Once, when I was interviewing a nonprofit leader about a surge in charitable giving, she made an off-the-cuff comment that has always stuck with me: “People first want to be successful in life, then they want their lives to be significant.”
Maybe that’s why the title of Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book caught my eye: “The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.” Through the lenses of biology, psychology and philosophy, she explores how the deep human need for our lives to mean something shapes our identities, relationships and culture.
A MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, Goldstein is the author of numerous works, including “Plato at the Googleplex.” A Ph.D. in philosophy, she has taught at Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard and other lauded institutions. Here’s the email exchange I had with Goldstein about this new book, published in January by Liveright Press:
Q. You say that the instinct to matter is “the most peculiar and the most human thing about us.” Why do we so urgently need to understand this about ourselves?
A. The mattering instinct is so deep within us as to go unseen. It’s not the same as our need for connectedness, which is directed toward having specific others in our lives who will regard us as deserving of their special attention, typically our family and friends, perhaps our colleagues, neighbors and community members. Connectedness is a well-recognized fundamental human need, which has received a lot of attention from psychologists.
But I mean something else by the mattering instinct. It’s our need to feel that we are pursuing lives that are meaningful in our own eyes. While connectedness concerns our relationships with others, the mattering instinct concerns our relationship with ourselves.
We try to satisfy the mattering instinct in what I call mattering projects, which give us our reason for living. Our mattering projects can be selfish or altruistic, spiritual or secular, competitive or cooperative. But whether it’s tending one’s garden or one’s cause, one’s relationships or one’s reputation, one’s immortal soul or one’s net worth, our ways of satisfying the mattering instinct become the loci of some of our deepest emotions. We evaluate how well our lives are going at least partly by how well our mattering projects are going.
Q. You write about how our ancient longing to matter can unite or divide us. How does this play out in the social-media-driven world we exist in today?
A. We each have so much at stake in our mattering projects, our very flourishing dependent on getting our mattering projects right. And if ours are right, doesn’t that prove that others’ are wrong?
The seeds of our intolerance are planted in this faulty logic. Faulty, because if you delve into the mattering instinct deeply enough, what logically follows is the intrinsic dignity of every one of us and therefore our right to seek our mattering as we will — according to our individual temperaments, talents, interests, and culture — so long as our mattering project doesn’t diminish others’ equal right to seek theirs.
As far as social media is concerned, it has exacerbated the unfortunate tendency of the mattering instinct to push us towards intolerance. We didn’t evolve to interact with one another in a virtual world but rather face-to-face in physical space where we can more directly hold one another responsible.
The virtual world loosens the restraints of civility imposed on us, making us shameless. We have difficulties enough confronting one another in our full reality, and social media isn’t helping.
We are indeed social animals, but the interactions on social media are too often anti-social. Our sense of mattering is typically increased by getting attention, and the more inflammatory the words we spout on social media the more the attention. Probably the worst we’ve witnessed of the irresponsibility unleashed on social media are the conspiracy theories that spread with the speed of light.
Q. For readers who may be facing loneliness or shrinking social circles, what can strengthen their sense of mattering, both by connecting outward and by deepening inner worth?
A. You hit on both of our fundamental needs in that question: the special connectedness with others in our lives; and the feeling of inner worth, which is another way of speaking of the mattering instinct.
Both needs continue in us just as long as we continue to be, which is why, at later stages of life, a person may experience the kind of loneliness and sense of pointlessness that had been absent for decades.
When those whose mattering project was one with their professional work retire, the mattering instinct doesn’t retire along with them. And when those whose mattering project was primarily devoted to the care and flourishing of their children are facing the empty nest, their need to flourish doesn’t suddenly vanish. No, to be human is to have these same two needs throbbing in the core of us throughout our lives.
We may have less to prove to ourselves at 60 than when we were 26, but that’s a burden we can gladly shed, helping us to see more clearly what truly matters to us at this point, so as to rekindle our excitement in going forward. There can be a thrill of freedom in this.
Perhaps there is some way to turn all that life experience into teaching others younger than oneself. Or perhaps now is the time to develop a passion or talent or interest that one’s earlier life left no time to cultivate. To teach, to learn, to cultivate: these are soul-expanding goals in sync with life itself. And as far as connectedness is concerned, here too there can be newfound freedom in choosing to have people in your life whom you aren’t forced to please, as you might have when you were younger, but who are in your life because you want them to be there.
Q. Finally, what changed for you personally in the process of writing this book?
A. The time in which I was writing coincided with a time in which we are experiencing in this country, as well as in the world at large, increasing polarization. Those fraught and irresolvable divisions that had long been the unfortunate consequences of the mattering instinct are becoming ever more fraught and divisive. It’s been a time to try our souls, provoking a host of negative emotions: anger, outrage, fear, despair, contempt, hatred.
How can people behave this way? This is a question that we all have had occasion to ask, though the people at whom we direct our bafflement varies, depending on who we are. I am as prey to these negative emotions as anybody.
But what I found, while working through the ideas of this book, was an antidote to animus. To understand the mattering instinct is to understand how hard it is to be human and to appreciate the intrinsic dignity that comes with being creatures who long to matter. For me, it opened up some space to feel the warmth of human commonality and sympathy.