The Mattering Instinct: Why We Long to Matter | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein – EP 727

32:09So why? Because these brains are the most complicated thing we've yet discovered in the universe. Yeah. Anyway, so we have got to be born into families, into caretakers who will pay us attention. even if we don't deserve it. How much attention does a little baby deserve? They're not doing anything extraordinary. Six months, they finally roll over and we're all applauding how helpless we are, right? Because if we don't have these caretakers paying us exquisite attention, we die. And that need for there to be others in our lives, friends, family, lovers, co-workers, community members, whoever you have in your life.

32:59That continues throughout our lives, that my friends are paying me attention, even when I screw up, when I don't have to prove to them how worthy I am. They are my friends. That's what it is to have people in your life. And that is a need we all have, this mattering to others. And it has to do with our relationship to others. Hopefully it's reciprocal. Hopefully we also pay them attention, but not everybody does. They just want the attention and they don't give it back. Anyway, mattering instinct is something else. It's our relationship with ourselves. It comes from this existential moment. It's almost like a Beckett play.

33:38In fact, Samuel Beckett writes about this moment over and over again, this kind of strangeness when we step outside of ourselves and interrogate ourselves as if almost we're another person saying, well, who are you? Why are you so devoted single-mindedly to your own survival and flourishing? Why are you paying yourself so much attention? You're not so very important. You're no more important than anybody else. And then you try to do something to close that gap. And that's what I mean by the mattering instinct. And you may do it through your social relationships. That's what I call socializers.

34:15but you may do it spiritually, religiously, the kind of studying that you were talked about. You may do it in terms of your, you have certain standards of excellence that you need to realize in order to feel okay about yourself. It may be very grand. Steve Jobs had said you have to make a dent in the universe. Well, not all of us are born to make a dent in the universe. I mean, raising prize petunias and maybe raising flourishing children. There are different ways that we, standards that we may have, intellectual, artistic, entrepreneurial, athletic, military, ethical, that we need to realize in order to feel, yeah, I'm okay.

35:02I can tolerate my own existence. It may be competitive when these are the four different, what I call the continents of the Mannerly map. And just about everybody I've spoken to over the past 40 years since I've been interested in this subject, I wouldn't say just about, just, yeah, everybody falls into one of these four grand categories. But then there are so many ways that these are realized. So many do. And that's just so fascinating, this kind of diversity in us. Thank you for sharing that, Rebecca. And I want to go into those quadrants here in just a little bit, but to summarize what you were just saying is connectedness concerns how we matter to others.

35:47And this is how most people perceive mattering. However, you, and I would say, I argue that mattering really concerns how we matter to ourselves. And this turn inward carries so much more moral and psychological weight when you think of it this way. And I started to think about this because at that same time I was given that calling, this group I inherited at Lowe's out of 300 and something thousand employees was the most disengaged group in the entire company. And when I got to the root of the issue, the issue wasn't about how they were relating to others. Everyone else thought they were a bunch of buffoons and I should get rid of the entire group.

36:35But what I realized was the breakdown was happening because almost to a person, none of the people in the group understood how they mattered to themselves, how the role that they were doing mattered in the bigger scheme of Lowe's. How does my job as a computer operator or someone in the data center or working in a call center impact a customer experience? And when they don't understand that, and I think this is what so few companies really understand, they're never going to be able to do the things you want them to. And that's why I really think, and I recently wrote a CEO weekly article about this, that the group of people that we are not spending enough time with in these organizations, if you think about it that way, is frontline managers.

37:29When I was in the military, these are your corporals or sergeants, but they're the frontline supervisors. And if those people don't have a return on energy, if they don't believe they matter, then everything else in your company is going to break down, is what I realized. And so when I rebuilt this group, I had to start from there. How do you start making those employees, those frontline supervisors feel that they matter? Because then it carries the ripple effect forward. And then they develop the relationship with their subordinates and teach them that they matter too. And that's how the mattering instinct starts expanding.

38:13That's what I found. I think that is extremely interesting. But I do just want to point out that for a lot of people, they really don't derive their mattering from their work. They work in order to make a living, to support themselves and perhaps their family. And so many people I've spoken to are of that kind. But that they're real mattering. And this existential project that makes them feel that they have a reason to live and that gives us them the impetus to get on with the future. It's hard to live a human life. They just can't stress that enough. That they're deriving it from something else.

39:00So, of course, it's very good to make people feel as if they matter in the workplace. It's a moral imperative to try to make people feel they matter wherever they are and to make them aware of how much they matter in that situation. You're an Uber driver, the cashier in the grocery store, everybody to treat them as if they matter. And point out the special things that they do that make them matter. It feeds the soul. It really feeds the soul. But I do want to just say that for some people, for example, there's this movement that's rather big among philosophers, effective altruism. And it said, take any job that's going to pay the most money so you can give the most charity.

39:41Work for Wall Street, work for whatever. Even if it's not meaningful work for you, what will give it meaning is that you're doing it in order to be an altruist, to make as much money as you can in order to give it away. So these are people who definitely are not going to derive any mattering from the work itself, but from what they're going to do with this money. I recently had a discussion with Joshua Green, and it was basically on that whole line. Exactly. like that. But there's this interview I did a while back with this gentleman, Dr. Abraham George. And he came over here from India to escape India and became a prominent business person in New York, built all this wealth, and then actually went back to India because he saw how big a gap was there for so many people.

40:35And he ended up creating this institution called Shanti Bhavan, I think is the name of it and put his altruism to work. And since that time, he has now taken 15 ,000 children who are in the lowest caste system. And these children now are New York Times best-selling authors and have attended Ivy League schools. And he has changed the complete dimensions for now tens of thousands of people. And I think it does show how that ripple effect that you were just talking about can change lives. It is, Freud had said that the two cornerstones of humanness are love and work. And I think the fact that he said work, where I would say mattering, it shows us a lot about Freud, no surprise.

41:27He derived his sense of mattering from his scientific work, which was revolutionary. And, but not everybody derives their sense of mattering from their work. And that, to me, has been the most interesting thing, to use this framework to try to understand other people and to get to the core of other people. What is it that's driving them? How are they trying to appease this longing? And I think an interesting take on this is if you look at Viktor Frankl. So if you look at how he defined the ways we achieve meaning, he did identify work as one of them, but he also identified relationships that we find ourselves in.

42:11So you could be a caretaker to a loved one who's going through a terrible sickness and you find meaning in that, or you could find meaning in the love that you have for a child or a partner. but he also finds you can find meaning or I would extend it to mattering in suffering so it's not just about work this and I think that's what makes it unique is mattering is completely dependent on each of us as individuals it's so that's right yeah it's where a real individuality comes out and free will is a big issue for philosophers right and I would say if it exists anywhere it exists on this plane, this plane of trying to respond to this shared mattering instinct, and which brings us into this realm of values, and we choose different values.

43:03And some are choosing, I tell stories of people who choose what I would call wrong values, and I try to give the criterion for distinguishing between better and worse ways of responding to this. If I wake up tomorrow morning and decide I have to invade Poland. My sense of mattering demands it. Well, then my sense of mattering may demand that, but I must be stopped because this is a destructive way of responding to the mattering instinct. And we do see very destructive ways of responding to it. And I would say some of the worst atrocities we've seen throughout history. And if we open today's newspaper, we will see very damaging ways of responding to this.

43:49But it's deeply human. So no wonder it can lead to atrocities and no wonder it can lead to beautiful acts of altruism and achievement and scientific discovery and artistic creativity and all of that. Let's take a break here before we go into the four quadrants, which I definitely want to go into to maybe talk about one of these stories. So I'll maybe let you pick one. But in the book, you talk about Spinoza, you talk about William James, you talk about Freud, who you brought up earlier. But is there a particular story that you feel might resonate the best for the listeners? Yeah, I bring up these stories to illustrate different aspects of this mattering longing.

44:38But perhaps William James, because I think the story of William James, the great philosopher and psychologist, in fact, at Harvard, down the street from where I am now, the psychology building was called William James Hall. Harvard is very proud of him. I think he illustrates it, especially when you could put him in a combination with his sister, Ellis James. But so William was born into an amazing family. His younger brother by 18 months was Henry James, the novelist. William James is the oldest of five children. And then there were two other boys after Henry and then a sister, Alice James. And William James' father was a kind of, he didn't have to work for a living.

45:29He had inherited money, but he was an independent scholar, Swedenborgian mystic. And William James was extraordinarily talented, intellectually, artistically, scientifically, philosophically, a very close-knit family. The connectedness was there, super there. When William decided he wanted to be an artist, they all took off and moved from Boston to Newport, Rhode Island, so that he gets to study with a famous artist there, the whole family decamped. And he, certainly in terms of connectedness, it was all in place. And he suffered, he decided he was not going, he wasn't a good enough artist. And there's nothing more contemptible than being a mediocre artist.

46:18He had these, already, this is a heroic striver, right? That he has these standards of excellence that must be met in order for him to live in peace with himself. So then he goes to medical school and he's not inspired by medical school. He goes through it. He becomes a doctor. He never practices. He goes into a deep depression, almost a catatonic depression where he would just lie in bed and contemplate suicide for months and months on end, right? And he does not commit suicide because he wouldn't do that to his family. But that is how tenuous his hold on life was, his engagement with life. And it's such amazing.

47:00He writes about it in one of his great books, The Varieties of Religious Experience. He says he attributes it to a French doctor, but he told his son and also his translator, his French translator, that it was himself that he was describing here. It was a first-person account of what it is like to be in a deep clinical depression. And then he pulls himself out of it. He decides his first act of free will be to believe in free will. And he will act as if his life is worth living. And he latches onto what I call a mattering project. He becomes a philosopher. And all of that energy was all over the place and is focused on this one area, which then merges into psychology.

47:47and he is a man of extraordinary energy. Everybody writes about him. He was physical energy and mental energy and social energy. He is, but constantly battling a kind of melancholic, what they called in the 19th century, a depressive temperament. When he accomplished a tremendous amount, his principles of psychology still read. It's magnificent. And he's a psychologist who writes like a novelist. And his brother, Henry James, is a novelist who writes like a psychologist. Two extraordinary talents. He was a heroic striver. He needed that project to carry that so that he could accomplish these great things in order for him to be able to live with himself.

48:33His sister, on the other hand, Alice, was a Victorian woman. There was no outlet for her. when she kept a diary, and it was finally published in the 1970s. It was a feminist project to bring out this diary of this Victorian woman. And she did suffer her entire life from depression. She constantly was fighting off suicide. She became a permanent invalid. Couldn't leave her bed and did get a lot of attention from her family in this way. But life was not a joyful endeavor for her. And when she actually got breast cancer at the age of, I think, 41 or 42, she greeted it with glee. Now she could retire.

49:21Now she had a diagnosable disease, and she could just retreat and wait for death. It's almost like a controlled experiment. Two people raised in the same household, the same close-knit, connected household, and the same kind of temperament. Neurotic, yes. Both of them were neurotic. But one was given a way to find himself to a mannering project that could allow him to live with himself and feel like he was realizing what he was meant to do when the other wasn't. And you see the results. You know how it was. So for me, this family, this amazing family, and especially these two siblings, really demonstrate something about the distinction between connectedness and the mattering instinct.

50:10I just wanted to share a couple more things about this, because this is one of the things I loved about your book is how much detail you put into these stories. So what you just left out that I think is important is that out of these five kids, their father chose the two oldest to be his heir apparent and the ones that he wanted to glorify the family name that he wasn't able to in his lifetime. So he did extraordinary things for William and Henry, including the fact that he moved the whole family just so that William could try to pursue his artistic ventures. And then when it failed, he moved them back.

50:54And when William James went to Harvard, Harvard isn't what we think about today. Harvard was a stumbling, not nearly as well-respected institution as it is today when William arrived there. And I think he, in many ways, I can see why they put so much behind his name, because he, in many ways, put them completely on the map. But another distinction that you really make is that the father allowed the two younger boys to go out to war when they were 16 and 17 years old, which caused both of them to end up with unfulfilling lives because of the experiences that they had in battle in many ways. And then the daughter, who was brilliant, as brilliant as the two older boys, was never given the same mattering foundation as the two older boys were, which I think impacted her own self-mattering in huge ways.

51:56And it was only in the twilight of her life when she found her partner who made her feel like she mattered that I think she truly became alive. So I think those are other really important parts that you bring about. Yeah. Well, actually, the most fulfilling part of her life when she just did not have the ideation, the suicide ideation, was a brief period when she was able to teach other women. There was some kind of group that allowed women to teach other women. And then she felt fulfilled. And then she was, and she did, it's true that her Catherine Loring partner, towards the end of her life, it was a very fulfilling relationship.

52:45but she needed, when you have that much talent, you need a way of expressing it, of trying to develop these ideas or develop your beautiful sentences. She had the writing gift and she had that heightened consciousness of consciousness that all of the James siblings had. But yeah, they're extraordinary family. But I have a novel called The Dark Sister in which William James is a character there. But the way that William, you know, that the way he was able to pull himself out was just, I'm going to commit to life, and that means committing to a certain project. It turned out to be a highly intellectual project, not artistic, but he was a heroic striver.

53:30And I think there's some, there is some evidence, comes from the psychology of personality, that we have a structure to our temperament so that some of us are more interested in close relationships, some of us in achievement, some of us in power. So there's this theory, the Murray McClellan theory of personality that groups us into these three different types. And there's some correlation with my quadrants, my continents, the four continents of the mattery map. Transcenders, what I call transcenders, those who seek it in some mattering, in some religious or spiritual way, is not included in this.

54:14But transcenders, I think, come in three different forms. Affiliators, those who are driven by need for affiliation, those who are driven by achievement, and those who are driven by the need for power. So the religious impulse can express itself in many different ways. Well, this is where I wanted to go anyhow. So in the book, in the mattering map, you bring out transcenders, which you just mentioned, socializers, heroics drivers, which you mentioned William James was, and competitors. And the reason you do this, as I interpret it, is you're trying to show how widely human responses to the same instinct diverge.

54:58And another thing that I thought was really important is that the mattering instinct is not circular. What I thought is the fact that we long to matter doesn't automatically justify how we pursue mattering was an important distinction that you made. So with that set up, you take us through the four quadrants. Thanks. Thanks for mentioning it's not circular. That would be very damning if it was. And I gave that a lot of thought that it not be circular. So, transcenders, heroic strivers, socializers, and competitors, and I can say they can all go right and they can all go wrong. And then I talk about how I try to distinguish between right and wrong responses.

55:42But transcenders, this is a very, this is a kind of religious, spiritual response to mattering. It requires the person, the transcender to have a belief that there is some transcendent, trans-empirical, beyond space and time being to whom one matters. Whether you call the transcendent being God or something more spiritual and vague, but yet that the universe is permeated by the goals, the intentions of this being. And this being intentionally created oneself, that you exist by reason of this transcendent being God. whatever you call it. And that means that this being felt that you have a purpose to play in the narrative of eternity.

56:43This is the grandest narrative that could possibly exist. And that this results in a great sense of mattering. You cosmically matter. That which created heaven and earth and the moral order created you. I was born into a transcender feel of family. That's my background. I was born into a very religious family. I was raised very religiously. And I was very religious. I have a serious nature. So when I was religious, I took it very seriously. In my tradition, for example, men are required to pray three times a day, every day. Women are not. I did. I took that on myself. and the sense of mattering I've experienced it is very strong I felt and I did something wrong when I violated one of the many laws that go into leading a Jewish orthodox life orthodoxy is what I was brought up in I felt that I was displeasing God himself that God was paying attention that and that was terrifying but I never doubted how much I mattered I mattered to God my very action all my actions mattered to God.

58:00That is a very strong sense of mattering. And as we well know, transcenders will give up their lives. That's what religious martyrs do. They feel that that is required by what grounds they're mattering, which is one of the points I make in the book, that our need to matter is stronger, our will to matter is stronger than the will to life itself. You can sacrifice your life if you think that your mattering demands that. So those are transcenders. And they're really interesting to me, especially given my background. And Herod is a great example of someone who gave up her life. Yes, exactly. Because she pursued her mattering.

58:44Exactly. And she says, as the fire is lit, hold the cross up so that I can see it. Okay, I'm going to start crying. I mean, it's very moving. Hold the cross up so I can see it through the flames. This is very moving. You know that this is many members of our species have, this is the way they ground their land. And I think one of the reasons that we feel this crisis of mattering is that most of us are no longer religious in that way. We may go to church, synagogue, mosque, but we don't ground our very mattering on these religious beliefs. And other things have moved in to take its place. Fame, power, money, these sorts of things, shallower.

59:27And that also, I should say that not everybody can achieve. Not everybody can be famous. Not everybody can be a billionaire. Not everybody can be powerful. But when the days of religion or spirituality really grounding the sense of mattering, everybody could have a part in that. And so that has some things to do with why mattering has, a lot of other things have to do with it as well. But one of the factors that goes into why there is a crisis of mattering, not that I'm in favor of her, it's interesting, I'll get this literature sometimes showing that believers, religious believers, have the greater sense of meaningfulness in their life, of matter in this life.

1:00:13This is not surprising to think that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. Nothing else can compete with that. I'll get this literature and it's put in the guise of, so therefore be religious, as if that's not how religion works. It's not, it always reminds me, it's like joining the health club, you'll be healthier. Well, become a religious believer, feel like you matter more. It's not how religious belief works. I know because I was once a believer. So there are heroic strivers and heroic strivers are also very interesting. These are people who have some, it's not mattering to God.

1:00:49It's not mattering to others. In a heroic striver, a true heroic striver, it really is a matter of there's standards of excellence that you have to fulfill or at least feel like you're getting closer to, making progress toward in order for your life to feel meaningful, in order for you to have a purpose and for it to make sense. And I do pay a lot of attention to heroic strivers in the book. And maybe that shows something about me. But these are a kind of person I understand very well. But I'm particularly interested in those who were really not trying to impress others. that were to really show that this is about realizing a standard of excellence for yourself and so that you can respect yourself, redeem yourself in your own eyes.

1:01:46And one of the, for me, most touching stories comes from my personal life. I have a very good friend. She's a writer, Megan Marshall. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer. and she had a partner who had once named Scott Harney who had hopes of being a poet and studied at Harvard with Robert Lowell and it wasn't going at all well. He sent out his poems. They were not published. He tried to get, he entered every contest. He did not win. And then he turned away from poetry and after, unfortunately, he died young and he, afterwards, Megan found his stash of poetry on which he had been constantly working.

1:02:31He never sent it out again. The rejections were poisoning it for him, right? But he worked just as hard and his poems are magnificent. And you see all of the effort. And that was his mattering project. He was going, making progress towards this. And it was not to win other people's applause or anything like that. It was just to feel like he was doing something with his life, that it was not a waste. He was in dialogue, not with his contemporaries, but with the great poets of the past. And so this really, to me, this story really demonstrated what it is to be a heroic striver. It's the applause, they may come, they may not.

1:03:16They couldn't come for him because nobody else, not even his partner, knew what he was up to. After his death, his book was published to great acclaim. It reminds me of the story. I recently had Mark Nepo on the show, and he was telling me that people now are very aware of the book of Spiritual Awakening because it sold like 30 million copies, but it wasn't his first book. It was many books in the way, and up until Oprah discovered it through her yoga teacher, he told me it had sold maybe 1 ,000, 1 ,200 copies, and it was really her who propelled it. So he's another one who I think the purpose was more in the mastery of what he was trying to put on words than it ever was the global attention and recognition that he deserved from it.

1:04:11That's how I took my meeting with him. Yeah. So should we go on to the next That's when I could talk more about her role. Yeah, so no, let's go to the next one. Socializers. Most people who I speak to, and I tell you, if you're sitting next to me on a long trip, on a bus or a train or a plane, sooner or later, I'm going to be asking you questions about what gets you up in the morning? What could go wrong in your life that would make you feel like you're living your life all wrong? These kinds of existentially probing questions. and everybody eventually has a story to tell me about it. But most people, as soon as I start talking about mattering, they just automatically supply the term mattering to others.

1:04:56Now, part of that is because of this connectedness that is a need for all of us. Without deep connections, people in our lives to whom we matter, what do we feel? Lonely. That's what loneliness is. When you don't have people who are just going to pay you attention, who think that you matter. But mattering, when it's mattering, the result of not feeling like you matter, as we see from William James' story, is depression. And in fact, the suicide helpline in the U.S. is www.umatter.gov.

1:05:36And I have spent a lot of time talking to depressed people. I since heroic strivers, by the way, are very prone to depression of this sort. It's hard to be living a living thing. It's even harder to be human. It's extremely hard to be a heroic striver, right? To have these standards of excellence that you have to feel like you're making progress towards. Otherwise, you feel disgusted with yourself. That's what depression is. It's self-disgust. You don't want to be in the presence of yourself any longer. It's like a psychological autoimmune disease. You're fighting against yourself. So how did I get back on heroic strivers?

1:06:19Yeah, there you go. But we're talking about socializers. For socializers, it's the mattering to others that really satisfies the mattering instinct. And it might be mattering to others who are in your life so that the need for connectedness and for mattering are really collapsed into one. So a mother who's living for her children or romantic partners who are living for each other or that really that's what the mattering is grounded on. or it could be mannering to others with whom you who are really not in your life who may be a bunch of strangers that's what the desire for fame is and the desire for fame I found especially among young people is very strong that many people young people I've spoken to they want to be influencers they want to be paid a lot of attention by a lot of people most of whom are strangers That's what fame is.

1:07:24And it makes sense. If you're trying to convince yourself that you're deserving of your own attention, the fact that so many others are paying you so much attention is good evidence that you're deserving. It makes you feel like you matter. It seems to quench that existential need. So it's understandable. I've spoken to a lot of famous people, and some of them find that fame is the pits. They don't like it, and it's very insecure. I'll tell one story about that, that to me captured it. Again, it was something I personally witnessed. I was at a party and there was a very famous writer there. It was an academic party, but this was a writer in residence, extremely famous.

1:08:03The name would be known by everybody. And a fellow philosopher came up and was in the little conversation cluster. And he's a philosopher. He's clueless. And he asked her name and she told it. And then he said, oh, and what do you do? She said, this conversation is over. Turned on her heel and walked away. And that really, to me, epitomized what an insecure grounding fame is. If you can't tolerate one clueless philosopher not knowing what you do and that that would hurt you, it shows the kind of insecurity of going after your mattering by way of fame. It's nice to have a lot of people paying attention to you.

1:08:59And there's one story. It's a movie star. I forgot his name. He's a famous movie star. I can't remember his name. But anyway, he wanted it. He was a little sick of always being swamped when he went out and everybody wanted to take selfies with him. So he put on a prosthetic nose and glasses and changed his hair. And he went to a mall in L.A. and he said, yeah, this really sucks. Nobody was coming over to me and telling me how much they love me. And can I curse on this? well no well he just said nope nobody nobody had to wait online to get a freaking cup of coffee this sucks i want to be famous that's true people treat the famous very nicely and for some people it works and for some people it doesn't but it is a kind of insecurity the public is fickle they're paying a lot of attention to you today but as it dips if that's what you're mattering is founded on, you can find yourself in a very bad place.

1:09:57So yeah, and then the cults also has to do with mattering a lot to the cult leader. And there's a bit called trickle down mattering. There are socializers come in many different flavors as well. And then there are competitors, that's the last. And those are the one kind of person that when I would talk about mattering, they would become uneasy and a little defensive because, sensitively questioning, it is revealed that they think of mattering as zero-sum. They are in competition with others as to their mattering. To the extent that others matter, they matter less. It's a piece of the pie. And here too, I know there are two very different kinds of competitors, some of which are individually competitive.

1:10:50And it may be in one sphere. For example, one scientist who I know who won a Nobel Prize and is another friend of his, a mutual friend, said to me that X was happy for all of 15 minutes when he got that call from Stockholm. And then he remembered that other people had also gotten Nobel Prizes. end of happiness. So he was a very strong competitor, but he did very wonderful work. He contributed to science. So even he's contributed something. You can do wonderful things if you are driven by competition. Then there are those who are group competitors. They feel like they belong to a group that most matters.

1:11:32And they're in zero-sum competition with other groups, especially if they feel that these other groups matter less, but yet are being regarded as mattering more. It's taking away that they're mattering. And one person that I go into great detail telling his story, because his story is amazing, is a former neo-Nazi skinhead who grew up rough and bad in his family. His mother was an addict. His stepfather was a brute. And Frank dropped out of school by the age of 13. He came into contact with some neo-Nazis. They said to him, look in the mirror. You matter. You are a white, male, heterosexual American.

1:12:22You matter more than anybody else in the world because of this group identity. and these other people whom they call the mud people of color, they are taking away your mattering and the Jews are behind it, the great replacement theory. So he became a fervent and a full-time neo-Nazi activist. He did terrible things. He'll be the first one to tell you. He came out of it. He saw the fallacy, the idiocy, he would say, of his ideology, but he grabbed hold of this way of trying to answer his own need to matter with all of his life force and devoted everything to it and did terrible things, as he would tell you, and has spent the rest of his life doing penance for that.

1:13:09This is one of the most amazing stories of somebody who changed his location on the mattering map. He lives for something else now. He lives for, I would call him a heroic, an ethical heroic striver. Anyway, those are the four types. Rebecca, thank you for taking them through us. I wanted to hone in on a couple things that I think are important. One is you argue that the mattering instinct is responsible for both humanity's greatest achievements and its greatest atrocities. And you brought up through your last example, the atrocities that it can cause. But the divergence here is really binary in many ways.

1:13:50You could look at a Mother Teresa and then you could contrast that with Hitler to show how both of their mattering instincts drove completely different outcomes. Why is this so important for a listener to understand in today's world that we're living in? I think, look, we are so different by temperament, belief systems, value systems, our culture, our talents, our passions, and that all the individuality all goes into how we respond to this shared motivation that we have, deep motivation that shapes our lives. We, none of us want to waste our life. We want to respond in the right way to this instinct.

1:14:37And we all recognize, we make the distinction that there are right ways and wrong ways. And we want to, in appeasing this longing and answering the question, do I really matter, that motivates all this, we want to do it in the right way. And we never, there's never the voice of God. Well, some people think there is the voice of God, but it's not the voice of God saying, yes, Rebecca, this is the way, this is the way to do it. there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty we have to live with. And it's better to recognize the uncertainty than not, because if we don't, and then we start thinking, look, everybody ought to be living the way I'm living, and they're living it all wrong.

1:15:23And they maybe will even go so far as to say, and they don't matter. They don't matter. Even they're unhumans. They just are not worthy of any respect or dignity. We want to get it right. And so what I try to do is to offer, given all of this diversity, and it's always going to be there. And it's a beautiful thing. One of my favorite quotations is from the Islamic mystic, Sufi mystic Rumi, you know, that there are a hundred ways to kneel down and kiss the ground. that there are just so many ways that we can appease this longing in creative, in beautiful ways. But there are ways that are ugly. And how do we distinguish?

1:16:15Because from the inside, the ugly ways feel the right ways. How do we distinguish? And again, I don't want to, I can't, in times past, we would have put this down to our beliefs about God, the word of God. Of course, We differed about the word of God and what he wanted from us. And we differed in often bloody ways about that. Is there some way of adjudicating of the difference between the right and the wrong way that doesn't require us to put our faith in something that we can prove and that we can all agree on? Secularists, religious people, the spiritual, the non-spiritual, the Republicans, the Democrats, all of us.

1:16:56And again, I go back to that supreme law of physics that motivates this in a convoluted way, this longing to matter. But I think that they can give us the distinction. Entropy is destructiveness. It's death. It's decay. Life is putting everything we have against this thing so that we can live, so that we can flourish. as all living things do. I think it's better to be on the side of life than on the side of entropy, on the side of disorder, destructiveness, and death. And if our mattering project is such so that it's serving us so that we are living with a sense of flourishing, with living true to our potential living fully living engaged, that's good.

1:17:54But we have to look beyond ourselves as well. Are we, is our mattering project such as to, in general, be on the side of life's struggle against entropy? If we're living in such a way as to increase suffering, increase confusion, increase ugliness, increase ill health as opposed to health. This is not a good mattering project, even if it's working for you, even if it's working for you. It's increasing entropy, disorder, and suffering on a very local level. I talk about, for example, a love bomber who I tell a story about. One of my acquaintances had an experience with this love bomber. left a whole trail of very sad women behind him, increasing disorder, increasing suffering, or it could be on a grand scale, a Hitler, a Pol Pot, a King Leopold, a Belgium, a Putin, and maybe some of our own leaders, but who are increasing chaos, disorder, suffering.

1:19:11and that's not a good way to live. And I think this sort of captures what we intuitively know about morality and about values that be on the side of life. That can be the meaning of life. You are on the side of life itself. That's not arbitrary. When I end the book by talking about an obscure woman, I'm just happy to learn about her, a Chinese woman, incredibly impoverished was an orphan at three years old survived by scavenging garbage and bringing it to recycling stations and this was during the period in china of a one baby policy and she found a lot of babies who were thrown out she found them in dumpsters she found them in public toilets she found them on the side of the road they were female if you could only have one baby?

1:20:05You wanted it to be male. You wanted it to be a male. And so she brought them home, this woman who could barely keep body and soul together. And she brought up over 30 little girls and she brought home more babies that she could find homes for. If she could find homes for them, she did. And those she couldn't, she raised with the barest means possible. She was dead by the time I learned about her, but I had the great privilege to be able to speak to one of her daughters, Juju, who threw an interpreter. And she, when I asked her, and she was a found baby, she was found, I think, in a public toilet.

1:20:47When I asked her, did you ever want to find your birth mother? And she started crying. I had the best, okay, I'm going to start crying. I had the best mother of anybody could possibly have. And everybody, every child who passed through her hands had the best mother that anybody could possibly have. And this is such a story of what it is to lead a good life. She was entirely on the side of life, of flourishing. Here are generations now. Juju has her own children, generations who are alive because of her. you know what? Okay. You know what more? Yes. That story reminds me of Schindler's List and that moment where he's sitting.

1:21:36It's a famous picture where he's sitting in a movie theater and they ask all the people around him who he saved to stand up and the whole theater stands up and you realize the ripple effect of your actions on generations. Yes. And again, I quoted Rumi and from my own tradition, the Jewish tradition, ancient rabbi, Rabbi Hillel, who had said, if I'm not for myself, then who will be for me? But if I'm only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when? And I think this both Rumi and Rabbi Hillel had captured neither of them by appealing to an almighty God, but what it is to really live a life that matters.

1:22:23It matters to yourself so you can live with yourself, but matters in some more objective sense of being on the side of life against disorder, entropy, all the things worth living for. Knowledge as opposed to ignorance, clarity as opposed to confusion, health as opposed to ill health, kindness as opposed to cruelty, beauty as opposed to ugliness. all of these require our resisting entropy. They all require order. These are good things. These are all good things. Love as opposed to hatred. These are the things we know intuitively are right. So I want to close on this. Rebecca, one of the mattering instincts' most humane implications is that mattering makes us vulnerable to being wounded by the world.

1:23:19How should that change how we judge one another? Yeah, it's hard to be human. Really, it's hard to be human. This is crazy. I still think it makes us vulnerable to, say it again? To being wounded by the world. So how does that change, that woundedness? How does that change how we judge one another? that it might be that our mattering project makes us dependent on others, even if we're heroic strivers. I tell the story of Scott Joplin, the great ragtime composer, but he wanted to do something so much grander. He composed operas, couldn't get them produced, gave everything to this, and they're marvelous.

1:24:07We know about Tremonishe, which was one of the operas. But he was a Black man in Jim Crow times. Nobody was going to produce his opera. Ragtime, jazz, that was acceptable. But so sometimes there is a sort of clash between what we need to do to feel that we matter and what the world wants from us. And they don't want that from us. And we need them to want this from us. or sometimes a romantic longing. This is the person whose love you need in order to quench your thirst to matter. And maybe they like you for a little while, but then they leave you, or maybe they never. It makes us, depending on what our mattering project is, can make us dependent on getting the right response from the world.

1:24:56And that makes us, that can wound us deeply. And we have to think about how to respond to that. Sometimes we have to change how we seek our mattering. AI now faces us. It may be stealing our mattering away from us, able to do our creative tasks better than we can. So all creatives will be facing an existential dilemma. Can they really matter when AI can do it better? So there are all sorts of things that can go wrong here, which is, I think there are practical ways that we can try to meet this, depending how it plays out in our lives and the lives of others. But one thing we really ought to be giving freely is our kind of mercy toward one another.

1:25:47In realizing this burden that everybody faces wherever there is human life, there is the quivering longing to matter that makes us vulnerable to being wounded by the world. and we should have mercy on one another. Rebecca, my last question to you, and I'm interested to hear your reply is, what does it mean for you to live a passion struck life? Yeah, well, my passion, I think, is obvious. I love knowledge. I'm going to tell you the truth. I want to know everything. I just want to know everything. And I want to be able to fit that all together in some meaningful way that will be helpful. helpful to add something to I'm not for myself and who will be for me but if I'm only for myself then what am I I live by that and but for me personally it's understanding things under trying to understand things on a large scale how it all fits together yeah that is that that's my passion.

1:26:54My passion is also to love others. And that is very hard. Sometimes we are all extremely flawed. And this framework that's allowed me to, I think, try to understand others is not to forgive everything about others. We do terrible things to each other by getting, I think, this wrong, this mannering instinct wrong. But I would say love and knowledge. These are my passions. Rebecca, it was such an honor to have you today. Thank you so much for joining me on Passion Struck. Congratulations on this amazing work, mattering instinct that you brought to the world. Well, thank you so much for understanding what it's about.

1:27:40Thank you very much. That brings us to the close of today's conversation with Rebecca Goldstein. If this episode lingered with you, it's because it's named something fundamental. The human need to justify our lives, not just to others, but to ourselves. Here are three reflections you might carry forward. First, mattering is an inward moral relationship. Belonging tells us where we stand with others. Mattering asks whether our lives are worthy of the attention they require. Second, the instinct to matter is powerful and dangerous. It fuels care, creativity, and endurance, and it can also distort into competition, exclusion, and harm when misdirected.

1:28:20Third, entropy places a boundary on meaning. Some ways of living sustain the conditions for life. Others quietly accelerate decay. The difference matters. Rebecca reminds us that belonging to matter is not something we outgrow. It is something we learn to live more wisely, more mercifully, and more honestly. If this conversation expanded your thinking, consider sharing it with someone who wrestles with questions of meaning, value, or worth. Or leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's one of the most meaningful ways to support the show. To continue the work, visit theignitedlife.net for guided reflections from the You Matter series.

1:28:58Watch the full conversations on YouTube at John R. Miles or Passion Struck Clips. Explore intention-driven apparel at startmattering.com. On Thursday, we continue the inquiry we started today with Daniel Coyle and his new book, Flourishing, where we examine how environments, culture, and collective practices shape who grows and who quietly withers. Modern experience, I think, to feel like you're just a cog in a machine, to feel like you're not mattering. I find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent, normalized, that kind of thing, where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational beings and simply machines.

1:29:35But what it looks like is isolation. What it looks like is loneliness. What it looks like is anxiety and depression, I think in the end, when, you know, we are social animals, we are animals made of meaning without meaningful connection, without mattering to use the language without mattering, we're hollowed out where it is a core need of us to be in community and growing. Until then, remember you matter, not because of what you prove, but because of who you already are. Your heart counts, your full self belongs, and the people who need your real presence most are waiting for exactly that. I'm John Miles, and you've been PassionStruck.