Rebecca Goldstein on Why Humans Need to Matter

Summary

The Good Fight – Episode Summary

Episode Title: Rebecca Goldstein on Why Humans Need to Matter
Podcast: The Good Fight (Host: Yascha Mounk, New America)
Date: January 13, 2026
Guest: Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Philosopher & Author
Main Theme: Exploring why humans possess a “mattering instinct,” how it shapes lives for better and worse, and what it reveals about ethics and flourishing.

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Episode Overview

In this profound conversation, Yascha Mounk sits down with acclaimed philosopher Rebecca Goldstein to discuss the core idea of her forthcoming book The Mattering: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. Goldstein introduces the concept of the “mattering instinct”—a deep-seated psychological need in humans to feel that their existence is significant. Together, they dissect how mattering relates to flourishing, identity, motivation, and both the light and dark sides of individual and collective behavior.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What Does It Mean to “Matter”?

• Goldstein’s “mattering” is not just about making a mark on the world or achieving grand feats.
• All humans, regardless of outward ambition, want to feel their own lives are worth the attention they can't help but pay to themselves.
• Quote:

  “Not everybody wants to make a mark in the world, but everybody wants to feel that they have somehow earned all the attention that they paid to themselves and that they have to pay to themselves and their commitment to their own life.”
  — Rebecca Goldstein [00:00, repeated at 16:37]

2. The Root of the Mattering Instinct

• Mounk distinguishes between animal self-preservation and uniquely human self-questioning.
• Goldstein links the origin of this instinct to two roots:
  • A basic, adaptive self-concern shared by living things (self-mattering).
  • Humans’ unique ability for self-reflection—tied to our large, complex brains and “theory of mind.”
• The resulting need: to reconcile the disproportionate attention we must pay to ourselves with our objective smallness in the universe.
• Quote:

  “If we assess how much something matters by how much attention we give it, we must think that we are the thing that matters the most in all the universe. And yet, short of lunacy, none of us think this... That sets up a kind of existential unease.”
  — Goldstein [04:51]

3. Types of Mattering Projects

Goldstein identifies four main strategies by which people seek mattering:

• Transcendent Mattering: Finding purpose through being part of a narrative crafted by a higher power or spiritual force.
• Heroic Striving: Pursuit of excellence—artistic, intellectual, ethical, or athletic—often for its own sake, not fame.
• Social Mattering: Finding meaning in relationships—caring for family, friends, or communities, or seeking the regard of strangers (fame).
• Competitive Mattering: Defining significance in comparison to others, either as individual or group competition.
• Not every person fits neatly into one type, but one often predominates.
• Quote:

  "The four types are: transcendent mattering, social, heroic mattering, and competitive mattering. Most people...one seems to predominate in an individual."
  — Goldstein [12:18]

4. Is the Need to Matter a Blessing or a Burden?

• Philosophical traditions, such as Stoicism and certain religious lines, suggest happiness comes from relinquishing this urge.
• Goldstein argues it's not so simple—mattering is universal, even for so-called “ego-dissolving” ascetics.
• The absence of mattering is often at the root of depression; mattering is linked to “intrinsic dignity.”
• Quote:

  “Nobody wants to feel like that, that they are nothing. And most of us, in fact, are not heroic strivers...But to feel like there is nothing truly worthy about oneself while one is so obsessed incessantly with oneself...That is not compatible with a sense of flourishing.”
  — Goldstein [16:37, 49:18]

5. The Four Mattering Projects: In Depth, Pros, and Pitfalls

a) Transcendent Mattering

• Strongest, but grounded in faith—a role set in the grand story of existence.
• Can inspire great good, but also fuel destructive fanaticism.
• Example: Religious pursuits or feeling “chosen” by the universe.

b) Heroic Striving

• Not about fame; it’s about meeting standards of excellence, sometimes self-set.
• Example: Baba Amte—worked with leprosy victims in India, even infecting himself to break stigma.
• These projects can end in disappointment if aspirations exceed ability; flexibility is needed.
• Quote:

  “Heroic strivers have some standard of excellence in their mind that they want to achieve. They're not going after fame...He did a tremendous amount of good...It was not a matter of trying to impress others, to reconcile himself to himself.”
  — Goldstein [23:36]
  “It's very hard to be human. The mattering instinct makes it extremely difficult to be human.”
  — Goldstein [28:35]

c) Competitive Mattering

• Defined by zero-sum thinking—one matters only at the expense of others.
• Intensely competitive individuals (e.g., Donald Trump) see all others as adversaries.
• Can spur innovation and achievement—if channeled toward domains that yield social benefit.
• Pitfall: Chronic dissatisfaction; “positives” are often external side-effects (e.g., economic efficiency).
• Example: Nobel Laureate only happy for 15 minutes after the award, then reverts to rivalry [40:11].
• Quote:

  “Competitors feel [the question] as: do I matter more than others? That's how they hear the question...They think of mattering in zero sum terms.”
  — Goldstein [34:23]
  “He was happy for all of 15 minutes in his life when he got that call from Stockholm. And then it dawned on him that others have also gotten the Nobel Prize.”
  — Goldstein [40:11]

d) Social Mattering

• Fulfillment through being important to others—family, friends, students, or even strangers (fame).
• Can go astray in codependency, domination, or pathological needs (e.g., fame obsession, “love bombing”).
• Example: Kevin Bacon disguised himself to avoid fan attention, found anonymity “sucked” [43:16].
• Quote:

  “Among millennials, the desire for fame...they will give up close relationships...that is, you know, mattering to others, mattering to a bunch of strangers.”
  — Goldstein [43:16]

6. Advice: How to Align Mattering With Flourishing and Ethics

• Two pillars for flourishing: feeling you matter and genuine connection to others.
• Projects should enhance your own flourishing without creating disorder for others.
• The “second law of thermodynamics” offers an objective framework:
  Are you decreasing or increasing disorder (entropy) in the world?
• Quote:

  “Life itself is ‘vive la résistance.’ This is what life is, right? Resistance to entropy...All the things that we think of as good goals require order: knowledge, compassion, justice, love, flourishing, health. These things are counter-entropic.”
  — Goldstein [57:27]

• Normativity comes in: just because you flourish doesn’t mean your project is good (e.g., “invading Poland”).
• Proselytizing your own type of mattering is common, but the value of pluralism is evident: liberal societies offer multiple schemes of valuation, reducing cruelty of single standard hierarchies (e.g., high school social systems).

7. Pluralism, Ethics, and the Dignity of Mattering

• Human societies benefit from a diversity of “mattering maps,” allowing each person to find value in different domains.
• Critique of transcendent justification of ethics—endorses a naturalistic, order-oriented ethics.
• Goldstein’s aspiration: assess yourself by whether you advance order and flourishing, for yourself and others.
• Democracy: less “ordered” than dictatorship, but better because it honors the mattering of more people.
• Quote:

  “A society that honors, that gives free rein to the mattering of every individual and the agency of every individual...is on the side of life itself, a counter entropic. Are you resisting disorder? Are you trying to go for greater order in the world at large?”
  — Goldstein [61:38]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It’s very hard to be human. The mattering instinct makes it extremely difficult to be human.”
  — Rebecca Goldstein [28:35]
• “Competitors feel [mattering] as: do I matter more than others? That's how they hear the question...It’s a positional good.”
  — Goldstein [34:23]; Mounk [36:05]
• “Heroic strivers have to face mattering adjudicators...Professors have to be mattering adjudicators, editors mattering adjudicators.”
  — Goldstein [28:48]
• “Life itself is a vive la resistance. This is what life is, right? Resistance to entropy.”
  — Goldstein [57:27]
• “It would be good to be able to see in all of us...How are they trying to prove to themselves that they matter? See the humanness in them.”
  — Goldstein [55:25]
• “There are certain people, I just think...they're entropy on two legs.”
  — Goldstein [61:03]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:00 — Goldstein defines “mattering” and its universality
• 04:51 — Explaining the roots of the mattering instinct and human self-reflection
• 12:18 — Introduction of the four “mattering” categories
• 16:37 — Is mattering a good thing? Goldstein’s nuanced take
• 23:36 — Detailed definitions of each mattering category; discussion of heroic striving
• 28:35–31:58 — Heroic striving, obstacles, and the need for “mattering adjudicators”
• 34:23 — Competitive mattering; examples and pitfalls
• 43:16–46:48 — Social mattering, fame, and their healthy and pathological forms
• 49:18 — Advice on finding alignment and flourishing
• 57:15 — Ethics, entropy, and how to assess healthy mattering
• 61:38 — Pluralism, democracy, and counter-entropic values

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Takeaways

• The need to “matter” is a fundamental trait of human psychology, for better and worse. It underpins both our highest achievements and our gravest misdeeds.
• Understanding your own “mattering project” (and those of others) is vital for both personal fulfillment and empathy.
• Flourishing is a balance: mattering must be pursued ethically, and in ways that promote connection, flourishing, and order—rather than loneliness or disorder.
• Societal pluralism is key; it allows more people to “matter” meaningfully on their own terms.

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For deep dives on AI, Goldstein’s personal story, and further discussion, the extended interview is available to paying subscribers.

Transcript

[A]

I don't understand it as synonymous with making a mark in the world or these sort of grandiose plans. I think it's something much broader, and it takes in many different types of people. Not everybody wants to make a mark in the world, but everybody wants to feel that they have somehow earned all the attention that they paid to themselves and that they have to pay to themselves and their commitment to their own life.

[B]

And now the good fight with Jasia Monk. What does it mean to matter? And why are human beings so obsessed with mattering in the first place? Is this a good thing about humanity? Is this what allows us to write great novels and create a functioning economy and make the world more and more affluent from generation to generation? Or is this at the root of some of the biggest human catastrophes of lives, misspent in the mistaken belief that you're some kind of genius and perhaps even of wars and forms of human conflict? Well, my guest today is Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein, and Rebecca is the acclaimed author of many books, including Plato at the Gould Googleplex. She is the winner of the MacArthur Award of the Guggenheim Award, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also, more importantly for today's purposes, the author of a new book just about to come out called the Mattering How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. We talked about all of those topics. I just mentioned about why human beings have some important need to matter, whether that is as socializers, as transcenders, as heroic strivers who really want to make the mark with their artistic work, or as competitors who really want to beat everybody else. And we discuss the ways in which all of us can become better adjusted people who matter. This instinct to matter, Rebecca argues, is inescapable. It is inherent to any meaningful human life. But we should think hard about how we are letting it shape our lives. In the last part of this conversation, which is reserved for paying subscribers, we talk about how artificial intelligence is going to complicate mattering, how it is going to lead to a crisis of meaning at the level of our species and in the lives of many individuals. And we go into Rebecca's personal story, her deeply religious upbringing, her assumption that she was going to be a transcendentalist, somebody who wants to matter because of her connection to the transcendental, how she fell out of that as a teenager and how she's making sure that as a heroic striver, she doesn't fall into the traps that often come with that. To listen to that part of the conversation, to become A paying subscriber, Please go to writing.yashamon.com 2026that is writing.yashamonk.com 2026for 30% off the best offer I have ever given you on this podcast. 30% off your first year of subscription. That means that having full access to these episodes is just a dollar a week. Rebecca Goldstein, welcome to the podcast.

[A]

A pleasure to be here.

[B]

Well, I really look forward to this conversation. I look forward to talking about some of the broader themes of your considerable work. But let's start with, with your latest, which is about something that I've been thinking a lot about and I think it's hard to think about in a systematic way and you sort of do in the book. It's about the mattering instinct. It's about the fact that it's so important to most human beings to matter, to have an impact on the world in some kind of way. And how to think about that. To start with the first question, I mean, this is like one of those things, you know, human beings just like looking at the sea or looking into the distance and it just is part of what human life is. And so we don't often question why that is the case. Why is it, do you think, that human beings have not every single one, but most of us, this deep need to matter? Why aren't we content just having a good life and having some fun and you know, enjoying our time on Earth and who cares about this weird thing called mattering?

[A]

Yeah. And the way I explain what mattering is, the concept itself, which is such an interesting concept, and the fact that we derive it from the verb, at least in English, I mean, from the noun in English. Matter, the stuff of the universe. Right. It's very, very interesting concepts there, the noun and the verb, that we have this capacity to step outside of ourselves and to interrogate ourselves, it comes from, you know, we have these very big brains and it comes with the capacity for self reflect. And it doesn't take too much self reflection to realize that we pay a tremendous amount of attention to ourselves that we, we can't help. I mean, to, to pursue our lives. We have to give ourselves a tremendous amount of attention. And you know, there's the, what the neuroscientists call the default mode network where you're not really paying attention to anything outside, you know, to the environment. And what are you thinking about? You're thinking about yourself. Your usually fantasizing about yourself and thinking about your past and your future. Yeah. And there was a Good reason why we do this and goes all the way back to the supreme law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics. I mean, so there's reason why all living creatures have to put their own thriving and flourishing first, using their energy to fight back against entropy. But in us who have this capacity for self reflection, we can step outside and say, wow, if what mattering means being deserving of attention, and if we assess how much something matters by how much attention we give it, we must think that we are the thing that matters the most in all the universe. And yet, short of lunacy, none of us think this right. We realize that we are not the thing that matters the most in the universe. And that sets up a kind of unease in us, a kind of existential unease to try to some way make the amount of attention that we're forced to give ourselves somewhat more commensurable with how much we really matter. And so we, we try to matter. We, we want to matter. We long to matter.

[B]

So let's dive into this distinction between all other animals and humans. You know, it's obvious why animals want to, to eat and to survive moment to moment. That's relatively straightforward. There's a slightly more complicated explanation as to why we tend to prioritize things that let us pass down our genes, but that has a kind of relatively straightforward explanation. Evolutionary biology that, you know, over many, many generations, every species has been selected to prioritize having offspring that is genetically related to them because the individuals who didn't have those instincts didn't pass on their genes and so they tended to die out over time. Right. That is straightforward. What's interesting about the kind of mattering instinct that human beings tend to have is that often it's not obvious that it gives us evolutionary advantages. And perhaps, I'm sure there's some evolutionary biologist who's going to come up with a story that tries to say why actually this has evolutionary roots, but it seems much less obvious. I mean, certainly there's many individuals who participate willingly in a war in which they're likely to die because they think what matters to me is my belonging in this nation and I want to fight for grandeur of a nation. I mean, there's people who go on suicide missions because they think that it's going to allow their names to live in glory as martyrs after they die. You know, there's all kinds of behaviors that we engage in that is detrimental to our immediate base interests, like survival, and that probably makes it less likely that we go on to have offspring. And yet we are so driven, or some of us, some individuals are so driven by this overriding need and desire to make a mark in the world that they end up engaging these behaviors. That seems like a much bigger puzzle.

[A]

It is a big puzzle. And you know, I call it the mattering instinct. But really it itself is not, it's not an instinct, as you've pointed out. It doesn't necessarily have adaptive value. It's the result of two instincts, two different instincts that we can explain how they had adaptive value. And that is the self mattering that's built into every living thing, that it's going to put its own flourishing and survival before everything else. That is the organizing principle of all of the instincts. It's, it's deeper than any instinct, in fact, this self mannering of every individual, of every living thing, including us, but also the adaptation that humans alone have developed for this ability to step outside of ourselves and look at ourselves and interrogate ourselves, to turn what psychologists call theory of mind trying to understand others, which has adaptive value for such gregarious creatures as we are. Altricial, gregarious creatures, that is, we're altricial. This means that we are dependent on others for a very long time. It takes a long time for these big brains to finally develop in our early 20s. And so we're very dependent on our caretakers, on others for very long time. So we, we have very well developed theory of mind trying to understand others, which we can then turn on ourselves in self reflection and, and ask and interrogate ourselves. See how much we matter to ourselves, the self mattering that is built into us just as living systems and say, you know, am I really deserving of this? And try somehow or other, I mean, you've spoken about people who have a, whose longing to matter is realized in, you know, in sort of making an impact in changing the world. I mean, Steve Jobs had said, you know, live so that you make a dent in the world. But there are other ways that the mattering instinct is addressed.

[B]

So you have a classification of four kinds of ways. And obviously I'm sure there's some that aren't fit exactly neatly into one of those categories. But it's a helpful classification of the four kinds of ways in which most humans try to matter. And some people are much more attracted to one of those categories than the others. What are those for?

[A]

Yeah, and I have to say, you know, I've been ever since I started thinking about this, which was more than four decades ago, I have been Talking to people about this. If you sit next to me on a bus, sooner or later you're going to. I'm going to start talking to you about your own sense of mattering, how you go about trying to appease it. And I have yet to. To meet anybody who doesn't know what I'm talking about. If you know and have an answer that fits one way or the other into these four strategies. So as all empirical hypotheses, it's open to falsification. But so far, this is what I found. So the four types are. I'll just name them for a second. There's transcendent mattering, there's social, there's heroic mattering, and there's competitive mattering. And what I found is most people, you know, we all have different aspects of this in ourselves, but one seems to predominate in an individual. So transcendent mattering is, you know, a kind of religious or spiritual response to the longing to matter. It involves a leap of faith and a transcendent presence who the believer believes purposefully created them. So that is a very strong sense of mattering, this transcendent or spiritual notion of mattering. It's the idea that you were purposefully created by the, you know, the greatest being that exists and that you have a role to play in the. In the narrative of eternity that is a very strong sense of mattering.

[B]

You know, I want to get more into detail about each of these buckets, you know, and the pros and cons of each of those kinds of ways of trying to matter and whether there's an objectively best one. But before I do that, I mean, is this whole thing just a mistake? You know, there's certainly philosophical traditions that try to reconcile ourselves to our objective insignificance. Most likely, most human beings are not going to matter, certainly in the kind of way that one of these categories aims for, of total transformation of a world. But perhaps even the other categories, you know, the Stoics want us to play our social roles in the world and so on, but to be indifferent to the fate of others and to be indifferent also to our standing in the world. We are just bit actors playing our part. But we shouldn't have all of those vain fantasies about how we matter. You know, there's other religious traditions that teach us to just sort of let go of this individualist urge to make a mark in the world. And there's some suggestions that perhaps that is actually the thing we can most do to become happy. Jonathan Rauch has been on the podcast a number of times. In one of my favorite conversations with him, we talked about his book on the happiness curve, which shows that people are least happy in middle age, perhaps when the most are trying to make a mark on the world, when they're sort of desperately trying to have an impact and starting to recognize that it's not going to be the impact that they hoped for. And they tend to become happier in older age, even as they start to have health problems and other things. And perhaps that's not exactly how we put it in the conversation, but reflecting back on it, one of the reasons for that is that that is the time when we reconcile ourselves to the fact that we don't matter as deeply to the world as we might have fought at 25 or as we might have desperately tried to cling onto at 45. So is the real advice just to get over this weird sort of chink in our psychology, or do you think that mattering is actually. And wanting to matter, if we do it right, is a positive thing, something that we should embrace and hold on to.

[A]

What he would say is that when I'm talking about belonging to matter, I don't understand it as synonymous with making a mark in the world or these sort of grandiose plans. I think it's something much broader, and it takes in many different types of people. Not everybody wants to make a mark in the world, but everybody wants to feel that they have somehow earned all the attention that they. They paid to themselves and that they have to pay to themselves and their. Their commitment to their own life. So I've spoken to, you know, people who are severely depressed, and what they say is, you know, I don't matter. I might as well have not shown up for my existence at all. You know, I make. I am nothing. Other people are something, but I am nothing. Nobody wants to feel like that, that they are nothing. And most of us, in fact, are not heroic strivers. That's one way of trying to appease the longing to matter. But it might be through one's spiritual beliefs, it might be through, you know, one's religious beliefs, it might be through one's social connections. So there are many different ways. But to feel like there is nothing truly worthy about oneself while one is so obsessed incessantly with oneself. You know, even the. The yogi meditating on top of his mountaintop, he's committed to his life and that this. And he's trying to get past his ego. That's his, what I call mannering project takes a tremendous Amount of discipline and rigor. But it's not going to help him in his life to find out that the next yogi on the other mountaintop has gotten past his, his ego. It's our life that we're committed to and trying to do something. I think it can go very, very wrong, very, very wrong, this mattering instinct. But I also think that there's something quite beautiful about it and it actually reconciles me to my species in a way that these days I often feel I need reconciliation. Engaged in some pretty horrible things right now, many of them motivated by the longing to matter which can go really awry. But it's also, there's something, you know, when we talk about the intrinsic dignity of the human, I think what we're gesturing towards very, very vaguely is this need to justify ourselves in our own eyes. It really has to do with justifying ourselves in our own eyes so that we can live with ourselves, live with ourselves who are so obsessed with ourselves. It's what makes us the values seeking creatures that we are. And that's, you know, that's something rather good. Our values can go very wrong. But the mere fact that we want to justify ourselves to ourselves, that's what it really has to do with not justifying ourselves to others. That may come into play depending on how it plays out in the individual. But that's not what I mean by the mannering instinct. Chronic migraine 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more can make me feel like a spectator in my own life. Botox Onobotulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It's the one prescribed branded chronic migraine

[C]

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[B]

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[A]

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[B]

Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-844botox to learn more. So let me try to reframe the question, amend it to a perhaps Hutler hypothesis. One way of saying this is that perhaps we are consumed by this need to matter. And I think this is the way in which some moral traditions put it, and we should just recognize we don't matter in any kind of way. And tranquility and a more sensible life plan lies in that. Now, another way of putting it is that there's sort of good and bad ways of trying to matter, ways that are well adjusted and ways that are ill adjusted. And that's probably going to be the case, right? Clearly, the person who blows themselves up because they just love the idea of themselves, you know, in the newspaper is ill adjusted. The person who's, you know, trying to matter by invading the neighboring country is ill adjusted. You know, that's relatively straightforward, but I guess does that map on to your four categories or not? You know, is it too simple to say that, you know, the competitors, they are inherently trying to matter in the wrong way? That perhaps the heroic strivers, of which we probably know a lot, being in the intellectual world and being writers and so on? No, they inherently are trying to accomplish something that is hugely unlikely to work out. And they've sort of gotten the wrong end of the stick. It's the transcenders and the socializers, the people who want to root their importance in community, in helping others in the family, perhaps in being connected to some larger spiritual or religious tradition or philosophical tradition. They are the ones who have it right. Or is that also too simple to say? No, actually, it's good for our heroic strivers. That's how we've managed to create some of the achievements of humanity. And even though a lot of the time it's going to go wrong, that's also how we did get Plato and Aristotle and John Stuart Mill and Martin Luther King and whoever else you want to put in there. So how do we think about what is a healthy manifestation of a matching instinct and what is an unhealthy manifestation of a matching instinct? Because it doesn't feel to me, I guess it doesn't feel to me like you think that we should cleanly rule one of those categories out. But it also doesn't feel purely descriptive. It does feel like the competitors may be more likely to go wrong than the transcenders or the socializers. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding, that all of

[A]

them can go wrong, socializers can go wrong. Maybe I should just Very quickly state what I mean by these four categories. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and, and all of them can go very wrong. And, and the transcenders is this kind of religious, spiritual response that there is some transcendent being, whether you call it God or not, but who is, who created laws of nature. And, and, and the sense of the transcenders is that they were intentionally created so that they have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. This is a very large sense of mattering and nothing else can compare to it. That's not a reason to argue for it or against it. Okay. There are heroic strivers. And heroic strivers have some standard of excellence in their mind that they want to achieve. They're not going after fame. I give many examples. I tell a lot of stories in the book because theory is theoretical. Tell us one about heroic strivers. So it can take the form of intellectual standards, artistic, athletic or ethical. I tell the story of one ethical heroic striver. He's an atheist. He was a very strong atheist, but he was a kind of saint, secular saint. His name is called Baba Amtay. He is. Was born in India and he truly had a heroic personality. He was always. It was not a matter of trying to impress others to reconcile himself to himself. He had these very high standards. And then he set out to conquer leprosy. So the people, traditionally going back to ancient times, the people in the world who matter the least, I mean, to call somebody a leper is to say they're a complete pariah, you know, and in the Bible as well, you know, so. And he just heroically, his story is amazing how he in fact even swallowed the. Or infected himself with the bacillus for leprosy. It turns out he had natural immunity. Turns out most of us do. But he did wonders in India and it was all. And when people would call him a saint, he'd be very, very annoyed. And it was simply that he had picked. He had to do something truly heroic and it took this ethical form. So, yeah, I mean, that's somebody who. He did a tremendous amount of good through his heroic striving. And do I wish him to have been changed? Of course not. You know, and so it can take many, many different forms. It's hard to be a heroic striver, clearly.

[B]

So let's stick with the heroic strivers for a moment. How would you gloss this? What do you think is a well adjusted heroic str, if there is such a thing? And who is illogatory? And does this just partially depend on the lack of A draw of whether you end up being successful. I mean if you are single minded about making an artistic mark, an intellectual mark or some contribution to the world. Right. I'm going to cure the world of leprosy or whatever it is. And it turns out that you're just not that good. Perhaps you have some local success but you're 50 years later people completely forget about you. Or you know, you just. You think I know that my first few novels weren't published but the fourth novel is going to transform the world. And there's so many other famous writers who are not recognized in their lifetime and you know, eventually people are going to recognize my brilliance. And sadly you just deluded about this. Like to what extent does the, you know, whether or not Heroic Striver is. Has a coherent life plan just depend on that happenstance of their talent or the success they find in the world? And to what extent is it a sort of deeper set of questions about how they're leading their life and so on?

[A]

It's very hard to be human. The man think makes it extremely difficult to be human.

[B]

I think I'm going to print a T shirt with it's very hard to be a human slogan.

[A]

I mean if you actually think about it, I mean because we're trying to justify ourselves to ourselves, We're taking on this extra burden in being human. And that's what existential crises are all about. So yeah. And most of my life spent as a professor and it is sometimes was my very unpleasant task to tell a graduate student I don't think you have it. I don't think that you are going to make it in this field. And I felt it my responsibility to do that because I felt that they were going to be in for a lot of frustration and disappointment and a lot of hard work that was going to go nowhere. I was acting as a mattering adjudicator. Professors have to be mattering adjudicators, editors mattering adjudicators. Not every mattering project that somebody goes into Heroic Strivers has mattering adjudicators. But it's a very sad fact that some of them do. My field, yes, I am subject to mattering adjudicators. Whether I get my work published or not isn't up to me. And sometimes people what I found and I tell the story of somebody. He's actually a friend of mine and he was a very, very good musician. He was in classical guitar. He got a lot of success as a. He went to conservatory and he very hard to get into conservatory but then he could not make a go of it as a professional. It's very hard in classical guitar, right? There aren't too many things, you know, written specifically for that. And orchestras don't hire you. So you either make it on the symphony stage or you play for weddings. And after true depression, he switched. He gave up his Mannering project and he got a doctorate in comparative literature and he became a writer. He is still a heroic striver. This is what I've noticed. If you have that kind of temperament and you want to, you know, make you, you want to prove to yourself your own mattering through your creativity. If one thing doesn't work out and you finally decide to give it up, and once the right moment to give it up is a hard thing to decide that you, you switch to something else that's also creative. And so, you know, there has to be this sort of flexibility in this sort of thing. But, you know, sometimes it's a real mismatch. Sometimes your parents have, you know, want you to be a heroic striver and your heart is not in that. That's not who you are.

[B]

Well, I think the heroic striver bucket is probably the one that is most likely to lead to disappointment. I'm no classical musician thing. My mother's a classical musician. She's. She's a conductor and I think she's had a very fulfilling career. But I once saw a study which I find fascinating, which is that among the skilled professionals, orchestra musicians are some of the least happy people. And the reason, I think is related to that of your friend, which is that you grow up, you probably have hopes of becoming a soloist. People fawn over you for the incredible skill and talent that you display. If you're going to become any kind of professional musician, you must be extraordinary. And then you don't quite make soloists and you're part of this collective. And if you play really beautifully, nobody really notices. If you make one damn mistake, you get shouted at and you know it's very audible and you're ashamed. And so, you know, even as you sort of probably were drawn to this in part by love of music, but in part by this kind of heroic strive of personality day to day, you know, you treat it as an expendable part of a collective that isn't individual at all. And so the, the gap between the chasm between those two things is what explains why orchestra musicians, I think, tend to be so unhappy, which is a really interesting thing. Let's go to another one of these buckets, which I think can go wrong in many ways with the competitive one, with the heroic strivers, I can see how it can go completely wrong. And I can also see how some of the people we most admire probably fall into that bucket With a competitive one. It's easy to see how that goes wrong. I mean, you're just consumed by trying to undermine your corporate rival and engage in corporate intrigue to get them fired. Or you're consumed by your hatred of some guy who beat you to some fellowship in high school and you obsessively have a chip on your shoulder about them and try to outperform them. Or you do it at the level of a nation and you're obsessed with the injustice that your neighboring country does inflicted on you in 1728. Where is this the positive thing? I mean, is it just that a lot of that competitive streak is also how we build a productive economy and sports and all of those kinds? It's a little bit harder to see how this competitive instinct can take a positive form.

[A]

And one thing I just have to keep reiterating, we don't have too much choice about how we respond to this, to this shared longing that we have that there is, you know, there are personality types. And I actually bring up a theory of personality, the Murray McClellan theory of personality, that really fits very well in describing how we respond to this, to this shared longing that we have. It's very hard to be competitive. It's very hard to be around competitive people, but it's very hard because. And they're the people, when I ask, you know, start talking to them about their mattering and do they think that they matter? They become sometimes a little bit self conscious because the way they hear it, just as transcenders hear it, when I say that question, they hear. My question about mattering is, do I matter to the universe? You know, was I purposely created and socializers. Here it is. Do I matter to others? Heroic strivers? Here it is, you know, am I doing something really worth the doing? Am I fulfilling my own ambitions for excellence? And competitors feel it as do I matter more than others? That's how they hear the question, do I matter? They think of mattering in zero sum terms. To the extent that I matter, I have to matter more and others must matter less.

[B]

It's a positional good.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. This has real. So you're always in an adversarial position with others. The one exception made often is, you know, people in your family because you think of them as extensions of yourself, so you don't feel in competition with. I mean, Donald Trump is a perfect example. He is an extreme competitor and he can be on the side of those who are the fruit of his loins, but everybody else is adversarial. I mean, you're either licking his boots, but it's very insecure.

[B]

Right. And it's a particular form of competitor that takes everything to be a zero sum battle. And I'm sure people who are competitors tend to be more likely to think of things in zero sum terms. But I think it's a particular combination of an extreme competitor and somebody who has an extremely zero sum worldview. So it's not just that I'm competitive and I want to win, it's that I see every situation as a competition and I have to win every competition.

[A]

Exactly, exactly. Or my mattering is always at stake. You know, that. That is. Yeah. And, you know, I make the distinction between those who are individual competitors and those who are sort of group competitors. I belong to the group that matters the most. And I am in an adversarial position with people of another group of other groups, especially if I consider them lesser, you know, which. And they're gaining on me. So actually, one of the people I profile is somebody who actually became a good friend. And he's an ex Nazi skinhead who the whole first half of his life was devoted to this movement. And here he was. He was a felon. He committed terrible acts of violence. Terrible acts of violence. And he has changed. He is now. He's doing penance for the first half of his life. He's in fact become an ethical heroic striver. I would say that's what his whole life is about, is doing penance for his earlier acts of violence. But it is. He's actually even now Jewish.

[B]

That seems to be going a little bit too far. I feel like I'm glad for every Nazi who stops being a Nazi. I'm not. I have to convert to Judaism. That's, you know, having grown up in Germany and being Jewish, of course, you know, I didn't meet many Nazis who'd convert to Judaism, but I met many children and grandchildren of senior Nazis who tried to expedite their historical perceived, their perceived historical guilt by converting to Judaism. And there was always something slightly creepy about it.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. Or tracing that some ancestor was Jewish. I mean, I met, you know, many, yes, Germans who have tried as he did. He actually found a Jewish maternal great grandmother. So anyway, in any case, you know, this. And he was somebody who, you know, who had suffered great deprivations in his childhood of caring, of nurturing. He came from a terrible situation. And when he met these Nazi skinheads who said, of course you matter. You matter so much more than all these people who are trying to rob you of your mattering. Look in the mirror and you will see how much you matter. You are a white, male, heterosexual American. You matter. And these other people are trying to take it away from you, especially Jews.

[B]

Well, you know, we just like taking things away from people. You still owe me an example, a positive example of a competitor.

[A]

Ah, yes. So again, this is someone. I'm not going to mention his name. He's a Nobel Laureate in science. Somebody I know. And. Someone else, a mutual friend who knows him as well, said to me, you know, XYZ was happy for all of 15 minutes in his life when he got that call from Stockholm. And then it dawned on him that others have also gotten the Nobel Prize.

[B]

That's not a positive example.

[A]

Well, he did good work. He turned his. From the outside, you would think that he is a heroic striver. You know, he used his great talent, his great intelligence, his scientific ability to do very good work that in fact benefits all of us. I can't say too much more. You're going to know who I'm talking about.

[B]

So. Right, right. So the good thing about being a competitor is the kind of positive externalities, right? But if you choose the right thing to compete in, I mean, perhaps you just want to be the biggest supermarket magnate, but actually the way to do that is to lower prices and to be ruthlessly efficient. And, you know, that might have some negative impacts on the world, but it also allows people to have cheap food that, that they can have nice dinners with.

[A]

Right, exactly. So is it fun to be him? No, he was happy for 15 minutes. As my friend said, you know, it's very, very hard to be. Everybody can possibly bring you down.

[B]

You know, I have a story about this which is secondhand, so I'm gonna be careful about not making it obvious who this is. This is someone who's a neighbor of, you know, in a college town in the United States, a neighbor of a prominent academic. And they are in a long running property dispute because this acquaintance of mine is doing renovations on the house. And the prominent neighbor, you know, is an incredible stickler for the rules and keeps every tiny little municipal rule that the contractors break in any way immediately earns them a long formal email and complaint and so on. And so one day, this acquaintance reads in the news in the morning that the neighbor won a Nobel Prize. And they thought, perhaps this is a nice way of starting an olive branch and say, look, I know we've not always gotten along the best, but congratulations. What a wonderful thing. If you're in the mood to celebrate, we're around. We have a bottle of champagne in the fridge. Feel free to drop by. And they got an email back within 10 minutes saying, thank you very much for your offer. That's very kind. By the way, yesterday your contractors did X and Y and a whole long list of what the contractors did wrong. So within an hour of getting the Nobel Prize, this person was, you know, continuing to point out the minor infractions of municipal rules.

[A]

We have to work with what we have, our temperaments, our, you know, and, you know, and some people are just, you know, hyper, hyper competitive. But, you know, that can change. You know, my friend, the ex Nazi skinhead shows that, you know, that there can be. Of all the people I've ever spoken to over these many decades of just talking to people about this, and by the way, I never engaged. This is not the kind of philosophy that I set out to do. I trained in philosophy of science, philosophy of math, technical stuff. But when I, you know, when I hit on this thing, I just found that it's. It's a. It's a way into the most interesting conversations that I can have with people, you know, and what has just so impressed me over the years is the diversity of ways that people try to respond to this thing. You know, but some way or other, everybody is responding. Don't think that socializers, by the way, mattering to others is also good. I mean, they too have their pathological forms. So, for example, you know, those who try to dominate, you know, the way that they matter to others is to dominate them. And it can be people, you know, in their family I spoke to, well, I actually was more the victim of a love bomber, you know, who had to completely dominate this young woman's life for years and then, you know, go on to the next one after. And then she found out that her intense love affair was at the expense of another woman before her, you know, that this was just a serial love bomber. So, you know, mannering to others can mean dominating them. You know, I love to read the advice columnists in the newspapers and. And so much of it is about socializers and those who see their mattering, their whole mattering is about their relationships, often to people in their lives. I call those intimate socializers. Sometimes it's complete strangers. So, for example, the desire, the craving for fame is to matter to a bunch of strangers. Words of strangers who are going to be paying you tons of attention. I tell this story about Kevin Bacon, the movie star, and. And, yeah, and he's always swamped by people, you know, wanting his autographer to take selfies with him. And he wanted to know what it was like to just be anonymous. So he got a prosthetic nose and glasses, and he went to a very busy mall in LA and he said it was very amusing. He says, you know, it totally sucked. It was horrible. Nobody's coming over and seeing how much they love me. I had a. Get a cup of coffee. This totally sucks. So he, you know, so, you know, it's. But anyway, studies have shown that, you know, among millennials, the desire for fame, you know, they will give up close relationships. They will give up, you know, romantic relationships for fame. And that is. That is, you know, mattering to others, mattering to a bunch of strangers.

[B]

And you put that in the bucket of socializers.

[A]

Yes, I do. Because it's mattering to others. You know, you're dependent on others. And, you know, when fame is fickle.

[B]

Well, so fame is presumably one way this can go wrong. I imagine others. So if a positive thing of this is that one achievable way to matter in the world is to matter to your family and your friends and the people in your community. And it's one of the things. One of the reasons why I love teaching as part of a portfolio of things I do, because in a very straightforward way, you walk into that classroom and you have an off day, and you realize that 20 or 50 or 100 people are bored, and you walk into a classroom and you're on, and it's a meaningful intellectual experience, and people are learning something and it feels like, hey, their day went better. And then obviously, some of the mentorship relationships and so on you have with students are really meaningful as well. And it's just a concrete answer to how you met in the world. That's very different from the kind of trying to write some text that might be read in X number of years. But of course, there's also all of these ways in which, you know, relationships can go wrong, either because you're saying, because you want to dominate them, because you want to be famous in a kind of Paris Hilton type of, you know, way. And presumably some people might also, you know, I'm thinking of people who have Munchausen by Proxy syndrome. So, you know, where mothers who start to invent illnesses for their children because they want to, you know, be seen as these heroic people who are rescuing the child and how heroic the child is and they are battling this horrible cancer and how much they're needed by their children. In some of these cases, they actually persuade the child that the child is deeply sick because it makes the child more reliant on them. Those presumably, are also all ways in which this trying to matter through the socializing kind of way can. Can go horribly wrong. What should we learn from all of this? So these are incredibly insightful points that you've made about each of these groups. I think as an analytical lens, it's really helpful. It's going to change how I think about the world. But of course, one of the questions that I'm asking myself is how can I make sure in my life that I end up on the aligned rather than the misaligned part of this? And different listeners, presumably are going to see themselves in different buckets. They're going to think of themselves as competitors or as heroic strivers, or as transcendence or as socializers. Is the advice different depending on the bucket? Is there an overarching set of pieces of advice you can give? Sort of. What lessons should we draw from this really insightful conversation?

[A]

Yeah, so I think that, excuse me, you know, there is, you know, how well one's mattering project is serving oneself right. And that, you know, is always to be evaluated. You know, how are you feeling? Like you're making, you know, that you're flourishing. This is like this. And our connections with others, this way of appeasing our mannering instinct and our connections to others, which as gregarious creatures, we all need. These are the two cornerstones of our flourishing. And both of them can go wrong. If you don't have deep connections with others, you suffer the sadness of loneliness. And if you don't have some way of trying to feel that it does make a difference that you're here, maybe just it makes a difference to your child or to your garden or to the world at large. Some way of. Of being able to justify your attention to yourself. You suffer. You suffer, you know, a sense of. Of. Of depression, really. Purposelessness. What am I? You know, I'm just. I'm Detroit. I'm. I'm too much. I'm redundant. Not. Not. That is not compatible with a sense of flourishing. I. So, you know, one of the things is, yeah, that you have to be feeling that you're flourishing. But as we've been talking, there are very bad ways of trying to respond to this. And there I think we have to bring in ethics. You know, something can be feeling wonderful, you're winning, you've invaded Poland, and it's going really well, whatever it takes. And yet you ought not to be doing this. There is that normative word, ought. Philosophers were very concerned with the division between is an ought. And I think there are oughts that come in to this. And you might. One thing I want to say, we all have a tendency to proselytize our own way of mattering, try to universalize it, because we want to show it's not just arbitrary. I think this matters because I'm me and this is what I'm doing, and this is my talent. We want to feel there's something objective there. But if it's really objective, then shouldn't everybody be doing it my way?

[B]

So, on a side note, I think part of it is wanting to justify it, and part of it, I think, is just projection. It's just, you know, I'm not a super competitive person, but I think if you see the world in these, like, deeply competitive terms, it's very hard to imagine that other people don't. And if they do, they're kind of suckers. Because in your values, right?

[A]

So, yes, yes, there's a lot of that too. But, you know, it's like, you know, I have a whole bunch of. We know the transcenders do this, you know, people who. The grounding is some metaphysical view of reality, and we're all living in that reality, so we all ought to be, whatever, fill in the blank, you know, accepting Jesus as our savior or whatever, you know, But. But what I found is that it takes place all across what I call the Mannering map, which just maps out all these different ways of responding to this. This longing. And, you know, so I, you know, I have scientists who are saying, you know, that, you know, to discover the laws of nature, this is the most important thing that we can do. Why isn't everybody seeking their mattering through trying to understand the objective laws of nature? Fashion designer Diana Friedland, who says, you know, if you have to dress well, you know, without it, you're nothing. So it's a bodybuilder said, you know, people who can't do a deadlift might as well not have been born. All of these universalizing statements.

[B]

This is a side note, but I actually think that that is one of the things that helps humans be reconciled to the world, which is to say that one of the things that makes certain kinds of high school environment so brutal is that there's one unified scheme of social regard, but everybody sort of roughly agrees on who's at the top of it and who's at the bottom of it. And there's one set of attributes that are particularly valued and that is really brutal because if you're towards the bottom end of that, you know, this low status is just imposed on you in an extreme way. One of the great things about liberal societies, actually one of the great things about pluralistic societies is that there's many different schemes of valuation and that most people tend to gravitate towards a scheme of valuation that they're relatively good in. So it's because you're super interested in knitting that you put value into the knitting community. And if you have some respect in the knitting community, you go around saying, you know, I'm really one of the most respected knitters in my town and people ask me for advice and that's something meaningful to me, right? And yes, I can't bodybuild, but who cares about that? Whereas the bodybuilder says, knitting, that's ridiculous, bodybuilding is important. People respect me because I have muscles. So the fact that we each kind of self select into schemes of valuation in which we are probably comparatively better than at random selection of activities in the world is one of the things that I think helps us reconcile ourselves to opposition in the world in a pluralistic society.

[A]

Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. I mean, I'm thinking about this. The party I went to once, went to, it was when it was at Princeton and it was with a bunch of really high level scientists. And they started talking about high school and how they were bullied and you know, they were, these were top, top guys and, you know, it was just, you know, and could never get any girls or any, you know, if that's what they wanted, or any man, if that's what they wanted. And you know, and there was such a sense of triumph, you know, look where we are now. But yeah, no, that is true, but it is, you know, it is something it would be good to be able to see in all of us. And it's a practice that I go through all the time because I'm appalled by many people, right, both on the, you know, in public and in private. And I'm always, you know, saying how are they trying to prove to themselves that they matter. See, see the humanness in them, you know, sympathize with what's going on there. And I find it extremely, it's helped me through these last years of political turmoil to able to go through this. Yes, but you, you really wanted to talk about how can you know what's objective? How can we tell what's going right, where it's going right and where it's going wrong? And my way is, once again, you know, it's the second law of thermodynamics. What life is, is resistance against disorder. That's that, that's the direction that all living systems have to be going on. They are, it's counter entropic.

[B]

Explain that to people who will have heard the word entropy but who may be confused exactly by what that entails. Why is life a kind of constant struggle against disorder?

[A]

Yeah. So entropy means disorder. And actually what the word actually means, entropy is transformation from within. Because every physical system, that's what the second law of thermodynamics says, every closed physical system is, is going towards disorder. That is the ending of the system. The system is not going to be able to function anymore. For the system to function, it takes a certain order. The more complicated the system, the more ways that it can go wrong and end up in disorder. And living systems are very, very complicated. Living systems are enclosed systems. We're always taking in energy. And what are we doing with this energy? We're resisting entropy. So life itself is a viva la resistance. This is what life is, right? Resistance to entropy. And so, and in general, the things that we think of as good goals require order, knowledge, compassion, justice, love, flourishing, health. All of these things require order. They are counter entropic. And I think there's, you know, there's the view that, you know, only some transcendent being can tell us the difference between right and wrong. But first of all, I'm skeptical of the transcendent being. And different people come to very different views about what the transcendent being wants from us, which is why, you know, religions have historically and still shed so much blood, that is, so much disorder can come from it. I go with the second law of thermodynamics. That is as objective and as proved as anything. In fact, physicists from Einstein down say that all our knowledge of the laws of nature could be falsified, except for this one. And in the book I go through why that is the case. This is the one that will never be falsified by experience. So it's really objective. And, and so I think in general, look, if you, the way to evaluate your, your way of going about life is first of all, is it doing well for yourself? Is, is, is, is it feeling good? But how much are you in tune with entropy? Are you make. Are you. Are you creating more disorder in the world at large, including in other people's lives? Whether you're invading a country or whether you're, you know, you're just harming the people in your life, making them miserable, or are you on the side of life itself, a counter entropic? Are you resisting disorder? Are you trying to. To go for greater order in the world at large? And it gives us the kind of intuitions that we all have, you know, that beauty is better than ugliness, that love is better than hatred, that knowledge is better than ignorance, that clarity is better than confusion. All of these things that are better are things that require order.

[B]

My only worry about this, and I sort of mean it as a joke and sort of mean it seriously, is that it also implies that Switzerland is better than Italy. And of course, as any friend of mine should know, Italy is better than Switzerland. What falls under this concept of order and what does not fall under this concept of order? Right? Because a lot of what is also wonderful in life is spontaneity. And all of those things which do entail a certain kind of disorder. I assume you're just talking about a different kind of order, but perhaps you can just clarify what kind of order you're talking about.

[A]

Exactly. You know, and there are many, many different values that go into it. I mean, in some sense, a dictatorship is more ordered. Right. Than a democracy. You know, I'm thinking of Plato right now and why he very much disliked democracy because it was so dishonored. But Plato was wrong, all right? Democracy is better. Why? Because the other thing that we have to put in the evaluation is that, in fact, to the extent that any of us objectively matter, all human beings matter to that same extent. I think actually the intrinsic dignity and the intrinsic mattering of each individual comes from our very longing to matter. I think that that is. That's really something estimable about us, even when it goes terrifically wrong. And so, you know, a society that honors, that gives free rein to the mattering of every individual and the agency of every individual, because without a sense of agency, there's misery. And. And as a society that allows for the spontaneity of beauty, which is also a kind of otter, there are many different ways of evaluating OTTER here. So it's, you know, it's complicated. It's just a sort of gross way. It's the way I think about, you know, my evaluations of people. There are certain people, I just think man. You know, they're on the side of entropy. You know, they are, you know, they are entropy on two legs. They are causing and, and other people just the opposite, you know. And so, yeah, that's a sort of way of, of assessing, but it's complicated. I think the next book is going to be all about the complexity of that.

[B]

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Good Fight. To listen to the rest of this conversation, to get access to all of our podcast episodes, to no longer have those annoying jingle ads from third parties dropped into your feed. Please support this work. Please become a paying subscriber. Today we're offering 30% off. That means that it's about a dollar a week to get full access to my writing and to the podcast, just go to writing.yashamonk.com 2026writing.yashamon.com 2026 thank you for listening and happy New Year.

[A]

It.