What person have you thought about the most over the past 24 hours? Did you dedicate the lion’s share of your mental energy to your spouse? One of your children? Your mother? Your father? Your boss? Your best friend? Nope. Not by a long shot. You devoted the overwhelming share of your thoughts to someone else: yourself.
While counterintuitive, this simple insight contains tremendous explanatory power. Of course, we think about ourselves more than any other person because we care about ourselves, how we act, whether we’re fulfilling our potential, and how we are perceived above almost all else. As Montaigne quipped, “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics.” We obsessively reflect on ourselves because we are obsessed with mattering.
This powerful notion animates The Mattering Instinct, the polymathic Princeton philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s highly absorbing attempt to map the human mind and discern coherent patterns in our often inconsistent behavior. “Every living thing,” Goldstein posits, “is organically driven by a mandate that ensures it matters to itself — which is to say that it prioritizes its own surviving and thriving.” Across a landscape spanning neuroscience, philosophy, physics, evolutionary biology, and intellectual history, the author adeptly guides her readers on a fascinating voyage of discovery.
This longing — the mattering instinct of Goldstein’s title — drives both our internal and external behavior. “We long to demonstrate that the reason we subjectively feel that we matter is that we objectively do,” she contends. To this commanding instinct, Goldstein attributes religion, art, science, politics, and the social distinctions that make up our communal lives — as well as darker forces that imperil our well-being.
She begins by defining her terms: “To matter is to be deserving of attention.” When we matter to ourselves, we deserve our own self-regard, and the same is true of mattering to others. The word matter itself derives from the Latin word for mother, mater, and the verb at the center of the book follows naturally from the noun, which connotes “the very stuff of things,” or its essence, the fundament of existence.
Yet, that matter begins to decompose no sooner than it has been created, and, Goldstein posits, it’s the race against entropy — the second law of thermodynamics — that impels us to make something of our lives. Ludwig Boltzmann, the eponymous discoverer of the constant in the entropy equation, himself insisted that the “foundations of human knowledge” attain their status only when others recognize them as such. (Goldstein notes that Boltzmann tragically died by suicide, “despair[ing] that the philosophy of his day would continue to block his science from becoming recognized.”)
Not all mattering takes the same form, though, and Goldstein’s most useful and interesting conceit is her categorization of four different archetypes. Socializers aim to please, whether by “mattering to the same people who satisfy their need for connectedness,” such as family members or close friends, or by drawing the attention of charismatic outsiders or an adoring public.
By contrast, heroic strivers engage in pursuits that “not only strain[] their individual capacities, demanding discipline and perseverance, but [are] devoted to something that they believe supremely matters,” be it beauty, truth, science, morality, or athletic prowess. Examples include Aristotle (“we must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal by straining every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us”), Wittgenstein (“the joy of my thoughts is the joy of my own strange life”), and Michael Jordan. They also include ethical heroes like Baba Amte, an Indian social worker born in the early 20th century to a Brahmin family who dedicated his life to ministering to lepers.
Transcenders orient their lives around a Godlike presence, “believed to ground the being of all that is true in both the physical and moral spheres.” Goldstein, a professed atheist raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, evinces a gracious sympathy for these divine seekers, rejecting the regnant progressive pieties that transcenders are somehow less bright or more narrow-minded than their secular companions. Tradition matters, and, for most of history, “the bulk of humankind have been transcenders, with societies organized around religious institutions.”
Finally, competitors “regard mattering as a zero-sum game,” whether on an individual or group basis. Some competitors compete to win, to dominate, to own; consider Mike Tyson (“I want to rip his heart out and show it to him!”), Bobby Fischer (“The greatest pleasure? When I break a man’s ego.”). Others tend, more modestly, toward vigorous self-improvement (e.g., Kobe Bryant’s “mamba mentality” — to “constantly try to be the best version of yourself”). Yet others locate their mattering in establishing superiority over other ethnic, religious, or racial groups.
And here, the generally positive force of mattering can run aground. Goldstein relates the harrowing story of Frank Meeink, a now-recovering skinhead who escaped a deeply troubled home in South Philadelphia to become a virulent neo-Nazi. “The Lancaster County white supremacists talked to me like they cared about what I thought and what I could become,” Meeink wrote. “Then they told me I had a destiny.” But through unlikely encounters in prison (he kidnapped and tortured a rival), and a twist I won’t spoil, Meeink eschewed his competitive group mattering in favor of heroic striving: fostering reconciliation between “wobbly” skinheads and Holocaust survivors.
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Goldstein’s book isn’t for everyone. Part brainy self-help manual, part philosophy tract, it occasionally drifts into the airport bookstore pop-psychology orbit. In addition, the four-part mattering map works well in theory, but, in practice, aren’t we all socializers, heroic strivers, transcenders, and competitors on different days — or even on the same day? Personally, in the course of a single hour, I often aim to please my friends and family, write an article that has a lasting impact, pray to God, and crush my adversary in court.
But archetypes serve an important purpose, even if they overlap, as they helpfully illustrate various distinct models of mattering. As the decorated novelist Don DeLillo wrote, “longing on a large scale is what makes history.” In her invaluable book, Goldstein amply demonstrates how our longing to matter has made — and remade — many histories.
Michael M. Rosen is an attorney and writer in Israel, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Like Silicon From Clay: What Ancient Jewish Wisdom Can Teach Us About AI
