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- [00:02]
A
Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. On this show, we spend a lot of time in conversation where there's no clean answer, where the best you can do is understand the shape of the problem better than you did before. Claude takes a similar approach to answering questions. It treats ambiguity like information, not a bug to fix. And because Anthropic is committed to no ads and Claude, your answers aren't being influenced by an advertiser's agenda. See why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner and try Claude for free at Claude aigraya. Support for the gray area comes from wix. Imagine if building a website was as easy as brainstorming ideas for one. Well, with WIX Harmony, it can be. WIX Harmony offers a powerful blend of AI solutions and precise drag and drop tools, bringing you the next generation of website creation. You can generate anything with AI while using manual design tools to adjust and detail and add your unique creative flair. Ready to create your website? You can see why 280 million businesses around the world rely on Wix for theirs. And go to wix.com harmony that's wix.com harmony. We are creatures who long to matter. Not just to belong, not just to be loved, but to matter objectively. We are a species that, for whatever reason, needs to feel that our lives are justified in some deep way. And that longing drives almost everything we do. Our careers, our art, our politics, our religions, even our resentment. When the longing is satisfied, we're good. When it collapses, we spiral, individually and collectively. I'm Sean Elley and this is the gray area. Today's guest is Rebecca Neuberger Goldstein, philosopher, novelist and the author of a book called the Mattering Instinct. It's a very ambitious book, the kind you don't see all that often. In it, she offers something like a theory of human nature and argues that that longing I was just talking about is wired into our psychology. For better or worse, we talk about the implications of that and why we should take it very seriously. Well, let's. Let's get into it. Let's get into mattering. When someone feels like they don't matter, what are they lacking? What do they really need? What are they chasing?
- [03:14]
B
The core is convincing oneself that one is deserving of the obsession, excessive, inordinate, constant attention that you have to give yourself in order to pursue your own life. And so when they feel. When you're feeling like you don't matter, you're feeling like you just really don't deserve to pay so much Attention to yourself as you must pay attention to yourself. I mean, it's kind of wired into our brain. So it's really a. It can often involve our relationship with others. And others can certainly make us feel as if we don't matter. The attention of others is more or less evidence for what we're really worrying about, which is our relationship with ourselves. I spoke to a lot of depressed people. I have close friends who have suffered enormously from depression. And what they paradigmatically say is, I don't matter.
- [04:24]
A
Is feeling like you matter the same thing as feeling like you're important?
- [04:28]
B
Not necessarily. You know, some people require a great deal of feeling important in the world, powerful in the world, an influencer in the world. But that's not the way it manifests with many people. But there's a sense of deservingness. You're not wasting your life. You're not just taking up space. That there is some notion of the deservingness of your own attention, which sounds a little bit paradoxical because, of course, you give yourself attention. It's automatic. That's what it is to be pursuing your life. You have to be. You're making plans, you have obligations, you're acting on your desires, of course, where we're hired to give ourselves, to feel that we're deserving of our own attention. But what is so amazing about our species is that we can step outside and say, but who am I? What's it all about? Why do I deserve all this attention that I have to give myself in order to live? And if you feel that you don't, your life really goes off the rails, as you say. You know, there are two very fundamental needs we have as gregarious creatures. We need to have people in our lives with whom we're connected. But there's this other component. It's an existential component. It's very much what the existentialists have been talking about, and that's having to do with our relationship with ourselves. Can we abide our own presence? And if we feel that we have done nothing to give ourselves so much attention as we must, nothing to justify that. This is what turns us into justificatory creatures.
- [06:20]
A
It sounds like you're very much on Team Aristotle, that chasing after happiness and pleasure is a bit of a dead end and not going to be enough for most of us.
- [06:32]
B
That's right. There is something. Despite all appearances, we are not as shallow as we would seem to be.
- [06:44]
A
I'll take your word for it.
- [06:46]
B
And I tell you, I've, you know, ever Since I became interested in this and it just came upon me, this novel, and I wrote it. It was called the Mind Body Problem. And the editor had said to me, I don't completely understand your character. She's very attractive and sexually desirable and very funny and very smart. And she's so unhappy. She's always on the cusp of despair. Why? What I realized, and she kind of let me know, was that she didn't feel like she mattered in the way that most mattered to her. And that's so important, that second part, because there is such a diversity of ways in which we try to convince our. Ourselves that we mattered. In her case, was that she wanted to contribute something to the world of ideas and she doubted, you know, that she had the wherewithal to do it.
- [07:41]
A
Well, to the point about convincing ourselves. Right. Like so much of this is about mattering to ourselves, justifying ourselves to ourselves. And yet. And of course, that's like. That's subjective, right? Like in our own minds it is. But you say it's not enough to just matter, that we have to matter objectively.
- [07:59]
B
Yes.
- [08:00]
A
What does that mean? Yeah, what does it mean? To matter objectively.
- [08:03]
B
So, you know, if mattering means, you know, and I think the way I define mattering is to be deserving of attention, when something matters, it deserves our attention. And you say this doesn't matter, don't bother to be thinking about it. Don't pay it too much attention. When we ask the question, we ask what matters and we ask who matters, and we ask whether we ourselves matter. If we're just in our lives, you know, chugging along, doing what we're interested in doing, you know, carrying out our plans, reacting to our desires, of course, there's a sense of self mattering. It's. And actually the person, the philosopher who really got this, philosopher who means a great deal to me, Spinoza, Burrough, Spinoza, back there in the 17th century. Yep. You know, that he, you know, he has this notion of konitas, which is, you know, this striving to thrive and to flourish in one's own being. But we can step outside of that same self mattering that everything living has. I mean, even the blade of grass struggling up through the crack in the sidewalk. Right. Is after its own thriving and persistence. And we can ask, what justifies my paying so much attention to myself. If to matter is measured how much something matters, we measure it by how much attention we pay to it, then it would seem subjectively that the thing that I judge to matter the most in all the universe is myself. That's the thing I pay the most attention to. And yet, short of lunacy, none of us know that we have some degree of perspective where we can step outside of ourselves, see all of this attention to ourselves and ask really what is it about me other than my arbitrary identity that makes me. That could justify my paying so much attention to ourselves. This is what makes us justificatory creatures. This is what makes us values seeking creatures, which is, I think something very precious.
- [10:32]
A
Is there an important role for other people in our self mattering quests? In order for me or anyone to really believe that I matter, do I need to feel that that belief is being validated by other people?
- [10:48]
B
You know, for some people, yes. And I would say for the majority of us, yes, it seems to be, as I said, I'm talking about people. If you sit next to me on a long bus ride, sooner or later I'm gonna have you talking about your own mannering project. What gets you up in the morning and keeps you engaged in your life and makes you feel like your life is worth pursuing. And oh my gosh, these conversations are extraordinary. The diversity. I mean, just. Can I just give you one example that I was sitting in a Manhattan hotel in a lobby waiting for a friend and a guy comes and sits next to me and he's clearly trying to pick me up. And I start talking to him about mattering and what it is that keeps him going in his life. And he was a genuine, authentic pickup artist. That was his project, that was his mattering project. And he had statistics, like, you know, he kept statistics how many women he managed to pick up. He had rules, he had strategies, he had books, he had heroes. The diversity is amazing. And to me this is the most interesting topic to discuss with people. I mean there was a.
- [12:14]
A
And you got him to talk about mattering.
- [12:15]
B
I can get anybody to talk mattering. And I mean one of the keys is it makes a person feel so much like they matter. When I am, I'm all agog, you know, trying to pull out from this person. Really what is it that gives you the impetus to get on with your life? You know, and what would make you feel as if your life, that you founded it on false premises, that you've gotten it all wrong, that you're really failing at this? You know, you can get into some pretty heavy stuff with people in talking about this existential longing that we have. So most people I have found, yeah. Others validating them is very, very important. But there are certainly the outliers to whom it doesn't matter at all. I found, for example, you know, I come from a background in math and physics and I still have a lot of friends in that world. And in the world of math and physics, I found that there are mathematicians who need absolutely no validation from other people. Because math is self proving if you have a proof, you know, and it's for a really important problem, you know,
- [13:34]
A
you know, that uncommonly objective.
- [13:35]
B
Yeah, yeah. And so, but you know, for most poets, for example, or novelists, I mean, how do you know that what you've written is any good? And how do you know even if you've gotten the acclaim that it's really any good, you know, so if that's what you're grounding, you're mattering on. And I talk about, for example, the great poet John Berryman, who is one of the, you know, most influential poets, a confessional poet of mid 20th century and he was really famous for a poet, won every big award in poetry, but he ended up committing suicide. So for some people it's, you know, it's. Even the validation may, may not do it.
- [14:21]
A
It does feel a little bit like a portrait of the Western mind in particular. Right. Like I'm not saying there isn't something universal to this longing to matter. Surely there is. But it seems especially acute in a very egocentric, self obsessed society. You know what I mean? Like Buddhist, a very different model. Right. Like no self, you actually don't matter. That's okay. Right. So do you feel like this is more of a Western mind in particular?
- [14:49]
B
Of course, very worried about this because I am interested in trying to dig down deep into something that we might share, even though we respond to it and in such different ways. And so I did speak to practitioners of Confucianism, and there it is, there is this sense of mattering, but the way they respond to it is very, very different. It's in terms of community, being part of this community, the continuity with the ancestors that there is a sense in which living a life that would be approved of by the ancestors. For many people that I profile, it really is not the outside validation. It was not important. Actually for those who are, you know, ethical strivers, it's the acts themselves, They're a little bit like mathematicians. It's the acts themselves that justify themselves. Nobody need know about it. In the tradition that I come from, the Jewish tradition, the highest form of doing good is you don't know who you're doing good for. And they don't know who is Doing the good for them. And that is the highest level of doing good. So there are so many ways of responding to this. But what I would want to insist on until it's invalidated, it's a falsifiable hypothesis, is that, that to be human is to have this longing to somehow want to be able to say to ourselves, my life isn't a waste. This short time here on Earth is not a waste.
- [16:42]
A
Why are we so needy? Why do we demand a reason for living? Why is being alive not enough for us?
- [16:49]
B
Yeah, that's who we are. That's who we are. And I would say, you know, we've changed the planet, the face of the planet in very dramatic ways, for good and for bad in this striving. But we're very. It's not just happiness that we're after. Other creatures feel happiness. If you lived in close relationship with a dog, you know, dogs feel happiness. You know, a tail wagging dog is, is a happy dog, but happiness is episodic. Happiness is not enough for us. There's some sort of long range view of our world that we want to justify. And I'd say, you know, the very best of us and the very worst of us comes from this.
- [17:44]
A
It is kind of strange that we have this instinct that is, it is like you're saying, sort of responsible for the best and the worst of us. You know, it can be a virtue or a pathology. It might, it might drive one person to join Doctors Without Borders or paint the Sistine Chapel and it might drive another person to invade Ukraine or, or fly into a building.
- [18:04]
B
Exactly.
- [18:05]
A
It's the same instinct.
- [18:06]
B
Exactly right.
- [18:07]
A
Very different manifestations.
- [18:09]
B
Exactly right. And I think it's helpful to be able to see that drive in people who are, who just appall us, horrify us, to be able to. I know that it helps me very much. I mean, we're living in a time in which there's a lot of feeling appalled by, by one another and the way that we respond to this longing to matter. But part of seeing the humanness in one another, which I think is a good thing to see rather than, oh, you're a monster. Even if they are a monster, if their acts are monstrous, how do we change it? Unless we see what's deep down in common with us in this longing. So one of the people I profile at great length, I wanted to talk to either an incel or an antisemite, a neo Nazi, a skinhead, somebody who had this kind of hateful ideology, by my lights, a hateful Ideology who thinks of their mattering as demanding the downward mattering of others, be they women or people of color or immigrants or Jews or whatever. So I got on Reddit and I got on these lists and I tried to make contact, but nobody who was actively a member of these groups wanted to particularly talk to me unless I pretended to be something I'm not. But I did find somebody who is an ex neo Nazi skinhead and was very, very active in that movement. His name is Frank Me. And he's now a friend, you know, and he came from really difficult circumstances, a broken home, his mom was a drug addict. His stepfather used poor little Frank's body as a punching bag. And he was bullied in school. I mean, there was no. It was bad. And then he met these neo Nazi skinheads who told him, and they literally used the language of mattering, which was so interesting. They told him, look in the mirror, you matter more than these other people. These mud people is what they called people of color. And you know that you are a white male, American heterosexual. And. And it was like being thrown a life raft, you know, when you're drowning. And he grabbed hold of it with all of his might, and he became very, very active. And he's a really smart, charismatic guy, and he became a very important agent in Neo Nazism. And it was all about mattering. It was all about mattering and the view that. So it's so important to understand how this can go wrong and the strategies that people will grab at to try to feel okay with themselves, to be able to live with themselves in order to know how to tackle this.
- [21:57]
A
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- [25:17]
C
Hello Sean. This is what I came up with. It said this is how I just used Claude. I told it I needed to write this ad, that I'd never used it before, that our audience is skeptical of AI hype. I explain the tension honestly. We have listeners who distrust this technology and here I am taking their money to advertise. Claude helped me think through how to say that out Loud instead of pretending it away. It's not magic. It's just useful for talking through problems when you're stuck. Let me just try one other thing here. I need a safe for work insult for my esteemed colleague Sean Ailing. He's a podcast host with a philosophy background. Let's see what he comes up with. Hey, Sean, you're a walking thought experiment. And what happens when someone reads enough Nietzsche to question everything except their own podcast?
- [26:07]
A
Cultural significance. That is objectively awesome. Try Claude for yourself for free at Claw AI Gray area. Well, let's. Let's actually talk about the different ways people carry out their. Their mattering projects. And you. You defined four different types, right? There are. There are socializers, people who want to matter to other people. There are transcenders, religious people that they want to matter to. To God or some, you know, higher metaphysical ideal or whatever.
- [26:57]
B
Yeah.
- [26:58]
A
There are competitors. These are people who just need to matter more.
- [27:00]
B
Yeah.
- [27:01]
A
Than the people around them. And there are heroic strivers. Yeah, right. Heroic strivers. People who just want to do great, great things that. That matter to them.
- [27:10]
B
Yeah.
- [27:10]
A
Do you think of these as equally valid approaches to mattering?
- [27:16]
B
You know, I do. There are creative and destructive ways of playing out all of these strategies. And what I've found is, you know, we may partake in different times of our life in different strategies, but every single one of these strategies, transcender, socializer, heroic striver, competitor, has creative ways and destructive ways of playing out.
- [27:46]
A
I feel like when people hear those types, you know, you hear heroic striver. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's me. You know, why not? That seems like the most noble. But I feel like a lot of people run into problems, Right, because you have this. You have this conception of yourself, and then you, you. You move through the world and you discover maybe you're not who you thought you were. Yeah. Maybe your ambition exceeded your talent. And then you have to deal with that and it's, you know, unless you're. Unless you're of a certain caliber, it seems like you're setting yourself up for a bit of disappointment.
- [28:25]
B
Yeah.
- [28:25]
A
And I don't know if it's the most reliable path.
- [28:27]
B
Exactly. It's got to be heroic for you. You know, some people it's gotta be heroic. I must break the records. I must get the Nobel Prize. I must, you know, come in first with the marathon for others. I'm gonna run the marathon. I am gonna train. I might be the last person to come in. I once saw a T shirt in a marathon, and it said, and in the back it said, I'm really slow. I hope somebody is reading this, you know, I hope there's somebody behind me. So it has to be something heroic for you. And heroic strivers, you know, they may depend on others to validate whether they're doing what they think they're doing, but they're really. Heroic strivers are not really trying to impress others. It's not for the fame. I've spoken to people who are heroic strivers, and I've spoken to people who are in it for the fame. That's a kind of socializer. They want the attention of others. Heroic strivers. It's really, here are the standards of excellence, and I would like to realize them or at least approach them, you know, asymptotically approach them in my life. And it can be intellectual, artistic, athletic, ethical. Could be ethical, could be entrepreneurial, could be military. You know, there are different standards, but it's really, for a heroic striver, it's meeting those standards. But you're right, you know, as a professor, especially with graduate students, you sometimes have to say, you are really smart, you are very talented, but I don't think this is where you're going to make your mark, you know, and that is horrible, and it's crushing.
- [30:27]
A
Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. If you're a fan of the gray area, then you probably don't mind holding contradictory ideas in your head or living in the discomfort of not knowing. Claude is designed to accommodate that kind of thinking. And Anthropic is committed to not running ads in Claude, so you don't have to worry about advertiser influence. Now, I haven't used Claude, but we knew that having an ad from Anthropic on the gray area is kind of a complicated thing. So I asked my editor, nemesis Jorge, to prompt Claude to write the ad for us, starting with the phrase, this is how I just used Claude.
- [31:07]
C
Hello, Sean. This is what I came up with. It said, this is how I just used Claude. I told it I needed to write this ad, that I'd never used it before, that our audience is skeptical of AI High. I explained the tension honestly. We have listeners who distrust this technology, and here I am taking their money to advertise. Claude helped me think through how to say that out loud instead of pretending it away. It's not magic. It's just useful for talking through problems when you're stuck. Let me just try one other thing here. I need a safe for work insult for my esteemed colleague Sean Ehling. He's a podcast host with a philosophy background. Let's see what he comes up with. Hey, Sean, you're a walking thought experiment. And what happens when someone reads enough Nietzsche to question everything except their own podcast?
- [31:57]
A
Cultural significance. That is objectively awesome. Try Claude for yourself for free at Claude AI Gray area.
- [32:12]
D
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B
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- [33:26]
A
The socializer type seems like maybe one of the more common types. But the thing about that is there's some nuance there, right? Like there's. To me, there's a really big difference between wanting to matter to the people around you. Your friends, your family, your colleagues, and wanting to matter to as many people as possible, including strangers. That's the difference between being useful and being famous.
- [33:52]
B
Yes, exactly.
- [33:53]
A
It seems like more and more people want to be famous rather than just matter to the people around them. And I feel like that is one of the many pathologies of the modern world that our technology is probably supercharged.
- [34:08]
B
Yes, it's become easier to become famous. You know, you can, you know, lip sync to a song in an adorable way while you bop your head and, you know, you go viral and, you know, suddenly a million people know of you. And for some people, fame actually does do it. But for many, many people, they find that fame is, first of all, it's fickle and
- [34:35]
A
it's counterfeit also.
- [34:37]
B
Yeah, I was once at a party and there was a very famous writer at this party. And if I were to say this writer's name, you would recognize this writer's name. So there was a fellow philosopher at this party, and he asked her her name, and. And then he said, and what do you do? And she said, this conversation is over. She turned on her heel and marched off. And I thought, oh, my God, how. How insecure is basing your mannering on fame? One person doesn't know who you are, and you're, you know, you're. You're offended. And. And so it's. It's a very insecure way of being, I think. And yet, if you're looking for evidence that you are deserving of the inordinate amount of attention that you give yourself, if all these strangers are paying you attention, that can qualm your doubt about whether you're worthy of your own attention. And so I can understand why it's so attractive. But for most people, it doesn't. I think it doesn't do the trick.
- [35:53]
A
So do you think that maybe the transcenders have got it figured out that maybe that's the most stable ground for your mattering project, to just devote yourself to maybe not necessarily God, but to be religious in some other sense or have some spiritual. To which you kind of. If you devote your life. Yeah. Some kind of spiritual life and that.
- [36:12]
B
Yeah.
- [36:14]
A
You know, if you can talk yourself.
- [36:15]
B
If you can talk yourself into it, perhaps you, you know, one of the problems with transcenders, but I want to say that it applies to other strategies as well. But it's quite stark in Transcenders is if you're basing your claim to really mattering on a view of the universe, of reality, some metaphysical view of reality, well, then it's very natural to universalize it to everybody, you know, whether. Whether they know it or not, what they ought to be doing is devoting themselves to this particular metaphysical view of reality. And that, of course, can lead to create intolerance. You know, we've seen intolerance among religious people. There's a whole history of it. But what I've actually found is that people tend to universalize no matter where they are. And I collect these statements of universalizing. I mean, for example, Diana Friedland, who was a fashion. She was the editor for many years, a legendary editor of Vogue magazine. You know, I have her saying, if you don't present yourself beautifully in the world by the clothes you wear, what gets you up in the morning, what gets you down the stairs? If you don't dress well, you're nobody. Which makes me and most of the academics I know, nobody. We don't particularly dress well, so there's such a tendency, not only among transcenders, but among all of us to say, look, there's nothing arbitrary about the way that I am grounding my life. There can't be. And therefore there's a kind of. As strong as the mattering instinct is, there's an instinct to universalize it and say, this is the way one really ought to ground one's mattering.
- [38:32]
A
Do you find that people have a hard time recognizing when their mattering project has failed? What does that look like?
- [38:41]
B
It's excruciating. You know, it's excruciating. What I call mattering adjudicators, you know, the professors, the editors, the gallery owners, the coaches, the right who are going to tell you, do you have it or not to be told that you don't, I mean, is excruciating. And you can, you know, you can say that they've gotten it wrong. And of course, Mandarin adjudicators do get it wrong. They're only. They're only human. And they. They can get it wrong. I mean, you know, the Beatles were told group singers are out and that they're, you know, they had absolutely no talent and. And to go find something else that was wrong. And they persisted. And sometimes it's right to persist, sometimes it isn't. You know, here's the thing. To be creatures of this sort who take on this burden of somehow trying to justify ourselves in our own eyes is to live with great uncertainty.
- [39:50]
A
One way to look at the political arena is to see it as the space where you have all these mattering projects competing and colliding.
- [40:00]
B
Yeah.
- [40:01]
A
And you get into this in a book a little bit. I mean, you say, you know, we are experiencing something like a crisis of mattering, and that it's not just individuals that can have an existential crisis. Societies can too. Is that what you think is happening now? Is our society having an existential crisis?
- [40:22]
B
Yeah, I think. I mean, I'm really curious as to whether you think so, but there's a sense.
- [40:31]
A
Oh, yes, I do.
- [40:32]
B
You know, we have great inequity, we have great income inequity in this country, but together with that goes a great mattering inequity, that we have the sense that there are certain people who really matter so much more than the bulk of us, that the very, very rich, and it keeps getting richer and richer. We're broaching trillionaires now, but we've got lots of billionaires now. The very, very rich, the very, very famous, the very, very Powerful and they tend to overlap are the people who really, really matter. And that's the sort of model that set up, you know, instead of the religious model. And we were all vying in our own way to matter to God, but at least there was the sense that, yeah, we matter to God. We were made in the image of God, you know, and that is what provides us with our core of mattering. We've now got a system in which that's set up for there to be great mattering inequality and that there doesn't seem to be enough mattering to go around. And so I say we squabble like children underneath a pinata trying to matter. You know, no wonder people are trying to get rich, get powerful, get famous, be an influencer, get as much attention as possible. This is the model that's held up to us. It's the model that's held up to young people. Be rich, be famous, be powerful. And that leaves out most of us aren't made to be rich or powerful or famous. It's not a good society that leads to the majority of people feeling like they don't matter. And it makes us vulnerable to the false claims of demagogues. I will make you matter. I will make you. I hear you. You matter to me. I will provide trickle down mattering to you. That is the voice of the demagogue, you know, and because this is such a deep longing, this is a, the core of our humanness. It has huge effects. It causes cults. Whether the cults are religious, whether the cults are political, or some very powerful amalgam of the two, it makes people extremely vulnerable to this kind of message. I will make you matter. I will make you matter.
- [43:29]
A
Isn't this just the, the, the, just the tragic reality of politics of, of tribalism and in group out, group thinking. Right. Like I, I have my identity and it's distinct from this other identity. And in order for my identity to be good or superior or meaningful.
- [43:47]
B
Yeah.
- [43:47]
A
This other group has to be less than.
- [43:49]
B
Yeah.
- [43:49]
A
And so it just sets, I mean, you call it incommensurable forms of life. Right. You just have these, these competing visions of, or these competing mattering projects that are bound up with these identities.
- [44:01]
B
Yeah.
- [44:01]
A
And they just collide in the social political world. And it just, it just, it has always been that way. And I think it creates a really serious political problem or challenge. And to be honest, I don't think you have a good answer for it. And in your defense, I don't think anyone has a good answer for it. But here's what you say in the book. I just want to read this to you. You say that the most pragmatic, not to say moral thing that we could do for society is create enough mattering to go around providing for all what ought to have been the birthright of having been born. I don't really know what that means practically and I don't know what that would look like in the world. And I'm curious what you have in mind here. Is there a society that has been able to distribute the mattering around in that sort of way where they were able to avoid some of these conflicts we're talking about?
- [44:53]
B
There are these tests that can test life satisfaction, which is different from testing happiness, but sort of, you know, life satisfaction, this long self reflective view of your life. And there's a test, the control test that's used and it involves thinking about your own life and then thinking of counterfactual lives that you might have led. And, and how much better or how much worse are these? Where are you in this ladder? Are you pretty up there? Your life is going pretty well compared to how it could have gone or not. And in this way psychologists have test the life satisfaction in various countries and invariably the Nordic countries come out on top. It's often Norway is on top or Denmark or then some are on top or Norway. And one of the things about these societies is that they have very supportive social nets. If you get, you know, that the government is to some extent there to take care of you from cradle to grave, there is not quite the income inequity that we have in our country.
- [46:12]
A
Well, that's all true, but can, can, can I just say a lot of what those societies also share is they're very homogeneous and they're very homogeneous. Certainly more homogenous than.
- [46:22]
B
Exactly, exactly.
- [46:23]
A
Right, that's, and that's. So there's less maybe competing.
- [46:28]
B
Yes.
- [46:28]
A
Mattering projects. I mean there are things like that. But in a liberal pluralistic society. Harder.
- [46:34]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, this is true. But, but you know, certainly to have a government, you know, that feels a little bit like it's like you matter to it that you're being taken care of and that if you get sick, which is a terrible thing to happen, that you won't lose all your money as well. You know, that this is, you know, this sense of mattering to one's leaders would be helpful and also that there aren't people who just matter so much more because they have so much more, you know, money Much more than they could ever use. And that would make absolutely no difference to their life if they lost a few million. So this might help. But also, I'm a big believer in just trying to see one another as clearly as possible. I live in a part of Boston where there are a lot of people on the street. There are a lot of the unsheltered. And every time I see them, it's like just flashes through my head. You were once a child, you know, maybe loved, maybe not. Something seems to have gone wrong because here you are on the street. But that, that. And it was so shocking to the person I was talking to. Oh, I never thought about that. You know, tried to see this individual as an individual, you know, and once as a vulnerable child and now a very vulnerable human being. I mean, if we sort of could see one another, the poignancy of what it is to be human, maybe we could wring out a little more compassion, a little more mercy for one another. And that would be for us to do, not the government. And that could be part of our mattering project, to see each other with some degree of imaginative compassion.
- [48:46]
A
Why do you think it's so hard? It should be so easy, and yet it is. And possibly hard, it seems.
- [48:54]
B
Yeah, well, I think, you know, I do think that that is part of the purpose and the, you know, of art, of art, to make that, because it takes imagination and to be able to try to imagine yourself into the subjectivity of somebody else. It's a capacity that we could cultivate. And I think it ought to be. I think it ought to be. I think that ought to be a message that we have that. That is a capacity worth cultivating. Yeah, it's hard. Everything worth living for is hard. I think knowledge is hard. Justice is hard. Compassion, mercy, kindness, these are hard.
- [49:53]
A
Being human.
- [49:54]
B
Effort.
- [49:54]
A
Being human is hard.
- [49:55]
B
Being human is hard. And trying to be a human in the most creative way possible is even harder. But I think it matters. It matters.
- [50:11]
A
Rebecca, this is a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. And again, the title of the book is the Mattering Instinct. It is fantastic. I recommend it. Check it out. Rebecca Neuberger. Goldstein. Thank you.
- [50:24]
B
Thank you so much. Thank you for really, for me, a very deep problem, and I would love to talk politics with you more.
- [50:35]
A
Careful what you ask for. I'll deliver.
- [50:38]
B
I would really, really welcome that.
- [50:48]
A
All right. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I'm sure by now you all know that I live for these hardcore philosophy shows, but as always, we want to know what you think so, drop us a line at the gray area@box.com or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. If you can and you have the time, please go ahead. Rate Review subscribe to the podcast that helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Thor, New writer edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala, Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington Wrote wrote our theme music and a special thanks to TGA alum Patrick Boyd. You matter to me objectively, Patrick, and I hope you know that episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays and Fridays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know.
- [51:54]
B
SA.