340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters

Summary

Sean Carroll's Mindscape Ep. 340 | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on What Matters and Why It Matters

Main Theme & Purpose

In this episode, Sean Carroll talks with philosopher and novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein about her life’s work on the concept of “mattering”—what it means to matter, why humans pursue it, and how it shapes our psychological well-being, morality, and societal divisions. The discussion centers on Goldstein’s new book, The Mattering Instinct: How What We Have in Common Drives Us and Divides Us, which analyzes the fundamental ways in which our need to matter defines both individual lives and collective conflicts.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Defining “Mattering” and Its Scope

• Mattering as Deserving Attention:
  Goldstein argues the core of “mattering” is “being deserving of attention” (11:20). This combines a normative (value-laden) sense with deep personal need.
• Personal vs. Social Mattering:
  Humans are unique in their “longing to be deserving of our own attention,” (18:36) not just the attention of others, highlighting the existential self-referentiality of mattering.
• Mattering and ‘Ground Projects’:
  Drawing from philosopher Bernard Williams, Goldstein describes “mattering projects” as the existentially charged endeavors that provide motivation and direction in a person’s life (12:09). Losing these projects can lead to profound depression or aimlessness, as exemplified by William James.

2. The Evolutionary and Biological Roots of Mattering

• Entropy and Life:
  Life is fundamentally a resistance to entropy (disorder):
  “To be alive is to be in resistance to the transformation from within, which is what entropy literally means.” (13:12)
• Self-Attention is Biological:
  Big brains, long childhoods, and social dependence lead humans to extraordinary self-attention and the drive for mattering (25:08).
• Theory of Mind & Counterfactual Thinking:
  Our abilities to imagine other minds and possible futures make mattering a “higher meta-level consideration” for humans compared to other animals (43:20).

3. The Forms and Failures of Mattering (“The Mattering Map”)

• Four Primary Strategies for Mattering (46:30, 71:57—see Goldstein’s “Mattering Map”):

  1. Transcendent Mattering (Cosmic/Religious):
     Belief in being intended by a higher power, “created for a purpose” (49:54).

  2. Social Mattering (Intimate/Non-Intimate Socializers):
     Attaining mattering by belonging to, or being valued by, others—either a close circle or a wider public (e.g., fame) (49:55).

  3. Heroic Striving:
     Pursuing mattering through excellence—intellectual, artistic, athletic, or ethical accomplishment, for its own sake rather than for others’ recognition (50:44).

  4. Competitive Mattering:
     Defining one’s worth in comparison or opposition to others, often in a zero-sum fashion—“mattering more than others” (50:46).

• Toxic and Universalizing Mattering:
  Problems arise when seeking mattering becomes pathological (e.g., needing to matter “more,” or insisting everyone share your mattering project) (59:57, 60:14).

• The Urge to Universalize:
  People often want their way of mattering to be the way:
  “We are trying to prove to ourselves that we objectively matter… If it really is objective, then it must be the fact of the matter, and so it must [be true for] everybody.” (63:10)

4. The Cultural and Moral Implications

• Mattering Across History and Politics:
  Differences in mattering projects explain everything from family dynamics to wars and genocides, highlighting both the nobility and danger of the instinct (65:05).
• Good vs. Bad Mattering Projects:
  Goldstein ties “good” mattering projects to counter-entropic forces: those that create order—knowledge, justice, beauty—while “bad” projects (e.g., conquest, manipulation) create suffering (66:18).
• The Dignity of Human Striving:
  Despite the violence and suffering this need can create, Goldstein emphasizes the inherent dignity in the human struggle to matter (76:14).

5. The Philosophical/Novelist Approach

• Goldstein’s writing—both analytic and fictional—springs from the need to “do justice to the complexity of being creatures of matter who long to matter” (74:47).
• Novel-writing, for her, became a tool to understand “the diversity of human stories and the way mattering plays out in it” (07:44).

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On “Mattering” vs. Mere Attention

“To want to deserve our own attention. What depression is… is you can’t stand to live with yourself… you can’t stand it because you can’t be yourself without paying yourself all of this attention. And to feel unworthy of it is to not even want to continue on with one’s life."
— Rebecca Goldstein (18:36)

On the Roots and Uniqueness of Human Mattering

“We bring justification into the universe. We bring values into the universe in this effort. Sometimes very bad values, but nevertheless, no other creature is doing this, at least on our planet.”
— Rebecca Goldstein (09:56)

On the Social Implications & Failures of Mattering

“One of my favorite stories is about another Nobel laureate… X was happy for all of 15 minutes in his life when he got that call from Stockholm, and then he realized that other people have also gotten that call… Yes, that is a competitor.”
— Rebecca Goldstein (51:09)

On “Good” vs. “Bad” Mattering

“If your life is, the way you’re… is itself counter-entropic, if it creates things that demand otter [order], like knowledge, like justice, like beauty, like fairness… this is a good mattering project."
— Rebecca Goldstein (66:49)

On Tolerance and Diversity in Mattering

“How can we recognize that we’re not all alike without wanting to wring each other’s neck? That is the political problem of our time.”
— Rebecca Goldstein (76:56)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:00] — Introduction; background on “Moving Naturalism Forward” symposium
• [05:13] — Goldstein introduces “mattering” as her life’s work
• [11:05] — Defining “mattering” as “deserving of attention”
• [13:12] — Entropy, resistance to disorder, biology’s role
• [18:36] — The existential burden of mattering; self-attention vs. attention from others
• [25:08] — Evolution of the social brain; origins of the word “matter”
• [31:05] — The William and Alice James case: belonging vs. existential mattering
• [41:14] — Entropy, survival, and Boltzmann’s legacy
• [46:30] — The four mattering strategies (“the mattering map”) introduced
• [59:57] — Toxic mattering and the urge to universalize
• [66:18] — Good vs. bad mattering in the context of ethics and entropy
• [68:14] — The “mattering map” as a conceptual metaphor
• [74:47] — Fiction-writing and the understanding of the “mattering instinct”
• [76:56] — Plurality in mattering and the political problem of difference

Conclusion: Takeaways for Listeners

• Mattering is a universal, deeply human drive, rooted in biology but uniquely shaped by our brains’ capacity for abstraction and self-reflection.
• The pursuit of mattering shapes morality, politics, personal well-being, and can explain both noble achievements and deep divisions.
• There is no single “right” way to matter, but there are clearly destructive and constructive forms.
• Understanding mattering—and respecting its diversity—may help us lower conflict and foster a more compassionate, pluralistic society.

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This summary captures the essence, intellectual depth, and engaging style of Sean Carroll’s conversation with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, providing a structured guide and valuable entry point for those unfamiliar with the episode.

Transcript

[A]

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Some of you might know that back in 2012 I put together a small symposium in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, called Moving Naturalism Forward. The idea being that naturalism is as opposed to theism. Naturalism being the view that the universe is just stuff obeying the laws of physics, that there's no extra supernatural deities or demigods or evil spirits or good spirits pushing us around and affecting our lives or giving us guidance or anything like that. The reason why I wanted to have a symposium on Moving Naturalism Forward is that especially at that time, 2012, there was still a lot of public discussion about atheism versus religion. And the public discussion was it took different forms from different directions, but a lot of it was, you know, the atheistic side, the naturalistic side, just explaining how bad religion was in various ways. And I was on that side, but I always felt that that was the easy part of the whole discussion to have. We needed to not only discuss why the world is naturalistic at heart, but all of the problems with naturalism, all the not reasons to disbelieve it, but the unanswered questions that we really needed to. Indeed, I now teach a philosophy course at Hopkins on philosophical naturalism, which every week we discuss a different question puzzle issue that naturalism has to think about. So we got a lot of great people together there. You can look it up online if you want. The full roster of participants, it was a high powered group, including a number of former Mindscape guests like Alex Rosenberg, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett. Who else? Simon Diddeo was there, David Puppel, a bunch of people whose names you would recognize. Jana Levin. And one of the best, most important, I thought, participants is today's guest, Rebecca Neuberger. Goldstein was there. And the reason why Rebecca was so great in that particular environment where we were just having casual conversations about deep and important ideas, is that she, as we'll mention in this podcast, sort of started out her college career wanting to be a physicist. Later realized that being a philosopher, philosopher was an even better fit for what she cared about. And then even later than that, realized that she actually wanted to be a novelist as well as someone who thought deeply about philosophy and physics and so forth. So through her career, Rebecca has gone back and forth, writing about both philosophy and writing fiction. And at that meeting in 2012, what she was really interested in was mattering, that is to say, what does it mean to say that something matters to us? Or even more importantly, that we Matter in some broad sense, you can matter to other people. You can matter to ourselves. If you are not a naturalist, you might matter in God's eyes for that matter. And this is obviously one of those questions that, on the one hand, is very big and important, on the other hand is maybe almost too big to be tackled in a productive way. Like mattering is just so central to how we live. When we talk about what's important, we're talking about what matters. How is it possible to just write a single book that kind of codifies some issues like this? But I think that the point is that you can talk about gigantically overarching ideas that suffuse every aspect of our lives if you sort of pick an angle and have a lens to look at that. And so Rebecca's point is that the fact that we human beings conceptualize things in terms of mattering, in terms of what matters to us and how we matter to other people and things and ideas, is part of what makes us specifically human. It's both what helps us in many ways. It provides purpose and meaning to our lives, and it hurts us in certain ways if we feel that we don't matter for one way, but also if we want other people's idea of what matters to line up with ours and to say that only our idea of what matters is what's important. So she's finally written it all down into a book that is about to come out called the Mattering Instinct. How what we have in common drives us and divides us. So this is a fun conversation in the sense that there's some, like, careful analysis of psychology and philosophy, but it's also something we can all relate to, right? It's not like talking about the Higgs boson, which I love talking about the Higgs boson. But we can easily put this kind of conversation in the context of our own individual lives and try to figure out how to make those lives matter in a better way to ourselves and to others. So let's go. Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

[B]

It's a pleasure to be here, Sean.

[A]

So you've written a book about mattering. I know that this is something you've been thinking about a very long time. I didn't realize until I got the publicity materials for your book precisely how long you've been thinking about it, but let's ease our audience into it gently. Mattering almost sounds like too big a topic. Doesn't that cover everything? What should we be focusing on when.

[B]

We'Re thinking about Everything that matters.

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

Right, yeah. And actually that was a big problem in writing the book. I think it sheds light, you know, on our own, you know, personal well being and self growth. And I think it sheds a lot of light on our political and religious divisions. All of the most irresolvable and fraught divisions, I think, have a fair heart, the different ways we go about mattering. And I think ultimately it sheds a lot of light on morality and on meaningfulness and on, you know, ethics. And one of the things that I've always been very concerned with is trying to show that science, starting with physics, going to theory of natural selection and onward neuroscience, it doesn't undermine our morality, it can be used to help us, guide us toward morality. So that's. I have a really. It's always been a big. An intuition of mine and so. But you're right, it's really, really big. And it's very, very personal and it's very impersonal and. Yeah, and so I had to tame this thing. And I also wanted to tame it with a lot of stories of how it plays out in individual lives. My other job aside, being trained as a philosopher, an analytic philosopher, a philosopher of science, in fact, is I'm a novelist, so I'm a storyteller. And I'm terrifically interested in the diversity of human stories and the way mattering plays out in it.

[A]

You remember when we were both participating in the Moving Naturalism Forward workshop and one of the other participants was Steven Weinberg, who had a famous quote about the more we learn about the universe? You know this quote? Yeah. The more we come to understand the universe, the more it seems pointless. I know what he meant, but I think that maybe you're going to agree with me that it's a little bit misleading, that quote.

[B]

Yeah, I do. I do think so. And you know, there is a kind. I mean, of course, you know, probably, you know, what he had in mind. And you know, one of the things I'm very interested in the book is mapping out the different ways that people try to satisfy this longing to matter. And, you know, which I try to define analytically what that means, you know, mattering. And you know, and one of the ways is to think that we were purposefully created by some higher transcendent being. You know, that which created the starry heavens and created the moral utter, created each one of us. And so we have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. It doesn't get any bigger than that. Unless you're a lunatic, you know, when you think that you are a transcendent being. But short of that, you know, that is the most sort of grand and perhaps grandiose view of mattering. And, you know, the more we learn scientifically, the less likely that seems.

[A]

That's what he meant.

[B]

Yeah. And that's what he meant. But that doesn't mean that we give up on our mattering projects. Right? Yes.

[A]

So there can be. I had a good friend, a film director, Scott Derrickson, who was a former Mindscape guest. And maybe he got this from somewhere else, but he put it very eloquently. I thought he said, like, the world, the universe, has to be meaningful because I'm part of the universe and it means things to me.

[B]

You know, that's really true. And that's one way of thinking about what we. You know, we. We vaguely talk about the intrinsic dignity of human life. And one of the things that I think gestures towards this is. Yeah. That we are the ones who. In this striving that comes out of the laws of nature that shape us, this striving to try to live lives that we can justify in our own eyes, that make us feel justified in paying such an awful lot of attention to ourselves, each one of us. Right, right. That. Trying to justify that, first of all, we become justificatory. Oh, I'm really glad I got that word out. I'm not going to try it a second time. That we become those kinds of creatures. We bring justification into the universe. We bring values into the universe in this effort. Sometimes very bad values, but nevertheless, no other creature is doing this, at least on our planet.

[A]

So let's home in on that analytically rigorous definition of what the word means. When. When we talk about mattering, do we necessarily mean mattering to somebody else or mattering to ourselves? Like what. What does mattering mean to you?

[B]

I think so. We talk about what matters, and we talk about who matters. And I think that the core elemental meaning is deserving of attention. And so already this is a term that combines what philosophers call the normative. Right. Deserving is a normative term. It brings in norms of justification. So if we are what I. My shorthand for what we are. Are creatures of matter who long to matter. It already says we are normative creatures at our core. And.

[A]

Yeah, and that doesn't. That's what I.

[B]

That's what I mean. Yes, by mattering.

[A]

But that doesn't require taking a stance on moral objectivism versus subjectivism yet.

[B]

No, no, it doesn't. And you know. And, you know, might be Your full fledged, you know, mechan or hedonist or whatever it is. But whatever you are, you have a way of trying to justify your own life, which is a condition for engagement in that life. You know, Renard Williams had this notion philosopher, important British philosopher of primarily the, you know, the 20th century, 21st century. And he spoke about ground projects, you know, and he. These are these projects that are sort of existentially charged for us. I call them mattering projects, but that see us through, that they give us the impetus to get on with our lives and they themselves take a lot of energy and it all. Of course, I'm a little trepidatious about talking about entropy.

[A]

You have to do it. It's there.

[B]

Yeah, we'll have to do it. Because it all goes back to that, you know, to be alive is to be in resistance to the transformation from within, which is what entropy literally means.

[A]

So if, if to matter is to be deserving of attention, there's already like a hackle that goes up and you say, like, should we want attention? Is it the same thing as. As asking for attention to want to matter or those.

[B]

Not necessarily. It's our own attention. So there, there is, there are different ways of trying to fulfill what I think is this core human, a need, longing. And it's a longing because we can never be sure. We can never be sure. Not even those who go after, you know, religious or spiritual, you know, grand mattering. They certainly can never be sure there. We certainly understand our leap of faith, but all of us are making some leap of faith in trying to justify ourselves to ourselves. And one of the ways is certainly mattering to mattering to others. And I ought to say, I think that there are two fundamental needs that we have. And Freud had said love and work. And I would imagine mend that love. I think it's connectedness, longing, belonging. I mean, not longing, belonging. You know, it's interesting that belonging has longing and you know, and other that that comes to us by way of being gregarious creatures evolved from gregarious creatures. We're not the only creatures who need other special creatures of our kind in our lives who will regard us as deserving attention whether we deserve it or not. That's what I look for for the people who are in my life, right? My friends, my family, my lovers, my lover, my, you know, my community, perhaps my colleagues. They're in my life. I need it. Love them, but I will get attention from them whether I deserve it or not. Belonging is a kind of mattering. It's mattering to others in your life. But then the thing that I'm talking about, this existential dimension that I don't think any other creatures share is. So let me just back up a moment. Belonging means it has to do with our relationship with others. Clearly the belonging to matter that I'm interested in has to do with our relationship with ourselves. And it is, it's a given that we are going to pay the an incessant abundance, abundant, excessive amount of attention to ourselves. It is a given, it's a biological. If it's written into our biology. Who. Who am I? You know, who am I? I am the person who. If you were to ask why are you paying so much attention to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein? I would say I am Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Question is answer. That's all you need to know to. To be a particular thing is to that identity consists in paying yourself first and foremost a tremendous amount of attention and nothing else. No other relationship is needed. I pay a tremendous amount of attention to two young women who exist in this universe and now two young men, two very little young men. And those two young women are my daughters and those two little men are my grandsons. And if I say, look, these people really, really matter to me and they say why? I would say I will give my relationship to them. But for myself, why do I pay myself attention? I am myself. That's what it is. When I am gone, there will nobody else in the universe who has an un. Reasoned inclination to pay so much attention to that particular thing. And it's a very, very wordy Spinoza gets it all in very briefly to his notion of conitas, that what individual identity consists in is a striving to persist and to flourish in one's own being. That that is what where this is this Konatas, this is the very essence of one's identity. Okay, now I've totally forgotten what you.

[A]

No, this is good. But let me, let me see if I get the distinction because look, I have two cats. They certainly want attention frequently. But am I correct in thinking you're drawing a distinction between wanting attention and feeling that one is deserving of attention? That's sort of a higher meta. Level consideration.

[B]

Exactly. And first and foremost, which I think is amazing that we have, that we have come to this to want to deserve our own attention? Our own attention. I mean, what depression is, and I've suffered from bouts of it and certainly had friends who suffered from more than bouts of it, is you can't stand to live with yourself you know, it is. It is like an auto. Psycho, psychic autoimmune disease. You can't stand it because you can't be yourself without paying yourself all of this attention. And to feel unworthy of it is to not even want to continue on with one's life. So this is a very deep psychological need and it has to do with our relationship to ourselves.

[A]

And is the word attention especially relevant now in a world where demands on our attention are more intrusive than ever?

[B]

Yeah, because, you know, what is it? What is our mind filled with our subjectivity? It's what we're paying attention to, you know, so there is. There is again, there's a kind of evaluative notion that goes into this. If you're paying so much attention to it, you must think it's deserving of attention. Okay. We're all frivolous in one way or another, you know, and we, you know, binge on things that we probably ought not to be paying attention to.

[A]

But.

[B]

But we draw this. We draw this distinction between those things that truly deserve our attention, that matter. That's what mattering means, being deserving of our attention. And to ask this question of whether I, who must be, be myself, I must pay so much attention to myself. And truly deserving of this attention is to become a different order of being altogether.

[A]

And you do think that this is something that is different for humans than for other kinds of animals. Is there some relationship here to our capacity for abstraction or something else? How does that relate to other human beings?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, we've got these amazing big brains.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And you. Right. Which take a tremendous amount of energy. Right. So many ways for them to break down. And we have. It comes with the capacity for self reflection, for which is really quite an amazing thing. Right. For being able to. We have a theory of mind, which I think we evolved in order to. Because of. We're gregarious creatures. It's. It's, you know, it's good to be. Not only are we gregarious creatures, we're altricial. I don't know what that means. Yes. Altricial comes from the Latin for we are. We take a lot of nourishing. Actually, when we talk about our alma mater. Alma mater, we're saying, you know, we're saying that our colleges or universities are our nurturing mothers. And that's really interesting too, that the word matter comes from mother, which is a fascinating semantic story.

[A]

I'm not going to go in. No, I want you to go into that. Is that true? The Word mother was first, and the word matter came later.

[B]

Yes, yes, yes. So here's. So it's an interesting story. It's a philosophical story. So Aristotle wanted this word for what we call matter, the stuff, the basic stuff. And, you know, contra his. Or pace. His mentor Plato, who thought real being is in the forms, he said, you know, was kind of stuff informed, you know, and that's how a thing is made. There is this, what we would call matter, but there was no such word.

[A]

Right?

[B]

And so he used the word form for. In ancient Greek for wood, highly. But just think of it as. He thought of it as pure potentiality, having no characteristics of its own. It was just pure passive receptivity. The Latin translators of Aristotle didn't want to use the word would, and they were trying to come up with a concept for pure receptivity, passive, formless receptivity. And they just grabbed hold of the metaphor of motherhood because, according to them, following Aristotle, the master, women have no role to play in conception other than being pure passive receptivity for the informing male. And of course, this stood to reason because Aristotle thought that what women were, his definition of women, were people who failed to be men. So to me, this is such an amazing story because the very word we use for the stuff of the universe that you physicists study. Right. Is. And the verb that we in English have derived from it, the verb to matter, to be worthy of attention, has written into it the ancient and still ongoing view among some people that men matter more than women. So, what a storm.

[A]

That is a great story. Just to add to it, I had Jacob Berendes on the podcast recently. I don't know if you know Jacob.

[B]

He's a. I don't know. I know, of course, the name.

[A]

Yes. So he told me that the word matrix is also developed from the word mother etymologically. And it makes me think that, you know, when physicists in the 1990s were very excited about M theory, they refused to specify what the letter M stood for. And two of the options were matrix and mother, but mattering was not one of them. Maybe I could put that in there as.

[B]

Maybe we could put that in there.

[A]

Battering theory.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So where were we? We were. I was trying to explain the word when I got off on Ama Mater.

[A]

It's. Yeah, it was my fault that I insisted that you do that.

[B]

Yeah, right. Okay. So, yeah, not only are we, you know, gregarious, but we are traditional, meaning that we are helpless for an incredibly long time. Right. Because of These big, big grains. And so we're born substance prematurely. You know, the brain, there's, it's hard enough to get those fetuses out of our head, of our bodies. Right. And, and we are, you know, and I think birth is exactly at the point at which the, the caloric needs of the fetus would overcome the metabolic needs of the mother.

[A]

That makes sense.

[B]

Time to get out, right?

[A]

You're on your own from now on.

[B]

You're on your own. Yeah, but you know, the brain of a child, you know, every time when you have a little infant, you know, and you bring it the first year to the pediatric appointments, they're measuring the skull, you know, because the brain has to double. I think that first year because it's so much maturing has to go. And it takes place until our early 20s, when the last piece of the brain finally comes in. The one that has us being responsible and having some, some sense of accountability comes in, you know, around 22, 23, 40. So. But yeah, so we are really, we really need other members of our species who will pay us attention whether we deserve it or not. Our very lives depend on it. That's why we were born so cute. We smelt so good.

[A]

Well, but as I recall in your book you, you mentioned mattering as one of two aspects of human flourishing. Is that right?

[B]

Yeah, well, mattering to others, this belonging, mattering to others, you know, those special others who are in our life on pain of extreme loneliness. We know what happens if there is nobody in your life who will pay you special attention. That is the hell of loneliness. But there's another hell that comes to us by. And other animals. Animals certainly. Oh God. If you've ever lived with a dog, you know, right. They chewed and then. Yes, they were very, very sensitive. And you have to pay them special attention. But to a certain extent, cats too. But not like dogs. But in any case, and not like humans because we're, we're so very dependent on this and everything is more complicated in us. We're just more complicated. But there's this other way that we can go to hell. And that is when we feel that we don't matter. We can have all of those social connections. And I tell the story of William James, one of my favorite figures, both philosopher and psychologists and a fantastic writer. So William James, yeah, important, important figure in this kind of question, these existential questions. And he suffered a terrible depression during his youth. Multi talented, very, very supportive family and friends. And, and yet he was contemplating suicide for a very long time. He tells this story, he disguises it. He attributes it in the Varieties of Religious Experience. He attributes it to somebody else. But he told his son and some other people that it was him. And it was this other thing, this existential thing. He couldn't hit on what I call a mattering project that would carry him forward. Once he did, he was off and running. I mean, he revolutionized psychology. He was a figure in philosophy. He was a beloved teacher. He was a wonderful, wonderful author. The Principle of Psychology is still an amazing work. And he was known for his boundless energy. And yet he, in his youth, spent half a year or more in bed contemplating suicide. So there is this other. And, oh, and his sister, Alice James, who we only learned of, well, maybe in the 70s or then when her journal was finally published. But she had the same psychology of William James. But being a Victorian woman, there was no outlet for her. And so she turned all of that into. She was a professional invalid. That's what she was. She got a lot of attention from her family like that. But she was constantly contemplating suicide. And when she finally got early 40s, when she finally got breast cancer, she was sort of happy in a way because she finally had a diagnosable illness and she could just go to bed and wait for death. I mean, so it looks like a controlled experiment. You know, two people with very much the same kind of temperament, the same what I call heroic strivers. I go on and distinguish between various ways that people try to meet this, this mattering instinct. But one had an outlet. And so when he, he loved, you know, the, the, the comic came pouring in. You know, I read a whole book of, of tributes to him when he died. And, and the other one, what support did she have? You know, the support of ineffectual doctors and fucked up pillows.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, I guess the, the lowbrow version of this. Didn't you tell the story of Kevin Bacon in your book?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the actor, right?

[A]

Yes, that's right. Walking around in disguise.

[B]

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Now, some, you know, we'll get into, you know, but there are different ways that we, we go after this, and I think it very much defines our lives. You know, when I'm writing novels and this is how I came on, this really was really trying to understand characters that I was writing about who were not myself and trying to understand what made them tick.

[A]

It's hard.

[B]

It's really, really hard. And this was my window into it. And then I saw, oh, this is a window that opens up into many, many things, right? Religion and heroic striving and politics and. Too much. Too much, as you say it was too much. Right, but. But some. One of the things that people, you know, try to do is, is to be famous. That is, if tons of people, including strangers, are paying attention to us. Surely I'm deserving of my own attention. I've got these hordes, you know, tweeting about what I eat for breakfast or who my latest lover is. Surely, surely I matter, you know, and so that is a very natural way of trying to feel like you matter to be famous. And now that because it's come so much easier to be famous, I mean, really easy to become famous, you know, we have people who are famous for just being famous, so that way has really been open. And, you know, there are polls that show that, you know, young people would give up all sorts of things, a good love partner, children, all the. In order to be famous. You know, that that's what quenches this longing for them. It often turns out to be not so very satisfactory because the public is fickle and so. Yeah, but Kevin Bacon, you know, he got sick of being so famous, and he wanted to experience what it would be like to be able to move through people and not, you know, and not be swamped with selfies and that sort of thing. And so he got a prosthetic nose and eyeglasses and all sorts of things. And he said. I said, this sucks. I had to wait on line for a fucking coffee. I didn't have people coming over and say how much they love me. Forget it. So, yeah, but most of us have to make do with waiting on line for coffee and not having people come over and say how much they love us.

[A]

So you've alluded to this already, but if human beings do depend on this feeling that they need to matter so much, if it's an instinct, like you put it, how does that relate to, of course, biology and fundamental physics, which is two of our big themes here on the Mindscape podcast. You talk a lot about entropy and natural selection and all that stuff.

[B]

I'm sure you do, yes. So I don't have to go into the nitty gritty, of course. But entropy, you know, means that every. In every closed system, entropy, which is disorder, increases, and all things do tend toward disorder. But enclosed systems, meaning that there's no resource to external, free energy that can be put to use, that we are able to use that energy to resist entropy. No living system is a closed system.

[A]

Right. Wouldn't work.

[B]

That's definition. Right. And I guess Schrodinger was really the first who pinpointed this. What is life? It is to be in resistance to entropy. That's what life is. And to have resources, recourse to low entropy. Sources of energy, mainly food and sunlight and certain chemicals. And what do we do with this? We resist entropy. What this means. And in creatures who have evolved attention. Let me just. Yeah. And creatures who have evolved attention. Evolve. It follows that the bulk of the attention is going to be centered on ourselves. How the environment affects our ongoing resistance to entropy. That is, we want to. Our project is to. As Spinoza had put it in Konitas, our. Our project is to survive and to flourish in our own being. And this is. It's even deeper than the instincts. It's sort of the organizing principles of all of the instincts that we've evolved. This is, you know, talking in very, very general terms that we can speak more specifically. But this is, you know, the direction. And then there are. There's a tension. Tension evolves so that we can take more finely attuned advantage of our environment. Food go towards it, predators run. And so attention again, is going to be. It's attention to the environment, but there's a kind of self referentiality that hangs over a good deal of our attention. How is this affecting my primary project, which is to survive and to flourish. So, you know, okay, and then we develop. Oh, this is where we broke off to talk about the word matter. We have a theory of mind because we are so developed, so slowly developing, and so dependent on others of our own species. And so we have to be able to distinguish who is going to be a source of nourishment and comfort and softness and who to flee. And we make out. We are able to at a quite early age. I think it's toddlerhood able to make out, or maybe even earlier make out the notion that others have minds, have desires, have their beliefs that are different from our own. Right. And then we. Very different from our own. If you're me, yeah. My desires and beliefs seem to be different from everybody anyway. It's. But then we develop this capacity for self reflection. We can kind of step out of ourselves and turn this theory of mind on ourselves. Right. Look at ourselves as an object of interrogation to try to discover things about. And one of the first things that becomes so apparent in being yourself is how much damn attention you pay to yourself. And if you have any sense of perspective, you realize that you're not worthy of all of this attention, if we measure how much we think something matters by how much attention we pay to it, it would seem that we seem to think that we are the thing that matters the most in all the universe. And as I say, short of lunacy, we know that this is not true. Even Donald Trump knows this. This is not true. Right. That it. Well, okay, you're. I, I see your. On your face. Okay, well, he's what we call very well defended against self reflection. Very well defended against self reflection. But, you know, it is, it is to us. And, and it's out of that, seeing the inc. What I call the mattering incommensurability. I don't think I say that in the book, but this inc. Incommensurability between how much we must, in order to be ourselves, matter to ourselves, and how much we think in our moments of objectivity, which we are capable of in turning our theory of mind onto ourselves, that is an objective capacity towards ourselves, we are able to see this incommensurability. And what I think this, what I call the mannering and instinct, it's not really, it's more complicated than a real instinct, but what I call. It's the combination of two instincts. Self reflection applied to our own self mattering gives us the mattering instinct, that is the longing to make the amount of attention that we feel we deserve a little bit more commensurable with how much we give it by choosing a certain kind of life, you know, that we feel will make them more commensurable. I was telling this to a. Do you know Richard Thaler, the economist?

[A]

I know his name. Yeah, yeah.

[B]

He's a Nobel laureate in economics. And I was telling this. This theory to him and I said. And he said, well, how much mattering. How much mattering do you think it takes? And I said, I know, you're the economist. You tell, you give me the amount. And he said, a smattering of mattering, which I really liked. So I have it from a Nobel laureate.

[A]

I'm disappointed that he didn't say $2.5 million worth of mattering. Let's go quantify this. So I will very briefly mention, just for historical reference purposes, it's absolutely true that Schrodinger highlighted this fact that, you know, we make use of free energy out there in the world. But Boltzmann totally understood it.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

He did not, like, write a book about it, but he definitely mentions it in talks right from the start.

[B]

Absolutely right. And as you know, he's one of my big heroes. In the book, you know, and a man who accomplished so much. Right. We are still reaping. Right. The benefits of his insight. And he made probability, you know, he introduced it as a fundamental in physics which went to get, you know, he got hell for that. Right. And so, you know, I worship and you know, when I ever since I was a student of physics, you know, as I was as an undergraduate, did you know that. Yes, yes, yes.

[A]

I only invite people on the show who are former physics students.

[B]

We are many that, yeah. That there is something, there is something of human consequence for. From the second law of thermodynamics. There's something so tragic about it. But his story is, it's, you know, is so tragic and, but yes. Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up Boltzmann.

[A]

He deserves some credit for that. Okay. But I want to, I want to get into a little bit more to this sort of theory of mind stuff. I wonder how general it is. I mean, one of the things that human beings can do is kind of run counterfactual simulations in our brains. Right. We can imagine how things could have been different. And I, I, I've heard different claims at different levels of strength here, but that does seem to be something that we are better that at than other species.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

And somehow like every species wants to survive, but is it somehow that the combination of a drive to survive plus our ability to run these simulations and think about other people and what they think, et cetera, you know, gives us this extra handle where matterings suddenly become super important?

[B]

Yeah, I, I think that that's, that that's absolutely true. And we are also able to have this notion, I don't know, maybe there. And you know, we obviously have a very well developed sense of self. You know, there are tests and you know, the mark on the forehead, what do they call that? The mark test or something? You know, that whatever, you know, that some other animals, you know, certainly.

[A]

Oh yeah, the mirror test and things like that.

[B]

The mirror test, the mirror test. Right, right, right, right. You know, had this, you know, that they have a sense of their selves as a thing that has characteristics, you know, and that some characteristics may or may not belong to it. And that is a notion of self. But our notion of the self and of our lives as our whole life is, you know, involves a degree of counterfactual reasoning, projection into the future and into the past. This notion of ourselves over long term and our wanting that long term thing that we are very finite thing that we are to matter in the sense of it is going to take up all of this energy of us. It's going to take up our valuable attention. It's really, you know, the contents of our brain, of our, of our minds, of our living conscious mind is what we're paying attention to. And most of the time we're paying attention to ourselves. The default network mode, you know, where our minds are when they're not really focused on anything external. When we're sort of daydreaming, fantasizing this sort of thing, we. What are we thinking about? We're thinking about ourselves, you know, usually. Yeah, as psychologists, they've done tests on this. It's like some very high percentage of the time is spent thinking about ourselves. And we, you know, that's self mattering. And every creature has it, you know, self mattering in the sense of this conitas, they are striving to survive and to, and, and to flourish. As I say, it's just, it's just built. Yeah, it's it that we all, we get that from the laws of, of, of nature that shaped us ultimately.

[A]

Right. But then there is like the dark side of all this. You already mentioned the fact that once mattering becomes important, we have a new anxiety that maybe we don't matter to other people.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. Keep saying to other people because there are.

[A]

Right, you're right.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

I just don't matter.

[B]

It could be true. God, it could be, you know, I can I. Maybe I'll talk about that. That I have these four different strategies. General strategies.

[A]

Exactly. Let's go into that.

[B]

I'm not a psychologist. I haven't run all the experiments that you're supposed to. What I've been doing is ever since this first emerged in like when I started thinking about it, I've just been talking to people about it constantly. If you sit next to me on a bus, you are going to talk to me. I am going to question you about, you know, what is where, what is your existential longing. What is the thing that you do that really matters to you? And if it went wrong, you would have to really rethink your life. Think I'm getting it, I'm getting it wrong. And so I come up with, you know, I've spoken to pickup artists, right? You know, they try to pick me up, they're going to be talking about mattering and why that pickup artist, right. And you know, I spoke to an ex Nazi skinhead, you know, who has become a good friend. And so there's so many different ways, you know, and this ex Nazi, I mean, he used to believe that his Mandarin derived from his being a white male American. And people like me, women, Jews, are trying to steal it from him. You know, that. And, you know, this is a kind of mannering that's understood in zero sum terms for me to matter. Others matter less. And those others might be defined by their group or it might be defined by everybody. Again, I think Donald Trump is a wonderful, like, example of this. He's in competition with everybody, unless those who, you know, are the fruit of his loins, you know, because they're extensions of himself or, or his lack, you know, but, you know, this is an extreme example of competitive, what I call competitive mattering, mattering more than others. And which is, you know, those who lust after power are, that's what's motivating them. So there's, so there is. But the four types of mattering that I have come in contact with is what I call transcendent mattering or cosmic mattering, and that is religious, spiritual, the belief, a metaphysical belief that there is some author of one's being who created you for a purpose and you matter to that being, otherwise he or it wouldn't have created you. But, you know, he may very well be judging you and you better do what he wants. You know, so that's. Yeah, right. And I was born into that. You know, I, I come from a Orthodox Jewish family and I believe that for the first 12 years of my life, that, that, yes, that, that, that kind of mannering. And I used to pray three times a day. I mean, I was, I was. Even though women are required to. But of course I'm in. You know, I, I took it to the extreme, you know, but so there's transcendent mattering, there's social mattering, and that is mattering to others. And there are those who I call intimate socializers. And they're the belonging, belongingness and, and, and the mattering instinct are collapsed into one. It's to matter to those who are in one's life.

[A]

Okay?

[B]

And that is, and that's what mattering means. And an awful lot of people are of this type. And you know, and they're not necessarily doing it right. You know, the advice columns are filled with people who, you know, are doing it all wrong. You know, my mother grabs me scary, you're not doing all she wants, the Runway life and blah, blah, blah, you know, and so, yeah, so it's not necessarily doing it right. And then there are the none in what I call the non intimate Socializers. And that's like, you know, wanting to matter to hordes of strangers. You might be a cult leader or you might be a fame seeker or, you know, something of. Of this sort, but that is you. So it doesn't have to be people who are in your life, you know, just tons of people paying attention to you. So these are social. Socializers. Then there are heroic strivers.

[A]

That sounds like a good one to be.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, not necessarily easy. Not necessarily. Nothing's easy really. But it's. Yeah, it's hard to be. It's hard to be human. I think that's my major takeaway. It is hard to be human, you know, to be trying to not only live according to the laws of nature that have shaped us, but. But to prove to ourselves that we're worthy.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Worthy by those things.

[A]

Right. We matter.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. And so it's a real burden. And so. But heroic strivers have some standard of excellence in mind. It could be intellectual, it could be artistic, it could be athletic, it could be ethical, could be some mixture of those. And they are not. It's really not mattering to others. And I have many examples of this. You know, it's. You can be very, very famous and then, you know, be a very famous poet and like John Berryman, one of the people whose story I tell and end up committing suicide, you know, because. Yeah. And, you know, it's. Yeah. And so the. To. That's being a heroic striver. And then there are the competitors. Competitive, mannering, it. They really see Mandarin as a zero sum game. They have Mandarin adversaries, you know, that they have and that they. And, you know, here's the interesting thing, Sean. Some people who really seem like heroic strivers really are competitors. So there is another. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're an academic. So, you know, one of my favorite stories is about another. Another Nobel laureate, whom I know. And some. I was discussing him with somebody else who knows him very, very well, and he said to me, you know, I'll just call him X. X was happy for all of 15 minutes in his life when he got that call from Stockholm. And then he realized that other people have also gotten that call from Stockholm and that, like, just. Yes, that is a compliment. And it's very, very hard. I mean, you know, you have to have sympathy. I think that's the other thing. We've been going through some very hard times, right, in this country and in this world, and we're very much at loggerheads and we see Adversaries. Wherever we are, we're seeing adversaries. I can't tell you how much this framework has helped me to, I don't know, lower my anger. My. How can you be like this? You know, to realize that, yeah, there's something very human even when it goes so very wrong. But there's some way in to understand these people. If I can be friends with an ex Nazi. Ex Nazi, though he is an ex Nazi, and he's a wonderful person, and he's spending the rest of his life doing penance for what he had done in his earlier part of his life. Yes. But it does show there's a way out. And it was because he was treated with dignity by other people. That's how he came out of it. Which is also, I think, such a lesson to, you know, everybody's struggling to feel like they matter. Don't tell them that they're dirt. Don't tell them they're deplorable.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, we get in trouble with that. But I want to distinguish, because it sounds like there could be some overlap between the competitors, socializers, transcenders. But because the socializers care about mattering to their circle, whatever that circle might be, the competitors want to matter more than anybody else. But you could want to matter more than anyone else to your circle, I suppose, right?

[B]

You could, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what it is. What is going to make you happy? Is it going to be the relationship itself? You know, that it's a nurturing that.

[A]

You matter or the fact that you matter more?

[B]

More. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it is. I mean, it's sort of subtle. And I have now some very wonderful psychologists who have gotten interested in this mainly from the community of positive psychology, and they want to devise questionnaires that will get at these distinctions.

[A]

That's what they do.

[B]

That's what they do. And I hope I've given them a lot of material to do this, because there are so many things that I would love to see tested. For example, among heroic strivers, some of us who are heroic strivers. I'm a heroic striver. I come out and freely confess.

[A]

Good for you. Yeah.

[B]

And which is not to say that, you know, that the people who matter to me don't matter to me enormously. Right. But. But in addition to that, I can be made miserable by my mattering projects going wrong, you know, and when. When they are failing, I feel that I am failing. So. And if I am failing in my relationship to the people in my life, I Also fail that I'm failing. You know, there are two ways. I mean, but we're socializers, intimate socializers. There's really only one way to fail and that's in your relate. So in that sense it's better. But look, I don't think we have all that much choice in how we come out. You know, that is a matter of, you know, it's both nature and nurture. All I know is that I was not nurtured to be a heroic striver at all.

[A]

Sometimes it happens that. That's true.

[B]

And sometimes it just happens. Yes, yes. So what was I saying? I've lost this.

[A]

Well, in the case of. I wanted to ask, in the case of your, for example, your ex skinhead Nazi friend, can you see the sort of a through line of the same kind of mattering instinct that that person had that just was sort of fulfilled, filled in one mode early on and became different later? Or did they switch?

[B]

Yeah, he really, you know, he really had a competitive notion of mattering. He was really basing his mattering on belonging to a certain group, white straight male Americans. And he ought to have mattered more than everybody else. And here were all these other people taking it away from him. When he realized that that was, in his words, bullshit, he really did look for another way of trying to. And he really has become an ethical heroic striver. That's what he is, you know, and it. So it really, it's an amazing. It's. I think one of the. Of all the people I've spoken to, he amazed me the most with his transformation.

[A]

That's a real transformation.

[B]

Yeah, it was a real transformation. And it was deep and you know, and it was by stages. First he was in jail and the people that he got along with were other black males. But it came out a stage. Still hated Jews. He hated them more than ever because that was the one thing, that one hatred that tied him to his former identity. Who was he without this? You know, he had no idea. And then, you know, that fell by the wayside again because of somebody he met who treated him with respect. So. But he really has changed his whole sense of mattering. I should also say that a very big difference. And I would love for these psychologists, people who know how to do this, to test this. For some people, you know, they. They hit on their way of mattering and it just serves them. They just go charging on through life and there it is, it's all just fine. For other of us, it emerges again and again, you know, as I Say, you know, my mattering project is faltering. You know, who am I, what am I, how do I deserve to be walking this planet? This sort of thing. So, you know, some of us have. And William James, throughout his life, had these periods of having to convince himself all over again. So it's a deep difference in our psyches. Those of us who are. It's very robust. And others of us would say not so robust, you know, who have to. And that might, you know, that might be a spur to ambition, to taking on more and more. Right, yeah.

[A]

So one kind of failure mode then is this sort of toxic mattering where you're, you know, putting too much emphasis on the wrong kind of mattering or whatever. But then there's another failure mode, I guess, where you insist that yours is the only right way of mattering and want everyone else in the world to do it your way.

[B]

Yes. So they call this the urge to universalize. And it comes so naturally to us. We know about transcenders, of course. You know, they're the ones who have jihads and crusaders. And, you know, I don't know if you have debated religious apologists on stage. Yeah, I had one experience doing it and will never do it again because I have never, never been exposed to somebody who fights so dirty as, like, really, really dirty, pulled out something personal and. And, and fraudulent, and I was just left abased. So, yes, and I will never do it again. But. But. Okay. But, you know, of course, transcenders, because they base it on some metaphysical belief, you know, that holds for all of us. We're all in the same reality, whether we recognize it or not. And they're God, however they conceive of it, you know, wants us to be this way. And so you're either failing or not, you know, and I should. That's a little too coarse. Also, there are some transcenders who think that the. The mattering falls on all of us equally. And they have a kind of, you know, Catholic with a small C view of this. And some who know, you have to accept this and be living your life for this. And, you know, otherwise you really don't matter. You really don't matter. And. And so. Yeah, but what I have found that all across what I call the mattering map, people universalize. And I have a whole slew of statements that I have been collecting, you know, from. From scientists and from artists and from. Oh, one of my favorite is from the fashion icon Diana Freeland, who was a editor of Vogue magazine. And she said, you know, you know, you. You have to. I can't remember it verbatim, but you have to dress well. That's what gets you down the stairs in the morning. Without it, you are nothing. What? I mean, yes. And then this other guy who was a strong man, who says, if you can't do a deadlift, you're. You're nothing. You know, there are all these ways of universalizing, and it comes pre. Naturally. It comes as naturally to us as the mattering instinct itself, because we are trying to prove to ourselves that we objectively matter. It's not just a case of my being me. So of course I mattered me. No, there's something objective about what. How I'm living and how I am carving out this life that I have that makes me matter. But if it really is doing the work for me, if it really is objective, then it must be the fact of the matter, and so it must. Everybody ought to be true.

[A]

It should be objectively true. I have this conversation with. With, you know, fellow academics and writers and so forth, less about mattering than about meaning, which is very closely related, very close. And they'll say, well, you know, of course, a meaningful, successful life is one in which you're creative and trying new things and doing something different all the time. I'm like, well, maybe for you it is, and that's perfectly valid, but it's okay if somebody else just wants to have their pizza and watch football and that's, you know, maybe live a nice family life. That's good.

[B]

That's right. Bring up their children, you know. Yeah. To be flourishing human beings. You know what? So we have. And this is really. This is the real diversity, the amazingly interesting diversity in us. I know. Diversity has now become a very loaded word. You know, I'm still in favor of.

[A]

It here at the Mindscape podcast. We are pro diversity.

[B]

Me too. Me too. But this is, you know, a kind of diversity that leads to very deep differences between us, you know, and so. And if our whole life is staked on, like saying, this is the Mavering project, this is what makes my life worth pursuing. This is what gets me out of bed in the morning, then why isn't it yours? And the mere fact that you are living a life and not living it, according to me, is an offense. I cannot tolerate it. And because clearly something is wrong in the logic there. And also, I am not a nihilist. I am not a moral relativist. I do think that there is a big difference between getting our mattering right and getting our Mattering wrong. Yes. If I decide I'm going to invade Ukraine to show that I matter.

[A]

That's bad.

[B]

Yeah. You know, Ukrainians be damned. This is not good. Right. This is not a good way of pursuing my mattering. If I'm a love bomber. Is that what it's called, love bombing? Right. And the way, and again I tell a story of a young woman whose life was pretty much ruined by a love bomber. Not ruined, but really knocked off track for her for a long time, you know, that somebody who needed to seduce in a, in a passionate love affair, you know, an all inclusive, heady, you know, crazy sentimental music playing in the background. Love affair. But again and again and again and again, leaving behind, you know, completely damaged young women in the wake. That is a bad way of doing it. That is a bad way of doing it. So that there are, you know, bad ways on historical Hitler, Putin, King Leopold of Belgium, Trump. That there are bad ways of doing it and better ways of doing it. And can I say that once again, I go back to the second law of thermodynamics?

[A]

You can always say that.

[B]

I can always say that that's where it starts. And to me, this is the best criterion for the dividing line between good and bad ways of trying to satisfy our mattering instinct, recognizing the huge diversity so that we're never going to do it in exactly the same way. And I would not recommend that everybody become a philosopher, God forbid.

[A]

Oh my God.

[B]

Yeah, right. Who would be the butcher? And so it, you know, it's just. But you know that life itself is a counter entropic process, right? And if you're a Mandarin project, if your life is the way you're. Is itself counter entropic, if it creates things that demand otter, like knowledge, like justice, like beauty, like calamity, like fairness, if, if you're, if we are at one with our mattering project, with the force of life itself, this is a good, this is a good mattering project. If you're a doctor, if you're, you know, whatever, if you know, if you're, if you're adding to knowledge, if you're adding to justice, all of these things, everything worth living for is a real battle because it's a real battle for order against disorder. So, yeah, I start with the law of entropy and I end with the law of entropy.

[A]

And I do want to give you an opportunity here because you offer us a conceptual metaphor to help us along in understanding how this works, which is the, the mattering map.

[B]

The mattering map, yes.

[A]

Explain what the mattering map is.

[B]

Yeah, this mattering map. And this was something that I really owe to what my. One of my fictional characters, you know, which is just a whole other story. The way, you know, people, a lot of my colleagues, you know, felt that I went. I just went berserk when I. When I published a novel when I was very young, I was still an assistant professor, meaning not tenured. And I published a novel, the Mind Body Problem. It was very philosophical novel, had a philosophical title, but it was a novel. And, you know, and here I was claiming to be a philosopher of science and doing something as frivolous as writing a novel. But in fact. In fact, yeah, I can. I can sympathize with that. And. But in fact, that's. That's where this idea came from of how important mattering is. And the mattering map itself was led to by this character. So what happened was this character, and she's actually a graduate student in philosophy ever since where I went. But unlike me, I was a happy little graduate student because I was doing philosophy of science. It was technical and it was all fine, but she was sort of outside that ilk and was more existentialist. And she's floundering. She's really floundering. And she falls back on another way of feeling that she matters. And that is just seduce one man after the other. Hence different interpretation of what the Mind Body Problem needs. And my editor at the time said, I just don't understand your character. She's. She's very smart, she's very funny. She's certainly very sexually desirable. You know, basically has any man she wants. Why is she so endlessly miserable? And, you know, I walked around for like two weeks and thinking about. And then. And she kind of. You know, you hear voices when you write, when you write novels. You probably have heard this. Yes. And, you know, she said, because I don't matter in the way that matters to me. And then she came up with this idea, which I would never have come up with because I was strictly analytic in those days. This was too vague for me. She came up with this idea of the mattering map. So we're all located somewhere on this mattering map. And your region defines how you think about your mattering, what you need to do in order to. You realize you're in the book. I called it the Will to Matter. And so, you know. And yeah, so, you know, the. The pickup artists, they have their little niche. And I once met a woman who told me my life is all about. Oh, God, Tupperware about Tupperware, you know, she was. That, that. I just, I'm always just discovering or, you know, I'm always discovering different niches or my husband will come home, say, oh, I just spoke to somebody. I found a new niche, a new little region of the mattering map, you know, and so that's where we're all, you know, we're, we're all located somewhere on this mattering map. And our co. Inhabitants kind of share our view of what it is to live a life that matters. They're all defining what it is.

[A]

Yeah, it takes just to be super down to earth. The map is a map of things that might matter to one.

[B]

Yeah. And I have actually, let me see if I have the book because I see if I. Okay, yes. I actually have a little sketch of the very broad because it's just there are so many regions of the Mairie map. But the book begins. Oh, this isn't going to help, but I can show you.

[A]

Yeah, it's an audio podcast, sadly. But. Oh, you. But the point is you've drawn it in the book.

[B]

I've drawn it. And there are four continents, you know, the transcenders, the heroic strivers, the competitors and the socializers. I mean by that them roughly up, you know, but there are just so many of these regions and. Yeah, so it was really came to me in my effort to try to understand a character who was quite different from myself. And that just became my window for trying to unheal. And then I just went around talking to all sorts of people. Well, you know, what makes you feel. What gets you out of bed in the morning?

[A]

Well, that also very much helps with the. One of the final questions I wanted to ask, which was how has working as a novelist helped you informed you in this working as a analytic philosopher mode?

[B]

So yeah, so much because. I had to sort of work this out in some way in stories because I do think that the way that we, the way that we respond to this instinct, to both of these deep needs of ours, our need for belonging, connectedness, people in our lives and our need to justify ourselves in her in our own eyes, that it, it produces a story. It produces the story of our life. And I'm just fascinated by the multiplicity of stories. Everybody you talk to, you know, they've got a story. And of course that story matters so much to them. It's their walk of life. Right.

[A]

And I, I, yeah, it does strike me, I do wonder how the world is changing because I don't know if you saw there was this thing on social media very recently about people who are using AI to do family portraits of themselves. So it's not a photograph of them because they. But they just ask the AI to make a photograph of them. And other people. Like, isn't that not the purpose of a photograph? It's not a record of anything that happened, but they're telling a story that is more important to them than what actually happened.

[B]

That is so true. That is so, so true. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the ways that we lie to ourselves in our stories we tell also has so much to do with how the mattering instinct is functioning in us. You know, the gap between how we're really behaving and how we think that we ought to behave if we're truly to matter. And yeah, it's so. Yeah, storytelling to me has. It's. Has it just like science, you know, all the. Because, you know, I set out to be a scientist. That's what I thought I was going to be until it was a. Was a graduate course in quantum mechanics. I was taking that, yes, because the professor didn't want me to ask a certain kind of question. And that was like. That offended me. And so I went to the philosopher to ask the question and got roped into philosophy of science. But just, you know, science, philosophy, storytelling, art, you know, we need all of these things really, to do justice to the complexity of being creatures of matter who long to matter. That is what a crazy thing we are. But it really. It makes me respect us. There's a way.

[A]

There's a dignity there.

[B]

Yeah, there's a dignity there. There is a dignity there that, you know, as bad as the outcomes have been in history and in our contemporary life, there is still, you know, the reason it's so tragic when a human life goes wrong is because. Because of how important human life is, you know, that's what makes it so tragic.

[A]

So I love the idea, just as a final thought, that you can elaborate on to whatever extent you want, that there's no right way to matter. There's no single right way to matter, and yet there are right and wrong ways to care about mattering. Both of that is true at the same time.

[B]

Exactly. You know, I think one of the fundamental political problems of our. Of our times is how can we recognize that we're not all alike without wanting to wring each other's neck? And that is the political problem of our time.

[A]

It's the problem of democracy. Right. Of liberal democracy.

[B]

So much the problem of democracy, but the conditions have really brought it to the fore. It's staring us in the face. And so, yes, I think that that is probably my most important, I don't know, point that I would like to make. That there are objectively wrong ways of doing it, and that can take many forms, but there are so many right ways of doing it.

[A]

More than one. Yeah. Very good. Yes, that is a wonderful thought to end on. Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

[B]

Such a pleasure to speak with you. Sth.

[A]

Sa.