Philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” among other honors, recently published The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us (Liveright, 2026). In it, she shares insights and examples drawn from many fields that tie in to the concept of mattering, showing us how essential it is to individuals and society itself.
Susan Perry: How long has the idea of “mattering” been of interest to you, and how long have you been working on The Mattering Instinct?
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: In some sense, for almost the whole of my more than 40-year-long writing life. In my first book, The Mind-Body Problem, a novel, I introduced the idea of the mattering map, its myriad regions each prioritizing a different answer to what makes for a life that matters.
My editor for that book didn’t entirely understand my main character. She’s bright, good-looking, sexually desirable, and yet she’s always on the cusp of despair. Why? I offered the mattering map as a way of explaining her. She had intellectual ambitions that she despaired of ever fulfilling. I gave to my fictional character the first ideas of what would eventually become my mattering theory.
Much later, I saw the idea being adopted by behavioral economists, feminist theorists, and cultural critics. That led me to think out this “mattering theory” more rigorously, explaining how we evolved it and the multitudinous ways in which it gets expressed, both healthy and not.
In the last book I’d published, Plato at the Googleplex, I used some of my ideas about mattering, and psychologist Martin Seligman recognized that something new was being proposed about human motivation. He organized a workshop of positive psychologists around the mattering theme. I promised to write the first draft of an article, but I soon saw that only a book would do.
By the time I began writing, the ideas were all worked out, and it took me about a year to write. But then there was the ordeal of getting it published. Editors kept mistaking the book for a self-help book—easy answers for existential angst—and I refused to go that way. The science and the philosophy are relevant to understanding how we became the peculiar species we are: creatures of matter who long to matter.
Was It Always About “Mattering”?
SP: Was the word “mattering” what you started or ended with?
