention we give to our own existence. In today's conversation, we explore why human beings feel compelled to ask whether their lives are worthy of the time, energy, and care they demand, why connectedness and mattering are not the same thing, and how that distinction reshapes how we understand dignity and self worth, how different people pursue mattering through distinct projects that Rebecca calls mattering projects, and how those mattering projects shape both individual lives and entire cultures. We go into why entropy functions as a real constraint on meaning, helping us evaluate whether a life sustains order, care, and human flourishing. We discuss how the desire to matter can lead to both extraordinary creation and profound harm, and lastly, why understanding this instinct may be essential to living together with greater clarity and mercy. This conversation sits at the philosophical heart of the youe Matter series, and it arrives as we move toward the February 24 launch of my upcoming children's book, you, Matter Luma, a story designed to plant the truth of intrinsic worth early. Before the world teaches children to confuse mattering with visibility, performance, or competition, Rebecca's work offers a deeper framework for understanding where that question comes from and what it asks us across a lifetime. Let's continue the youe Matter series with philosopher Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating a life that matters. Now let that journey begin. Picture this. You're trying to whip up dinner after a long day, but your pans are sticking like glue, the handles are burning hot and cleanup feels like a full workout. Sound familiar? Yeah, I've been right there. Frustrated, wasting time scrubbing and honestly kind of dreading cooking. Then I switched to caraway and wow, everything changed. From the very first sizzle of garlic in their ceramic skillet, I was sold. Food slides right off. No oil pools, no scraping needed. It heats super evenly so my veggies come out perfectly roasted every time and the colors gorgeous on the counter like modern art instead of boring pots. Best part? It's completely non toxic. No weird chemicals leaching into my food so I actually feel good about what I'M feeding my family and cleanup literally wipe and done in under a minute. I reach for these pieces every single night. Caraway's Cookware set is a favorite for a reason. It can save you up to $190 versus buying the items individually. Plus if you visit carawayhome.com passionstruck you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com passionstruck or use code passionstruck at checkout. Non Toxic Kitchenware made Modern why choose.
- [06:52]
Sleep Number Advertiser
A Sleep number Smart bed? Can I make my sight softer?
- [06:55]
Rebecca Goldstein
Can I make my site firmer?
- [06:56]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Can we sleep cooler?
- [06:58]
Sleep Number Advertiser
Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side your sleep number setting Enjoy personalized comfort for better sleep night after night. And now during our President's day sale, take 50% off our limited edition bed plus free premium delivery with any bed and base ends Monday only at a Sleep number store or sleepnumber.com.
- [07:26]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I am absolutely honored today to have Rebecca Goldstein join me. Rebecca is the author of a brand new book, the Mattering Instinct, which I absolutely have just devoured given my passion for this topic, but I think we're kindred spirits and I can't wait to have this discussion with her. Rebecca, it's so great to see you here today.
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Rebecca Goldstein
It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
John, I want to start out by talking about something before we get into your book. Around 2019, I understand you were part of a group of individuals that I refer to as the Dream Team. Some of them I know fairly well. Some of them have yet to meet, but it included Marty Seligman, my friend David Yaden, Barry Schwartz, who's becoming a friend, Roy Baumeister and a few others. And I understand that you all met to have a really deep philosophical discussion around mattering and I was hoping you might be able to take us into that room with the those people, what was occurring.
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Rebecca Goldstein
Well, thank you. Actually thank you for bringing that up because it was really important to me and they are. I like the way you describe them, that they are a dream team. All of them top notch psychologists. No, I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a philosopher. That's my academic field. And it was Barty Seligman. Well, let me go back a little. I've been thinking about mannering a very long time. It snuck up on me while I was playing hooky from philosophy and during a summer vacation wrote a Novel called the Mind Body Problem. I was a young, untenured professor of philosophy, and my husband at the time, Sheldon Goldstein, had said, you're going to ruin your career before it's struggling to exist. And because I was doing very technical kind of philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of math, I was in what they call an analytic philosopher. None of this existentialism stuff. No, that was meaningless, imprecise, and. But this novel came to me, and in order to understand my character, I came on this notion of mattering, that it's. Everybody needs to feel that they matter in the way that most matters to them. And the diversity creeps into that second half of the sentence, that there are just an abundance of ways in which we try to prove to ourselves that we matter. And I thought, well, this is interesting. This helps me understand my character. And my character presented the idea. I know I did, but. Of the mattering map. But the interesting thing was I would never have thought of these things on my own because they were too imprecise. I couldn't quantify it. I couldn't put it into symbolic logic. I could. The kind of training that I had just gone through made me think of these as imprecise and therefore not useful. But because I was inhabiting this fictional character, I could present these ideas. So that was weird. But these ideas began to grow in me and I started to pay a lot of attention to them, pay a lot of attention to other people and what it was that most mattered to them, improving to themselves, their own mattering. And a theory began to develop. But I never had any intention of writing about it, or first of all, the theory got too big, and I'm suspicious of big theories. Analytic philosophers are suspicious of big, grand theories, especially my own. But little pieces of it leaked out into almost everything else I wrote. And the last book I had written was called Plato at the Googleplex, why Philosophy Won't Go Away. And Marty Seligman, he was able to see there are a few paragraphs or two pages I give to what I call the mattering instinct. I didn't call it that then, but I talk about it as a way of trying to explain one of the great mysteries in the history of ideas. And that is why, in a certain period of time, call it the Axial Age, all religions that are still extant emerged, as well as philosophy, as well as Western philosophy. And I hazard the hypothesis that life became stable enough so that the mattering instinct could emerge. Marty Seligman, alone of all my. Everybody who read that book grabbed onto that and he organized a workshop around this idea of mattering for me to present this idea. And it was so encouraging to have these psychologists, not philosophers, psychologists, paying psychologists who I knew were top notch, all of them connected with positive psychology, paying this kind of attention to it. And we were supposed to write. I was supposed to write a paper for it. And I started the paper and the paper just got getting more and more complicated and I saw I just had to write a book. So Marty Seligman of Everybody is responsible for me writing this book. And I couldn't get the paper out. It's the first time I've ever been assigned a paper I couldn't complete because all the ideas connected in a very strict deductive way almost. And I had to try to get it all out in the most readable, accessible fashion I could. And being a novelist, that helped because I'm good at telling stories as well. I can tell a story, this being stories about real people, not made up stories. I tried to demonstrate the various ideas, the stories of people. But anyway, it was a very intense three days. Everybody started out, or not everybody. Not Marty, but everybody was a little skeptical. And by the end they seemed, most of them convinced. I'm not sure about Roy Baumeister, but everybody else seemed. But that was good too, because he was pushing. So you need that. Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out because it was really just personally very important to me. And yeah, it was responsible for my sitting down and writing the book.
- [14:07]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
For anyone who wants to look at the output of that meeting, I'm to going to drop a link to the paper that was produced by that dream team that applies mattering to work environments specifically and work cultures, which I have read and utilize. I just want to touch on Marty for a second because I interviewed Gabriela Kellerman.
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Rebecca Goldstein
She was there too. Yes.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Who is part of this. And Marty wrote a book a few years ago and I was hoping to interview Marty for this book and. And he declined personally to me in an email. And I even tried to get Angela Duckworth, who's a close mentee of his, to see if he would reconsider. And he wouldn't. But what she told me, which really gives this so much merit, is she told me that Marty is dedicating the remaining remainder of his life to studying mattering, which I think tells you the weight that he is giving to this topic.
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Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
And then I hope somewhere along the line he might reconsider and have that discussion with me.
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Rebecca Goldstein
I hope so. I'll add my voice if that helps. At all. And his students have been getting in touch with me. Hopefully some real empirical research will come out of this. There are many empirical hypotheses that I suggest that could be tested. Did. I'm not in that business. I'm not an empirical psychologist. I'm not even a psychologist. But Marty had said he wrote the first sentence of the paper that I never completed, which was that some of our. The most important ideas in psychology can be traced back to philosophy. That it's the philosophers who come up with these ideas. And I just. The generosity of Morty Seligman is. It's really something for all of us to celebrate. He is so. Many academics, you find, are rather competitive and everything. He. No, he is so beyond that. He is dedicated to ideas themselves, ideas for the betterment of all of us. So it's positive psychology and a most positive psychologist.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
Well, I love hearing that. Rebecca, I want to go now to the book. You open up the book and you go through what we just discussed, how you've been studying this for so long, but you call the mattering instinct the most peculiar and the most human thing about us. What makes this longing just not a motive, but something that fundamentally distinguishes human life?
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Rebecca Goldstein
And the most poignant thing about us, too, I think the poignancy of our life is captured by this longing that we have to matter. And I really want to ground it on solid science, going back to physics, the most solid of all the sciences. And there the most robust of physics, the one that physicists tell us can never be negated. And that's the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy, which is disorder, it's nature's scorecard for disorder. And disorder of a system means the system is. You can't get any useful work out of it. So entropy is kind of a downer story. And all life is in resistance to entropy, to ground everything starting with that. But.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
And maybe we could just. I can intervene right there because for a listener who might not be familiar with entropy, can you just explain this? Because people might not be making the connection between entropy and mattering.
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Rebecca Goldstein
All systems, closed systems that don't have access to external sources that can be turned into energy, they just. They dissipate. They become more and more disordered and useful work can't be gotten out of them. So that to the extent that entropy, which means disorder, is growing, the system is running less and less efficiently until suddenly it can't. Not suddenly gradually, at the end, it can't run at all. If it's a living system it means it dies. And all physical systems are running according to this law. And it's the laws of probability show you why disorder is much more probable than order. And so that's the drift. That's the direction of all physical systems, including us. Great news. We're going to die. We're going to die just like everything else. And all biological systems, us included, are taking in energy, food, sunlight, certain chemicals in order to resist entropy. All of the laws of biology are actually derivable from this fundamental fact about physics. It's not even an instinct, the fact that every physical, every biological system matters to its itself. It's the organizing principle of all of the instincts derivable from entropy. But we alone, of all biological systems, of which we know at least of all biological systems on this earth, we have the capacity because of these amazingly complicated big brains that we've evolved to be able to step outside of ourselves, see how much we matter to ourselves, how much attention we pay to ourselves. Incessantly pay attention to ourselves. That doesn't mean we're selfish. It doesn't mean we're self centered. It means our brains are running as they evolve to run, to defeat, to push against as long as possible against entropy. We can step outside ourselves and see ourselves mattering and ask why? Why of all the things in the universe do I pay so much attention to this one thing? That if the measure of how much I think something matters is how much attention I give it, it seems to follow that I think I matter more than anything else in the universe. And short of lunacy, I know that's wrong. That's the sanity in all of us. And that sanity because of this capacity to step outside of ourselves gives rise to this longing to matter, to in some way try to prove to ourselves that the amount of attention we give to ourselves is somewhat commensurate with how much we deserve, that we do deserve this. It's not just arbitrary that I just don't. I just happen to be who I am as everything else just happens to be what it is. No, there is something about me that can prove to myself that, yeah, just a little more, a little more commensurate. A Nobel Prize economist. I mean failure. His last name is Failor is. When I was discussing this with him, because I discuss this with everybody, he said he was economist, he said, but he said, I'm thinking how much mattering do we need? He said, a smattering of mattering, just enough. But some people need a lot more than a smattering, a mattering and we differ a lot in how much we need and how we go about doing it. And that's what makes us different from all other organisms. And that's what makes us values seeking creatures. We're looking for norms to justify ourselves and that brings us into the realm of values. And that ultimately, I think, is what has produced the greatest achievements of our species and also the greatest atrocities. That is it's deeply human.
- [22:25]
John Miles
Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment. One of the insights running quietly through this conversation is that the longing to matter does not begin in adulthood. It begins early, before we can articulate it, before we can defend it. That realization sits at the heart of my upcoming children's book, you matter Luma, launching February 24th. You matter. Luma is a story designed to help children understand intrinsic worth before the world teaches them to measure themselves by achievement, approval or comparison. If the ideas in this series resonate with you, especially if you care about how the next generation comes to understand their value, you can now, pre order umatterluma@barnes&noble, Amazon bookshop.org, or go to the website umatterluma.com your help supports bring this message of mattering to the lives that.
- [23:15]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Will carry it forward.
- [23:16]
John Miles
Now a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now back to my conversation with Rebecca.
- [23:34]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
So two things. One, in my first book, Passion Struck, I open it up with Discussing Grit by Angela Duckworth, and I actually had a conversation with her on this, but I said you were missing a very important ingredient. Grit alone is just grit. And I actually in the book used entropy as the missing ingredient. Because when you apply entropy to grit, you have to be intentional about where that entropy is being directed. If not, that grit can go to either something that is going to take your life to a greater place or it's going to take it in the opposite direction.
- [24:15]
Rebecca Goldstein
Exactly.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
So I personally loved how you used it in the book and understood what you were saying. I want to get back to what you were just talking about, though, with how mattering is something that really distinguishes us from all the other species on the planet, because I think it gets back to that moment we begin asking ourselves whether our lives deserve the attention that we give them. And I think that's where we cross into a distinctly human problem. Why does self reflection turn life into an existential question at that point rather than merely a biological one?
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Rebecca Goldstein
Because it brings us into that realm of justification that we the whole. So I define mattering, whether we're talking about what matters or who matters as deserving of attention. Deserving is actually both. Those words deserving and attention are really interesting. Attention, yeah. That's something to be empirically explored by all neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. It's a scientific question. Attention deserving, that's what philosophers call a normative concept. It has to do with ought rather than is. And the fact that we are asking this question of ourselves, am I deserving of my attention? Brings us into this realm of justification that we are trying to justify ourselves to ourselves. And we have to live with ourselves 247 and be very aware of how much attention we are paying to ourselves. There's the default network market mood. When you're not being. Paying attention to external stimuli, when you're fantasizing and daydreaming and what psychologists have told us. What are you thinking about then? Yourself. You're fantasizing about yourself or you're remembering about yourself that we. And we have to do that. This is what our brains are wired to do. Attention evolves as an adaptation to help us survive and to flourish. And of course, we're always paying attention to ourselves. When we're paying attention to the environment, we're paying attention to how that environment is affecting ourselves. So we have to put ourselves first and foremost. But when we step outside ourselves, and it may not be very conscious, but it's there at some level, we step outside ourselves and we see how much attention we pay to ourselves as if we're the most important thing in the universe. I think it sets up a kind of unease. And we want to address that unease. And that brings us into the sphere of justification, of values, something entirely different under the sun. I think it's beautiful. I think it is what we mean when we talk about the intrinsic dignity of every human that we all claim to acknowledge that there's a certain intrinsic dignity to every human. It is because we take on this extra burden of justifying the application of the laws of nature to ourselves. Are we really worthy of. We have to act this way. This is what biology has determined for us. But we can ask the justificatory question. It brings us into an entirely different realm. And that's what it is to be human. So we take on this extra burden and it makes human life. All life is hard. You got to struggle against entropy. It's hard. But human life is so much harder. You have to convince yourself that you are deserving of the struggle. That's amazing. And that is what we all hold within us. That's something estimable. That's something even when we lose patience with things that are fellow human beings are doing, it's good to remember how hard it is to be human.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
So I want to go to my origin point on mattering and how I got involved with this, and then we'll come back. I was taking a deeply spiritual course somewhere around 2005, 2006 time frame where I immersed myself in, in a 34 week study of the Bible. I met twice a week in a small group and we explored all aspects of this from a philosophical standpoint. Because the person who was guiding it not only had a doctorate in theology, he also had a doctorate in philosophical history. And so it was really an eye opening experience. But throughout this process, I started to get these unworldly callings that I was supposed to go out and help. The lonely, the broken, the burned out, the battered, the helpless of the world. And I had no idea at the time I was a senior executive at Lowe's in the IT group, had no idea why I was being asked to do this thing or how these things were even interrelated. But now, as I have seen the loneliness epidemic and the staggering statistics that we have in both adolescent and adult rises in depression and anxiety, and more people burned out and disengaged and helpless, I started to figure out these things can't be isolated. They have to be symptoms of something that is larger. And when I started to really analyze this and started looking at this from a spiritual layer, a scientific layer, a philosophical layer, it all took me to matter.
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Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
And when you lose it, these are the things that starts happening across society when this most important thing of our human makeup starts to erode. So I wanted to put that out there. So you understood how I came at this. Yeah, But I think it's important for listeners because you draw an important distinction in the book. And I think it's an important one that people don't contemplate. And that is the distinction between connectedness, which a lot of people are talking about today, and mattering. Yeah, we often treat them as the same, but philosophically they're very different. Different. And I'm hoping you might help with that explanation.
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Rebecca Goldstein
Thank you. Thank you. That is, I have found in trying to discuss these ideas, that is the conflation that people seem to naturally make, that makes it very hard for me to talk about what I actually mean here, to try to uncover it. One is very obvious to us that we need to matter. To others. So the same notion mattering is used in connectedness that we need. There need to be certain people in our lives who will pay us attention whether we deserve it or not. Hopefully all of us had this experience as very young children in our families. That is the point of families, to make everybody in the family, but most especially children, if there are children in the family, to feel that they matter, that they're deserving of attention. We are born exceedingly helpless, more helpless than all other animals. And that's because, again, these big brains are. In order to get these heads out of the birth canal, which is difficult enough, take it from someone who gave birth, that in order to get these big brains out of the birth canal, they have to come out very prematurely. Only 30% developed in that first year of life. The brains grow enormously. That's why when you bring an infant to the pediatrician, they are measuring the circumference of their heads, because those heads have got to double in size or something. I don't remember exactly what the number is, but they grow really fast. Fast. And so we're born incredibly helpless. And it takes a very long time for our brains to develop into our early twenties, when the most important, the prefrontal lobes, the place of maturity, of responsibility, of taking being accountable, of thinking before you act, all of that stuff, impulse control finally comes into being, locks into place. So it's like there's very little time between your brains finally coming into maturity and the first wrinkle you start. So why? Well, because these brains are the most complicated thing we've yet discovered in the universe. Yeah. Anyway, so it. We have got to be born into families, into caretakers who will pay us attention even if we don't deserve it. How much attention does a little baby deserve? They're not doing anything extraordinary. Six months, they finally roll over. And we're all applauding that. How helpless we are. Right? Because if we don't have these caretakers paying us exquisite attention, we die. And that need for there to be others in our lives, friends, family, lovers, coworkers, community members, whoever you have in your life that continues throughout our lives, that they're my friends, are paying me attention even when I screw up, when I don't have to prove to them how worthy I am, they are my friends. That's what it is to have people in your life. And that is a deed. We all have this mattering to others, and it has to do with our relationship to others. Hopefully it's reciprocal. Hopefully, we also pay them attention but not everybody does. They just want the attention and they don't give it back anyway. Mattering instinct is something else. It's our relationship with ourselves. It comes from this existential moment. It's almost like a Beckett play. In fact, Samuel Beckett writes about this moment over and over again. This kind of strangeness when we step outside of ourselves and interrogate ourselves as if almost we're another person saying, well, who are you? Why are you so devoted single mindedly to your own survival and flourishing? Why are you paying yourself so much attention? You're not so very important. You're no more important than anybody else. And then you try to do something to close that gap. And that's what I mean by the mattering instinct. And you may do it through your social relationships, that's what I call socializers. But you may do it spiritually, religiously, the kind of studying that you were talked about. You may do it in terms of your. You have certain standards of excellence that you need to realize in order to feel okay about yourself. It may be very grand. Steve Jobs had said you have to make a dent in the universe. Well, not all of us are born to make a dent in the universe. Maybe raising prize petunias, it may be raising flourishing children. There are different ways that we standards that we may have intellectual, artistic, entrepreneurial, athletic, military, ethical, that we need to realize in order to feel, yeah, I'm okay, I'm. I can tolerate my own existence. It may be competitive when these are the four different, what I call the continents of the mattering map. And just about everybody I've spoken to over the past 40 years since I've been interested in this subject, I wouldn't say just about just. Yeah, everybody falls into one of these four grand categories. But then there are so many ways that these are realized. So many. And that's just so fascinating, this kind of diversity in us.
- [36:56]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Thank you for sharing that, Rebecca and I want to go into those quadrants here in just a little bit, but summarize what you were just saying is connectedness concerns how we matter to others. And this is how most people perceive mattering. However you and I would say. I argue that mattering really concerns how we matter to ourselves.
- [37:20]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah.
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Podcast Host/Interviewer
And this turn inward carries so much more moral and psychological weight when you think of it this way. And I started to think about this because at that same time I was given that calling. This group I inherited at Lowe's, out of three hundred and something thousand employees, was the most disengaged group in the Entire company. And when I got to the root of the issue, the issue wasn't about how they were relating to others. Everyone else thought they were a bunch of buffoons and I should get rid of the entire group. But what I realized was the breakdown was happening because almost to a person, none of the people in the group understood how they mattered to themselves, how the role that they were doing mattered in the bigger scheme of, of Lowe's. Like, how does my job as a computer operator or someone in the data center or working in a call center impact a customer experience? And when they don't understand that, and I think this is what so few companies really understand, they're never going to. Gonna be able to do the things you want them to. And that's why I really think. I recently wrote a CEO weekly article about this, that the group of people that we are not spending enough time with in these organizations, if you think about it that way, is frontline managers. When I was in the military, these are your corporals or sergeants, but they're the frontline supervisors. And if those people don't have a return on energy, if they don't believe they matter, then everything else in your company. Company is going to break down. Yeah, is what I realized. And so when I rebuilt this group, I had to start from there. How do you start making those employees, those frontline supervisors feel that they matter because then it carries the ripple effect forward. And then they develop the relationship with their subordinates and teach them that they matter too. And that's how mattering the mattering ends. Instinct starts expanding. That's what I found.
- [39:35]
Rebecca Goldstein
I think that is extremely interesting. But I do just want to point out that for a lot of people, they really don't derive their mannering from their work. They work in order to make a living, to support themselves and perhaps their family. And so many people I've spoken to are of that kind of. But that they're, they're real mattering that what I mean, this existential project that makes them feel that they have a reason to live and that gives us them the impetus to get on with the future. Because it's hard to live a human life. They just can't stress that enough that they're deriving it from something else. So of course it's very good to make people feel as if they matter in the workplace. And it's a moral imperative to try to make people feel they matter wherever they are and to make them aware of how much they matter in that situation. Your Uber driver, the Cashier in the grocery store, everybody. To treat them as if they matter, to make that and, and point out the special things that they do that make them matter is. It's just, it feeds the soul. It really feeds the soul. But I do want to just say that for some people, for example, there's this movement that's rather big among philosophers, effective altruism. And it said take any job that's going to pay the most money so you can give the most charity work for Wall street work, work for whatever, even if it's not meaningful work for you. What will give it meaning is that you're doing it in order to be an altruist, to make as much money as you can in order to give it away. So these are people who definitely do not, Are not going to derive any. They're mattering from the work itself, but from what they're going to do with this money.
- [41:27]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah, I recently had a discussion with Joshua Green and it was basically on, on those whole, that whole line.
- [41:33]
Rebecca Goldstein
Exactly.
- [41:34]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
But there, there's this interview I did a while back with this gentleman, Dr. Abraham George, and he came over here from India to escape India and became a prominent business person in New York. Work, built all this wealth and then actually went back to India because he saw how big a gap was there for so many people. And he ended up creating this institution called Shanti Bhavan, I think is the name of it, and put his altruism to work. And since that time he has now taken 15,000 children who are in the lowest caste system. And these children now are New York Times best selling authors and have attended Ivy League schools. And he has changed the complete dimensions for now tens of thousands of people. And I think it does show how that ripple effect that you were just talking about can change lives.
- [42:33]
Rebecca Goldstein
It is. Freud had said that the two cornerstones of humanists are love and work. And I think the fact that he said work, remember I would say mattering, it shows us a lot about Freud. No surprise, he derived his sense of mattering from his scientific work, which was revolutionary. And. But not everybody derives their sense of mattering from their work. And that to me has been the most interesting thing to use this framework to try to understand other people. And it's to get to the core of other people. What is it that's driving them? How are they trying to appease this longing?
- [43:17]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And I think an interesting take on this is if you look at Viktor Frankl, so if you look at how he defined the ways we achieve meaning, he did identify Work as one of them. But he also identified relationships that we find ourselves in. So you could be a caretaker to a loved one who's going through a terrible sickness and you find meaning in that, or you could find meaning in the love that you have for a child or a partner. But he also finds you can find meaning. Or I would extend it to mattering in suffering. So it's not just about work. And I think that's what makes it unique. Unique is mattering is completely dependent on each of us as individuals.
- [44:02]
Rebecca Goldstein
It's. So that's where. Yeah, it's where our real individuality comes out. And free will is a big issue for philosophers. Right. And I would say if it exists anywhere, it exists on this plane. The plane of trying to respond to this shared mattering instinct. And which brings us into this realm of values. And we choose different values. And some are choosing. I tell stories of people who choose what I would call wrong values. And I tried to give the criterion for distinguishing for between better and worse ways of responding to this. If I wake up tomorrow morning and decide I have to invade Poland, my sense of mattering demands it. Well, then my sense of mattering may demand that, but I must be stopped. Because this is a destructive way of responding to the mattering instinct. And we do see very destructive ways of responding to it. And I would say some of the worst atrocities we've seen throughout history. And if we open today's newspaper, we will see very damaging ways of responding to this. But it's deeply human, so no wonder it can lead to atrocities, and no wonder it can lead to beautiful acts of altruism and achievement and scientific discovery and artistic creativity and all of that.
- [45:27]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Let's take a break here before we go into the four quadrants, which I definitely want to go into to maybe talk about one of these stories. So I'll maybe let you pick one. But in the book, you talk about Spinoza, you talk about William James, talk about Freud, who you brought up earlier. But is there a particular story that you feel might resonate the best for the listeners?
- [45:51]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah, I bring up these stories to illustrate different aspects of this mattering longing. But perhaps William James, because I think the story of William James, the great philosopher and psychologist, in fact, at Harvard, down the street from where I am now, the psychology building was called William James Hall. Harvard is very proud of him. I think he illustrates it, especially when you could put him in combination with his sister, Ellis James. But it. So William was born into an amazing family. His younger brother by 18 months was Henry James, the novelist. William James is the oldest of five children. And then there were two other boys after Henry and then a sister, Alice James. And William James father was a kind of. He didn't have to work for a living, he had inherited money. But he was a independent scholar, Swedenborgian mystic. And William James was extraordinarily talented intellectually, artistically, scientifically, philosophically. A very close knit family. The connectedness was there, super there. When William decided he wanted to be an artist, they all took off and moved from Boston to Newport, Rhode island so that he could study with a famous artist there. The whole family decamped and he certainly, in terms of connectedness, it was all, all in place and he suffered. He decided he was not going. He wasn't a good enough artist. And there's nothing more contemptible than being a mediocre artist. He had these already. This is a heroic striver, right, that, that he has these standards of excellence that must be met in order for him to live in peace with himself. So he. Then he goes to medical school. And he's not inspired by medical school. He goes through it. He becomes a doctor. He never practices. He goes into a deep depression, almost a catatonic depression, where he would just lie in bed and contemplate suicide for months and months on end, right? And he doesn't not commit suicide because he wouldn't do that to his family. But that is how tenuous his hold on life was, his engagement with life. And it's such a amazing. He doesn't. He writes about it in one of his great books, the Varieties of Religious Experience. He says it, he attributes it to a French doctor. But he told his son, and also his translator, his French translator, that it was himself that he was describing here. It was a first person account of what it is like to be in a deep clinical depression. And then he pulls himself out of it. He decides his first act of free will be to believe in free will. And he will act as if his life is worth living. And he latches onto what I call a mattering project. He becomes a philosopher. And all of that energy was all over the place and is focused on this one area which then merges into psychology. And he is a man of extraordinary energy. Everybody writes about him. He was physical energy and mental energy and social energy. He is but constantly battling a kind of melancholic, what they called in the 19th century a mellow depressive temperament. When he accomplished a tremendous amount. His principles of Psychology still read. It's magnificent. And he's a psychologist who writes like a novelist. And his brother Henry James is a novelist who writes like a psychologist. Two extraordinary talents. He was a heroic structure driver. He needed that project to. To carry that so that he could accomplish these great things in order for him to be able to live with himself. His sister, on the other hand, Alice, was a Victorian woman. There was no outlet for her when she. She kept a diary. And it was finally published in the 1970s. It was feminist project to bring out this diary of this Victorian woman. And she, she did suffer her entire life from depression. She constantly was fighting off suicide. She became a permanent invalid, couldn't leave her bed, and did get a lot of attention from her family in this way. But life was not a joyful endeavor for her. And when she actually got breast cancer at the age of, I think 41 or 42, she greeted it with glee. Now she could retire, now she had a diagnosable disease and she could just retreat and wait for death. It's almost like a controlled experiment. Two people raised in the same household, the same close knit, connected household and the same kind of temperament. Neurotic, yes, both of them had. Were neurotic. But one was given in a way to find himself to a mannering project that could allow him to live with himself and feel like he was realizing what he was meant to do and the other wasn't. And you see the results, you know how it was. So for me, this family, this amazing family, and especially these two siblings really demonstrate something about the distinction between connectedness and the mattering and stuff.
- [51:32]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
I just wanted to share a couple more things about this because this is one of the things I loved about your book is how much detail you put into these stories. So what you just left out that I think is important is that out of these five kids, their father chose the two oldest to be his heir apparent. And the ones that he wanted to glorify the family name that he wasn't able to in his lifetime. So he did extraordinary things for William and Henry, including the fact that he moved the whole family just so that William could try to pursue his artistic ventures. And then when it failed, he moved him back. And when William James went to Harvard. Harvard isn't what we think about today. Harvard was a stumbling, not know, nearly as well respected institution as it is today. When William arrived there and I think he, in many ways I can see why they put so much behind his name because he in many ways put them completely on the map. But another distinction that you really make is that the Father allowed the two younger boys to go out to war when they were 16 and 17 years old, which caused both of them to. To end up with unfulfilling lives because of the experiences that they had in battle in many ways. And then the daughter who was brilliant, as brilliant as the two older boys, was never given the same mattering foundation as the two older boys were, which I think impacted her own self mattering. Yeah, in huge ways. And it was only in the twilight of her life when she found her partner who made her feel like she mattered, that I think she truly became alive. So I think those are other really important parts that you bring about.
- [53:33]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah, well, actually the most fulfilling part of her life when she just did not have the ideation, the suicide ideation was. Was a brief period when she was able to teach other women. There was a. Some kind of group that allowed women to teach other women. And. And then she felt fulfilled and then she was and she did. It's true that her. Katherine Loring, the partner towards the end of her life, was. It was a very fulfilling relationship, but she needed. When you have that much talent, you need a way of expressing it, of trying to develop these ideas or develop your beautiful sentences. She had the writing gift and she had that heightened consciousness of consciousness that all of the James siblings had. But yeah, they were extraordinary family. In fact, I have a novel called the Dark Sister in which William James is a character there. But the way that William, you know, that the way he was able to pull himself out was just, I'm going to commit to life. And that means committing to a certain project. It turned out to be a highly intellectual project, not artistic, but he was a heroic striver. And I think there's some. There is some evidence comes from the psychology of personality that we have a structure to. To our temperament. So that some of us are more interested in close relationships, some of us in achievement, some of us in power. This. So there's this theory, the Murray McClellan theory of personality that groups us into these three different types. And there's some correlation with my quadrants, my continents, the four continents of the mattering map. Transcenders, what I call transcenders. Those who seek it in. In some mattering, in some religious or spiritual way is not included in this. But transcenders, I think, come in three different forms. Affiliate those who are driven by need for affiliation, those who are driven by achievement, and those who are driven by the need for power. So the religious impulse can express itself in many different ways.
- [55:54]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Well, this is where I Wanted to go anyhow.
- [55:56]
Rebecca Goldstein
So great.
- [55:59]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
So in the book, in the mattering map, you bring out transcenders, which you just mentioned, socializers, heroic strivers, which you mentioned William James was. And competitors. And the reason you do this, as I interpret it, is you're trying to show how widely human responses to the same instinct diverge. And another thing that I thought was really important important is that the matter mattering instinct is not circular. What I thought is the fact that we long to matter doesn't automatically justify how we pursue mattering was an important distinction that you made. So with that set up, can you take us through the four quadrants?
- [56:41]
Rebecca Goldstein
Thanks. Thanks for mentioning it's not circular. That would be very damning if it was. And I gave that a lot of thought that it not be circular. So transcenders, heroic strivers, socializers and competitors. And I can say they can all go right and they can all go wrong. And I'll talk about how I try to distinguish between right and wrong responses. But transcenders. This is a very. This is a kind religious, spiritual response to mattering. It requires the. The person, the transcender do have a belief that there is some transcendent trans empirical beyond space and time being to whom one matters. That the trend, whether you call the transcendent being God or something more spiritual and vague, but yet that the universe is. Is permeated by the goals, the intentions of this being and this being intentionally created oneself. That you exist by reason of this transcendent being, God or whatever you call it. And that. And that that means that this being thinks that felt that you have a purpose to play in the narrative of eternity. This is the grandest narrative that could possibly exist. And that this results in a great sense of mattering. You. You cosmically matter that which created heaven and earth and the moral otter created you. I was born as a. Into a transcender feel of family. That's my background. I was born into a very religious family. I was raised very religiously and I was very religious. I have a serious nature. So when I was religious I took it very seriously. In my tradition, for example, men are required to pray three times a day every day. Women are not. I did right. I took that on myself and. And the sense of mattering I've experienced it is very strong. I felt that I did something wrong when I violated one of the many laws that go into leading a Jewish orthodox life. Orthodoxy is what I was brought up in. I felt that I was displeasing God himself. That God was paying attention, and that was terrifying. But I never doubted how much I mattered. I mattered to God. My very action, all my actions mattered to God. That is a very strong sense of mattering. And as we well know, transcenders will give up their lives. That's what religious martyrs do if they feel that is required by what grounds they're mattering, which is one of the points I make in the book, that our. Our need to matter is stronger. Our will to matter is stronger than the will to life itself. You will. You can sacrifice your life if you think that your mattering demands that. So those are transcenders. And they're really interesting to me, especially given my background.
- [59:56]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
And Joan of Arc is a great example of someone who gave up her life.
- [60:01]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yes, exactly.
- [60:03]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Because she pursued her mattering.
- [60:05]
Rebecca Goldstein
Exactly. And she says, as the fire is lit, hold the cross up so that I can see it. Okay, I'm gonna start crying. I mean, it's very moving. Hold the cross up so I can see it through the flames. This is very moving. You know that this is. Many members of our species have. This is the way they ground the rain. And I think one of the reasons that we feel this crisis of mattering is that most of us are no longer religious in that way. We may go to church, synagogue, mosque, but we don't ground our very mattering on. On these religious beliefs. And other things have moved in to take its place. Fame, power, money, these sorts of things. Shallower. And that also, I should say that not everybody can achieve. Not everybody can be famous, not everybody can be a billionaire, not everybody can be powerful. But in the days of religion or spirituality, really grounding the sense of mattering, everybody could have a part in that. And so that is. That has some things to do. Do with why mattering is. A lot of other things have to do with it as well. But one of the factors that goes into why there is a crisis of mannering, not that I'm in favor of. It's so interesting. I'll get this literature sometimes saying, showing that believers, religious believers, have the greater sense of meaningfulness in their life, of mannering this life. This is not surprising to think that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. Nothing else can compete with that. You. I'll get this literature, and it's put in the guise of so therefore be religious. As if that's not how religion works. It's not. It always reminds me, it's like joining the health club. You'll be healthier. Well, become a religious Believer, if you like, you matter more. It's not how religious belief works. I know because I was once a believer. So there are heroic strivers and heroic strivers also very interesting. These are people who have some, some. It's not mattering to God, it's not mattering to others. In a heroic striver, a true heroic striver, it really is a matter of these standards of excellence that you have to fulfill or at least feel like you're getting closer to making progress toward in order for your life to feel meaningful, in order for you to have a purpose and for it to make sense. And I do pay a lot of attention to heroic strivers in the book and maybe that shows something about me. But these are a kind of person I understand very well, but I'm particularly interested in those who were really not trying to impress others that were to really show that this is about realizing a standard of excellence, excellence for yourself and so that you can respect yourself, respect, redeem yourself in your own eyes. And one of the. For me, most touching stories comes from my personal life. I have a very good friend, she's a writer and Meghan Marshall, she's a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. And she had a partner who had once named Scott Harney, who had hopes of being a poet and studied at Harvard with Robert Lowell. And it wasn't going at all well. He sent out his poems, they were not published. He tried to get, he entered every contest, he did not win. And then he turned away from poetry. And after, unfortunately, he died young and he. Afterwards, Megan found his stash of poetry on which he had been caught constantly working. He never sent it out again. The rejections were poisoning it for him. Right. But he worked just as hard and he. And his poems are magnificent. And you see all of the effort and that was his mannering project. He was going, making progress towards this. And it was not to win other people's applause or anything like that. It was just to feel like he was doing something with his life, that it was not a waste. He was in dialogue not with his contemporaries, but with the great poets of the past. And so this really, to me, this story really demonstrated what it is to be a heroic striver. It's the applause. They may come, they may not. They couldn't come for him because nobody else, not even his partner, knew what he was up to. After his death, his book was published to great acclaim.
- [64:48]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
It reminds me of the story of. I recently had Mark Nepo on the show and he was telling me that people now are very aware of the book of Spiritual Awakening because it sold like 30 million copies. But it wasn't his first book. It was many books in the way. And up until Oprah discovered it through her yoga teacher, he told me it, it had sold maybe a thousand twelve hundred copies and it was really her who propelled it. So he's another one who I think the purpose was more in the mastery of what he was trying to put on words than it ever was the global attention and recognition that he deserved from it.
- [65:32]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah, yeah.
- [65:33]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
That's how I took my meeting with him.
- [65:34]
Rebecca Goldstein
Them. Yes. So should we go on to the next one? I could talk more about her.
- [65:38]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yeah. So no, let's go to the next one.
- [65:39]
Rebecca Goldstein
Socializers. Most people who I speak to and I tell you, if you're sitting next to me on a long trip on a bus or a train or a plane, sooner or later I'm going to be asking you questions about what gets you up in the morning, what you know, what could go wrong in your life that would make you feel like you're living your life all wrong. These kinds of existentially probing questions. And everybody eventually has a story to tell me about it. But most people, as soon as I start talking about mattering, they just automatically supply the term mattering to others. Now part of that is because of this connectedness that is a need for all of us without deep connections, people in our lives to whom we matter. Oh, what do we feel? Lonely. That's what loneliness is. When you don't have people who are just going to pay you attention who think that you matter. But mattering when it's mattering, the result of not feeling like you matter, as we see from William James Story, is depression. It's. And in fact the suicide helpline in the US is www.umatter and you matter.com and I have spent a lot of time talking to depressed people. I since heroic strivers, by the way, are very prone to depression of this sort. It's hard to be living a living thing. It's even harder to be human. It's extremely hard to be a heroic striver. Right. To have these standards of excellence lens that you have to feel like you're making progress towards otherwise you feel disgusted with yourself. That's what depression is. It's self disgust. You don't want to be in the presence of yourself any longer. It's like a psychological autoimmune disease. You're fighting against yourself. So how did I get back on heroic strivers? Yep, there you go. I bet if we're talking about socializers for socializers, it's the mattering to others that really satisfies the mattering instinct. And. And it might be mattering to others who are in your life so that the need for connectedness and for mattering are really collapsed into one. So a mother who's living for her children or romantic partners who are living for each other, or that really, that's what the mattering is grounded on. Or it could be mattering to others with whom you who are really not in your life, who may be a bunch of strangers. That's what the desire for fame is. And the desire for fame I found, especially among young people, is very strong. That many young people I've spoken to, they want to be influencers. They want to be paid a lot of attention by a lot of people, most of whom are strangers. That's what fame is. And it makes sense. If you're trying to convince yourself that you're deserving of all your. Of. Of your own attention. The fact that so many others are paying you so much attention is good evidence that you're deserving. It makes you feel like you matter. It seems to quench that existential need. So it's understandable. I've spoken to a lot of famous people and some of them find that fame is the pits. They don't like it, and it's very insecure. I'll tell one story about that that to me captured it again. It was something I personally witnessed. I was at a party and there was a very famous writer there. It was an academic party, but this was a writer in residence. Extremely famous. The name would be known by everybody. And a fellow philosopher came up and was in the little conversation cluster. And he's philosopher. He's. He's clueless, right? And he asked her name and she told it. And then he said, oh, and what do you do? She said, this conversation is over, turned on her heel and walked away. And that really, to me, epitomized what an insecure grounding fame is. If you can't tolerate one clueless philosopher not knowing what you do and that that would hurt you shows the kind of insecurity of going after your mattering by way of fame. It's nice to have a lot of people paying attention to you. And there's one story. It's a movie star. I forgot his name. He's a famous movie star. I can't remember his name. But anyway, he wanted it. He was a little sick of always being swamped when he went out and everybody wanted to take selfies with him. So he put on a prosthetic nose and glasses and changed his hair and he went to a mall in LA and he said, you know, this really sucks. Nobody was coming over to me and telling me how much they love me and how can I curse on this?
- [70:50]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Sure.
- [70:51]
Rebecca Goldstein
Well, no. Well he just said no. Nobody, nobody had to wait online to get a friggin cup of coffee. This sucks. I want to be famous. It's true, people treat the famous very nicely and for some people it works and for some people it doesn't. But it is a kind of insecurity. The public is fickle, they're paying a lot of attention to you today. But as it dips, if that's what your mannering is founded on, you can find yourself in a very bad place. So yeah, and the cults, this also has to do with mattering a lot to the cult leader. And there's a book called Trickle Down Mattering. There are socializers come in many different flavors as well. And then there are competitors that that's the last. And those are the one kind of person that when I would talk about mattering, they would become uneasy and a little defensive because sensitively questioning it is revealed that they think of mattering as zero sum. They are in competition with others as to their mattering. To the extent that others matter, they matter less. Piece of the pie. And, and here too I notice there are two very different kinds of competitors, some of which are individually competitive and it may be in one sphere. For example, one scientists who I know who won a Nobel Prize and is another friend of his, a mutual friend said to me that X was happy for all of 15 minutes when he got that call from Stockholm and then he remembered that other people had also gotten Nobel prizes. End of happiness. So he was a very strong competitor, but he did very wonderful work and contributed to science. So we even he's contributed something. You can do wonderful things if you are driven by competition. Then there are those who are group competitors. They feel like they belong to a group that most matters and they're in zero sum competition with other groups. Especially if they feel that these other groups matter less but yet are being regarded as mattering more. It's taking away that they're mattering. And one person that I go into great detail telling his story because his story is amazing, is a former neo Nazi skinhead who grew up rough and bad in his family. His mother was a addict, his stepfather was a brute and Frank dropped Out of school by the age of 13 he came into contact with some neo Nazis. They said to him, look in the mirror, you matter. You are a white male, heterosexual American. You matter more than anybody else in the world because of this group identity and these other people whom they call the mud people of color, they are taking away your mattering and the Jews are behind it. The great replacement theory. So he became a fervent, a full time neo Nazi activist. He did terrible things, he'll be the first one to tell you. He came out of it. He saw the fallacy, the idiocy, he would say, of his ideology. But he grabbed hold of this way of trying to answer his own need to matter with all of his life force and devoted everything to it and did terrible things, as he would tell you, and has spent the rest of his life doing penance for that. This is one of the most amazing stories of somebody who changed his location on the mattering map. He lives for something else now. He lives for. I would call him a heroic, an ethical heroic striver. Anyway, those are the four types.
- [74:46]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Rebecca, thank you for taking them through us. I wanted to hone in on a couple things that I think are important. One is you argue that the mattering instinct is responsible for both humanity's greatest achievements and its greatest atrocities. And you brought up through your last example the atrocities that it can cause. But the divergence here is really binary in many ways. You could look at a Mother Teresa and then you could contrast that with Hitler to show how both of their mattering instincts drove completely different outcomes. Why is this so important for a listener to understand in today's world that we're living in?
- [75:30]
Rebecca Goldstein
I think, look, we are so different by temperament. Belief systems, value systems, culture, our talents, our passions, and that all the individuality all goes into how, how we respond to this shared motivation that we have, deep motivation that shapes our lives. We none of us want to waste our life. We want to respond in the right way to this instinct. And we all recognize, we make the distinction that there are right ways and wrong ways. And we want to, in appeasing this longing and answering the question, do I really matter? That motivates all this. We want to do it in the right way. And it's. We never, there's never the voice of God. Well, some people think there's the voice of God, but most, it's not the voice of God saying, yes, Rebecca, this is the way, this is the way to do it. There's a tremendous amount of uncertainty. We have to live with and it's better to recognize the uncertainty than not. Because if we don't, we. And then we start thinking, look, everybody ought to be living the way I'm living, and they're living it all wrong. And they maybe will even go so far as to say, and they don't matter. They don't matter even they're unhumans. They just are not worthy of any respect or dignity. We want to get it right. And so what I try to do is to offer, given all of this diversity and it's always going to be there, and it's a beautiful thing. One of my favorite quotations is from the Islamic mystic, Sufi mystic Rumi, you know that there are a hundred ways to kneel down and kiss the ground, that there are just so many ways that we can appease this longing in creative, in beautiful ways. And. But there are ways that are ugly and are. And how do we distinguish? Because from the inside the ugly ways feel the right way. So how do we distinguish? And again, I want to, I don't want to, I can't. In times past, we would have put this down to our beliefs about God, the word of God. Of course we differed about the word of God and what he wanted from us. And we differed in often bloody ways about that. Is there some way of adjudicating of the difference between the right and the wrong way that doesn't require us to put our faith in something that we can prove and that we can all agree on? Secularists, religious people, the spiritual, the non spiritual, the Republicans, the Democrats, all of us. And again, I go back to that supreme law of physics that motivates this in a convoluted way, this longing to matter. But I think that that can give us this, the distinction entropy is destructiveness, it's death, it's decay. Life is putting everything we have against this thing so you know it, so that we can live, so that we can flourish as all living things do. I think it's better to be on the side of life than on the side of entropy, on the side of disorder, destructiveness and death. And if our mandarine project is such, so that it's serving us, so that we are living with a sense of flourishing, with living true to our potential, living fully, living, engaged, that's good. But we have to look beyond ourselves as well, is our mannering project, such as to in general be on the side of life's struggle against entropy. If we're living in such a way as to increase suffering, increase confusion, increase ugliness, Increase ill health as opposed to health. This is not a good mattering project. Even if it's working for you. Even if it's working for you, it's increasing entropy, disorder and suffering on a very local level. I talk about, for example, a love bomber who I tell a story about. One of my acquaintances had an experience with this love bomber. Left a whole trail of very sad women behind him. Increasing disorder, increasing suffering. Or it could be on a grand scale, a Hitler, a Pol Pot, a King Leopold, a Belgium, a Putin, and maybe some of our own leaders, but who are increasing chaos, disorder, suffering. And that's not a good way to live. And I think this sort of captures what we intuitively know about morality and about values that be on the side of life. That can be the meaning of life. You are on the side of life itself. That's not arbitrary. When I end the book by talking about an obscure woman, I'm as happy to learn about her. A Chinese woman, incredibly impoverished, was an orphan at three years old, survived by scavenging garbage and bringing it to recycling stations. And this was during the period in China of one baby policy. And she found a lot of babies who were thrown out. She found them in dumpsters, she found them in public toilets. She found them on the side of the road. They were female. If you could only have one baby.
- [81:26]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
You wanted it to be male.
- [81:27]
Rebecca Goldstein
You wanted it to be a male. And so she brought them home, this woman who could barely keep body and soul together. And she brought up over 30 little girls, and she brought home more babies that she could find homes for. If she could find homes for them, she did. Those she couldn't, she raised with the barest means possible. She was dead by the time I learned about her. But I had the great privilege to be able to speak to one of her daughters, Juju, who threw an interpreter. And she. When I asked her, and she was a found baby, she was found, I think, in a public toilet. When I asked her, did you ever want to find your birth mother? And she started crying. I had the best. Okay, I'm going to start crying. I had the best mother of anybody could possibly have. And everybody, every child who passed through her hands had the best mother that anybody could possibly have. And this is such a story of what it is to lead a good life. She was entirely on the side of life, of flourishing. Here are generations now. Juju has her own children, generations who are alive because of her. You know what? Okay, you know what? More?
- [82:50]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Yes, that story reminds me of there's list and that moment where he's sitting, it's a famous picture where he's sitting in a movie theater. And they ask all the people around him who he saved to stand up. And the whole theater stands up. And you realize the ripple effect of your actions on generations.
- [83:11]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yes. And again I quoted Rumi, and from my own tradition, the Jewish tradition, ancient rabbi, Rabbi Hillel, who had said, if I'm not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I'm only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when? And I think this. Both Rumi and Rabbi Hillel had captured many, neither of them by appealing to an almighty God. But what it is to really live a life that matters, matters to yourself. So you can live with yourself, but matters in some more objective sense of being on the side of life. Against disorder, entropy, all the things worth living for. Knowledge, as opposed to ignorance. Clarity, as opposed to confusion. Health as opposed to. Opposed to ill health. Kindness, as opposed to cruelty. Beauty, as opposed to ugliness. All of these require our resisting. Entropy. They all require otter. These are good things. These are all good things. Love as opposed to hatred. These are the things we know intuitively are right.
- [84:29]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
So I want to close on this. Rebecca. One of the mattering instincts, most humane implications is that mattering makes us vulnerable to being wounded by the world. How should that change how we judge one another?
- [84:43]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah, it's hard to be human. Really. It's hard to be human. This is crazy. I still didn't hear. Makes us vulnerable to. Say it again, to being.
- [84:53]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
To being wounded. Wounded by the world. So how does that change that woundedness? How does that change how we judge one another?
- [85:03]
Rebecca Goldstein
That it might be that our mattering project makes us dependent on others, even if we're heroic strivers. I tell the story of Scott Joplin, the great ragtime composer. But he wanted to do something so much grander. He composed operas, Couldn't get them produced. Gave everything to this. And they're marvelous. We know about Tree Minische, which was one of the operas, and. But he was a black man in Jim Crow times. Nobody was going to produce his opera Ragtime Jazz. That was acceptable. But. So sometimes there is a sort of clash between what we need to do to feel that we matter, and. And what the world wants from us. And they don't want that from us. And we need them to want this from us. Or sometimes a romantic longing. This is the person whose love you need in order to quench your thirst to matter. And maybe they like you for a little while but then they leave you or maybe they never. It makes us depending on what our mattering project is, can make us dependent on getting the right response response from the world. And that makes us that can wound us deeply and we have to think about how to respond to that. We sometimes we have to change how we seek our mattering AI it now faces us. It may be stealing our mattering away from us, able to do our creative tasks better than we can. So all creatives will be facing an existential potential dilemma. Can they really matter when AI can do it better? So there are all sorts of things that can go wrong here, which is I think there are practical ways that we can try to meet this depending how it plays out in our lives and the lives of others. But one thing we really ought to be giving freely is our kind of mercy towards toward one another. And in realizing this burden that everybody faces, wherever there is human life, there is the quivering longing to matter that makes us vulnerable to being wounded by the world. And we should have mercy on one another.
- [87:27]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Rebecca, my last question to you and I'm interested to hear your reply is what does it mean for you to live a passion struck life?
- [87:35]
Rebecca Goldstein
Yeah, well, my passion I think is obvious. I love knowledge. I'm going to tell you the truth. I want to know everything. I just want to know everything. And I want to be able to fit that all together in some meaningful way that will be helpful to add something to. If I'm not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I'm only for myself, then what am I? I live by that. And but for me personally, it's understanding things under trying to understand things on a large scale, how it all fits together. Yeah, that is that, that's my passion. My passion is also to love others and that is very hard sometimes. We are all extremely flawed. And this framework that's allowed me to I think try to understand others, it's not to forgive everything about others. We do terrible things to each other by getting I think this wrong, this mannering instinct wrong. But I would say love and knowledge, these are my passions.
- [88:44]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
Rebecca, it was such an honor to have you today. Thank you so much for joining me on Passion Struck and congratulations on this amazing work mattering instinct that you've brought to the world.
- [88:55]
Rebecca Goldstein
Well, thank you so much for understanding what it's about. Thank you very much.
- [89:03]
John Miles
That brings us to the close of today's conversation with Rebecca Goldstein. If this episode lingered with you, it's because it's named something fundamental. The human need to justify our lives not just to others, but to ourselves. Here are three reflections you might carry forward. First, mattering is an inward, moral relationship. Belonging tells us where we stand with others. Mattering asks whether our lives are worthy of the attention they require. Second, the instinct to matter is powerful and dangerous. It fuels care, creativity, and endurance, and it can also distort into competition, exclusion, and harm when misdirected. Third, entropy places a boundary on meaning. Some ways of living sustain the conditions for life, others quietly accelerate decay. The difference matters. Rebecca reminds us that belonging to matter is not something we outgrow. It is something we learn to live more wisely, more mercifully, and more honestly. If this conversation expanded your thinking, consider sharing it with someone who wrestles with questions of meaning, value or worth. Or leave a five star review on Apple, Podcasts or Spotify. It's one of the most meaningful ways.
- [90:13]
Podcast Host/Interviewer
To support the show.
- [90:14]
John Miles
To continue the work, visit theignitedlife.net for guided reflections from the you Matter series. Watch the full conversations on YouTube at John R. Miles or Passion Struck clips. Explore Intention Driven apparel@start mattering.com on Thursday. We continue the inquiry we started today with Daniel Coyle in his new book Flourishing, where we examine how environments, culture and collective practices shape who grows and.
- [90:39]
Guest or Additional Commentator
Who quietly withers modern experience. I think to feel like you're just a cognitive machine, to feel like you're not mattering, I find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent, normalize, that kind of thing, where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational beings and simply machines. But what it looks like is isolation. What it looks like is loneliness. What it looks like is anxiety and depression. I think in the end, when you know we are social animals, we are animals made of meaning without meaningful connection, without mattering. To use the language without mattering.
- [91:13]
John Miles
We're hollowed out.
- [91:15]
Guest or Additional Commentator
It is a core need of us to be in community and growing.
- [91:20]
John Miles
Until then, remember, you matter. Not because of what you prove, but because of who you already are. Your heart counts, your full self belongs, and the people who need your real presence most are waiting for exactly that. I'm John Miles and you've been passion struck.