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Philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a recipient of a MacArthur \u201cGenius Grant\u201d among other honors, recently published The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n Susan Perry: How long has the idea of \u201cmattering\u201d been of interest to you, and how long have you been working on <\/strong>The Mattering Instinct<\/strong><\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n Rebecca Newberger Goldstein:<\/strong> In some sense, for almost the whole of my more than 40-year-long writing life. In my first book, The Mind-Body Problem, <\/em>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.<\/p>\n My editor for that book didn\u2019t entirely understand my main character. She\u2019s bright, good-looking, sexually desirable, and yet she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Much later, I saw the idea being adopted by behavioral economists, feminist theorists, and cultural critics. That led me to think out this \u201cmattering theory\u201d more rigorously, explaining how we evolved it and the multitudinous ways in which it gets expressed, both healthy and not.<\/p>\n In the last book I\u2019d published, Plato at the Googleplex<\/em>, I used some of my ideas about mattering, and psychologist Martin Seligman<\/a> recognized that something new was being proposed about human motivation<\/a>. He organized a workshop of positive psychologists around the mattering theme. I promised to write the first draft of an article, <\/em>but I soon saw that only a book would do.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> book\u2014easy answers for existential angst\u2014and I refused to go that way. The science and the philosophy<\/a> are relevant to understanding how we became the peculiar species we are: creatures of matter who long to matter.<\/p>\n SP: Was the word \u201cmattering\u201d what you started or ended with?<\/strong><\/p>\n RNG:<\/strong> It’s been the concept of mattering from the beginning. For me, meaningfulness, when applied to our lives, is a derivative term, one which I define in relation to our longing to matter and how we react to it. To matter means to be deserving of attention<\/a>. The mattering instinct that I define in the book is our longing to be deserving of our own <\/em>attention. <\/p>\n And yet we have the capacity to reflect on our own self-mattering and realize it\u2019s just as arbitrary as our own personal identity<\/a> is. And this prompts the longing to justify our own self-mattering\u2014that is, to try to prove to ourselves that our subjective feeling of how much we matter is based on something objective. That\u2019s the mattering instinct. In particular, I distinguish between four general strategies: the religious\/spiritual<\/a>, the social, the heroic, and the competitive.<\/p>\n Our mattering instinct is what yields us our existential dimension. It involves our relationship with ourselves. In addition, there is our longing to matter to others whom we regard as in our lives. This yields us our social dimension. Both are essential to human flourishing. <\/p>\n SP:<\/strong> Do you have thoughts to share about being married to another author, Steven Pinker? <\/strong><\/p>\n RNG:<\/strong> The advantages outweigh the disadvantages. We understand what it\u2019s like to be obsessed with work\u2014we\u2019re both happiest when obsessed\u2014and give each other the mental space needed. We are experts in different fields\u2014he in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology<\/a>, me in philosophy\u2014and so we can learn a lot from one another, which has been reflected in the books we\u2019ve written since we got together in 2005.<\/p>\n Philosophy Essential Reads<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n SP: You do a fine job of combining the appeal of a how-to (how the reader and society can do better at flourishing) with a broad-based search into\u2014and clear explanations of\u2014the many philosophical and psychological aspects of our craving to have our lives matter. What kind of feedback do you get and from whom before feeling \u201cdone\u201d? <\/strong><\/p>\n RNG:<\/strong> I always feel that there is some type of internal logical structure, dictated by the ideas themselves, and I don\u2019t start writing until I clearly sense that internal logic as almost a living thing. I always write a complete first draft, revising abundantly as I go along, sentence by sentence, until I hand it over to a trusted reader. Steve has become my first reader. For my past few books, I\u2019d had a wonderful editor who died just before I began this one.<\/p>\n SP:<\/strong> As baby boomers like me find that death is hovering too close for comfort, does our instinct to matter change? <\/strong><\/p>\n RNG:<\/strong> Nothing quite so sharpens our longing to prove to ourselves that our lives matter more than a reminder of our own finitude. We none of us want to feel that we\u2019ve wasted our brief time here on earth. And the intimations of mortality become more insistent as one ages. A good mattering project\u2014a project that channels the longing to matter\u2014can hopefully<\/em> see a person through to the end. <\/p>\n SP: You posted on your <\/strong>Substack<\/strong><\/a> that you hadn\u2019t intended your work to be political, but someone accused you of being totalitarian. What’s that about?<\/strong><\/p>\n RNG:<\/strong> In some sense, these ideas do have political implications. In addition to the great inequalities in income and power, there are profound inequalities in how much mattering people are made to feel that they possess\u2014not surprising since it\u2019s money, power, and fame that have largely taken the place of the more religious and spiritual response to the mattering instinct. The religious and spiritual response was available to all, whereas money, power, and fame are available only to the few.<\/p>\n My calling this a societal problem is what prompted the reviewer to call me a totalitarian, since he presumed that I was calling for \u201cstate-mandated mattering.\u201d It seems to me that the founders of this country had something very much like mattering in mind when they chose words including the right of all people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nWas It Always About “Mattering”?<\/h2>\n
The Life of a Writer<\/h2>\n
The Politics of Mattering<\/h2>\n