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

What if the most human thing about us isn’t happiness, survival, or even love but the relentless need to feel we matter? In this profound installment of the You Matter series on Passion Struck, MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein joins the show to unpack her groundbreaking book The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us (Liveright, January 13, 2026). A philosopher and novelist celebrated for Plato at the Googleplex and The Mind-Body Problem, Goldstein argues that this primal instinct is uniquely human. Rooted in self-reflection and our resistance to entropy, it propels our greatest achievements and darkest conflicts. Through vivid stories—from William James overcoming depression to a neo-Nazi skinhead’s redemption, Scott Joplin’s tragic devotion to his opera, and an impoverished Chinese woman rescuing abandoned babies—Goldstein reveals how “mattering projects” shape identity, relationships, culture, and even atrocities. She distinguishes true mattering (an inward justification of our existence) from mere connectedness (belonging to others), explores four “continents” on the mattering map (Transcenders, Heroic Strivers, Socializers, Competitors), and offers a moral boundary: align with life and flourishing against disorder and entropy. This conversation probes a crisis at the heart of modern life: In a world of metrics, performance, and isolation, how do we answer the question “Do I really matter?” and live with mercy toward one another’s vulnerable longings? If you wrestle with purpose, dignity, meaning, leadership, or why humans create beauty and harm, this episode delivers a clarifying, compassionate framework for understanding ourselves and our divided world. Passion Struck is the #1 alternative health podcast and personal growth podcast dedicated to human flourishing and the science of mattering. It is ranked #1 on FeedSpot’s list of the Top Passion Podcasts on the Web, recognizing the show’s commitment to thoughtful, human-centered conversations like this one. Caraway’s cookware set is a favorite for a reason—it can save you up to $190 versus buying items individually. Plus, if you visit Carawayhome.com/PASSIONSTRUCK, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. Check out Kalshi and use my code SB60 for a great deal: https://kalshi.comCheck the full show notes here: https://passionstruck.com/mattering-instinct-rebecca-newberger-goldstein/Download a Free Companion Reflection Guide: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dy59XSRcQgovN3N-KNbHILa9GO91Tou-/view?usp=sharingConnect with John Keynote speaking, books, and podcast: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesPre-Order the Children’s Book You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Learn More About Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: https://rebeccagoldstein.comThe Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides UsAvailable wherever books are sold. Mattering is an indicator of organizational health: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-74409-001In This Episode, You Will LearnWhy the mattering instinct is the most peculiar and poignant thing about being humanHow self-reflection and...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck.

• 0:02Speaker 01

  We are so different by temperament, belief systems, value systems, our culture, or talents, our passions, and that individuality all goes into how we respond to this shared motivation that we have, deep motivation that shapes our lives. And we, none of us want to waste our life. We want to respond in the right way to this instinct. And we all 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.

• 0:42John R. Miles?

  Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter.

• 1:30John R. Miles?

  Hey, friends, and welcome back to episode 727 of Passion Struck. Over the past several episodes, we've been opening a new inquiry here on the show, the You Matter series, an exploration of how human beings experience significance in a world increasingly organized around performance, metrics, and proof. We began last week with renowned psychologist Barry Schwartz, examining how modern choice culture erodes agency and authorship. We continued on Thursday with psychologist Daniel Ellinburg, exploring how inherited scripts of strength and emotional restraint shape who is allowed to feel, speak,

• 2:11John R. Miles?

  And be seen. Today, we go deeper beneath choice, beneath roles, beneath culture itself, to the instinct that makes all of those questions unavoidable. Why does a human life need to matter at all? My guest is Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, MacArthur Fellow, philosopher and novelist, whose work has spent decades probing how human beings search for meaning, value, and justification within a finite life. Her new book, The Mattering Instinct, argues that belonging to matter is a defining feature of human consciousness, rooted in our capacity for self-reflection and our need to justify the attention we give to our own existence.

• 2:55John R. Miles?

  In today's conversation, we explore why human beings feel compelled to ask whether their lives are worthy of the time, energy, and care they demand, why connectedness and mattering are not the same thing, and how that distinction reshapes how we understand dignity and self-worth. How different people pursue mattering through distinct projects that Rebecca calls mattering projects, and how those mattering projects shape both individual lives and entire cultures. We go into why entropy functions as a real constraint on meaning, helping us evaluate whether a life sustains order, care, and human flourishing. We discuss how the desire to matter can lead to both extraordinary creation and profound harm.

• 3:39John R. Miles?

  And lastly, why understanding this instinct may be essential to living together with greater clarity and mercy. This conversation sits at the philosophical heart of the You Matter series, and it arrives as we move toward the February 24 launch of my upcoming children's book, You Matter Luma, a story designed to plant the truth of intrinsic worth early, before the world teaches children to confuse mattering with visibility, performance, or competition. Rebecca's work offers a deeper framework for understanding where that question comes from and what it asks us across a lifetime. Let's continue the You Matter series with philosopher Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide

• 4:23John R. Miles?

  on your journey to creating a life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:33John R. Miles?

  I am absolutely honored today to have Rebecca Goldstein join me. Rebecca is the author of a brand new book titled The Mattering Instinct, which I absolutely have just devoured, given my passion for this topic. But I think we're kindred spirits and I can't wait to have this discussion. Rebecca, it's so great to see you here today.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much, John.

• 4:56John R. Miles?

  Rebecca, I want to start out by talking about something before we get into your book. Around 2019, I understand you were part of a group of individuals that I refer to as the dream team. Some of them I know fairly well, some of them I've yet to meet. But it included Marty Seligman, David Yaden, Barry Schwartz, who's becoming a recent friend, and a few others. I understand that you all met to have a really deep philosophical discussion around mattering. I was hoping you might be able to take us into that room with that amazing dream team. What was occurring?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. Actually, thank you for bringing that up because it was really important to me. And they are, I like the way you describe them, that they are a dream team, all of them top-notch psychologists. No, I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a philosopher. That's my academic field. And it was Marty Seligman. Well, let me go back a little. I've been thinking about mattering a very long time. It snuck up on me while I was playing hooky from philosophy and during the summer vacation, wrote a novel called The Mind Body Problem. I was a young, untenured professor of philosophy.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  And my husband at the time, Sheldon Goldstein, had said, "You're going to ruin your career before it's struggling to exist." And because I was doing very technical kind of philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of math, I was what they call an analytic philosopher. None of this existentialism stuff, no, that was meaningless, imprecise. But this novel came to me. And in order to understand my character, I came on this notion of mattering, that it's, everybody needs to feel that they matter in the way that most matters to them. And The diversity creeps into that second half of the sentence, that there is, there is just an abundance of ways in which we try to

• 6:55Speaker 01

  prove to ourselves that we matter. And, and I thought, well, this is, this is interesting. This helps me understand my character. And my character presented the idea, I know I did, but of the mattering map. But the interesting thing was, I would never have thought of these things on my own, because they were too imprecise. I couldn't quantify it. I couldn't put it into symbolic logic. I could, the kind of training that I had just gone through made me think of these as, as imprecise and therefore not useful. But when the, because I was inhabiting this fictional character, I could

• 7:41Speaker 01

  present these ideas. So that was weird, but

• 7:45Speaker 01

  these ideas began to grow in me and I started to pay a lot of attention to them, pay a lot of attention to other people and what it was that most mattered to them, improving to themselves, their own mattering. And a theory began to develop, but I never had any intention of writing about it or, first of all, the theory got too big. And I'm suspicious of big theories. Analytic philosophers are suspicious of big grand theories, especially my own. But little pieces of it leaked out into almost everything else I wrote. And the last book I had written was called Plato with the Google Plex, Why Philosophy Won't Go Away. And Marty Seligman,

• 8:29Speaker 01

  he was able to see, there are a few paragraphs or two pages I give to what I call the mattering instinct. I didn't call it that then, but I talk about it as a way of trying to explain one of the great mysteries in the history of ideas. And that is why in a certain period of time, we'll call it the axial age, all religions that are still extant emerged, as well as philosophy, as well as Western philosophy. And I hazard my hypothesis that life became stable enough so that the mattering instinct could emerge. Marty Seligman alone of all my, everybody who read that book.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Grabbed onto that and he organized a workshop around this idea of mattering for me to present this idea. And it was so encouraging to have these psychologists, not philosophers, psychologists, paying psychologists who I knew were top notch, all of them connected with positive psychology, paying this kind of attention to it. And we were supposed to write, I was supposed to write a paper for it. And I started the paper and the paper just got getting more and more complicated. And I saw I just had to write a book. So Marty Seligman of everybody is responsible for me writing this book. And I couldn't get

• 9:55Speaker 01

  the paper out. It's the first time I've ever been assigned a paper I couldn't complete because all the ideas connected in a very strict deductive way almost. And I had to try to get it all out in a, in the most readable, accessible fashion I could. And being a novelist, that helped because I'm good at telling stories as well. I can tell a story, this being stories about real people, not made up stories. I tried to demonstrate the various ideas, these stories of people. But anyway, it was a very intense three days. Everybody started out, or not everybody, not Marty, but everybody was a little skeptical.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  And by the end, they seemed, most of them convinced. I'm not sure about Roy Baumeister, but everybody else did. But that was good too, because he was pushing. So you need that. Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out because it was really just personally very important to me. And, and yeah, it was responsible for my sitting down and writing the book.

• 11:00John R. Miles?

  Rebecca, for anyone who wants to look at the output of that meeting, I'm going to drop a link to the paper that was produced by that dream team that applies mattering to work environments, specifically in work cultures. I just want to touch on Marty Seligman for a second, because when I interviewed Gabriella Kellerman.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  She was there too. Yes.

• 11:19John R. Miles?

  She and Marty wrote a book a few years ago, and I was hoping that Marty would be part of that interview for his book, but he politely declined. I even tried to get Angela Duckworth, who's a close mentee of Marty's, to see if he would reconsider, but unfortunately, he wouldn't. What she told me, which gives me so much hope and gives this so much merit, is that Marty is dedicating the remainder of his life to study mattering, which I think tells you the weight that he has given to this topic. I hope somewhere along the line, he might reconsider and have that discussion I had hoped.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  I hope so. I'll add my voice if that helps at all. And his students have been getting in touch with me. Hopefully, some real empirical research will come out of this. There are many empirical hypotheses that I suggest that could be tested. I'm not in that business. I'm not an empirical psychologist. I'm not even a psychologist. But Marty had said, he wrote the first sentence of the paper that I never completed, which was that some of our the most important ideas in psychology can be traced back to philosophy, that it's the philosophers who come up with these ideas. And I just,

• 12:41Speaker 01

  the generosity of Marty Seligman is really something for all of us to celebrate. He is so many academics you find are rather competitive and everything. No, he is so beyond that. He is dedicated to ideas themselves, ideas for the betterment of all of us. So it's positive psychology and a most positive psychologist.

• 13:07John R. Miles?

  I love hearing that. Rebecca, I want to now go to the book. You open up the mattering instinct and you go through what we just discussed, how you've been studying this for so long. But you call the mattering instinct "the most peculiar and the most human thing about us." What makes this longing not just a motive, but something that fundamentally distinguishes human love?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  And the most poignant thing about us, too, I think the poignancy of our life is captured by this longing that we have to matter. And I really want to ground it on solid science, going back to physics, the most solid of all the sciences, and there, the most robust of physics, the one that physicists tell us can never be negated, and that's the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy, which is disorder, it's nature's scorecard for disorder, and disorder of a system means the system is, you can't

• 14:14Speaker 01

  get any useful work out of it. So entropy is kind of a downer story, and all life is in resistance to entropy, to ground everything, starting with that.

• 14:26John R. Miles?

  Rebecca, I have to intervene right there. For a listener who might not be familiar with entropy, can you just explain this? Because people might not be making the connection between entropy and mattering.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  All systems, especially closed systems, that don't have access to external sources that can be turned into energy, they dissipate, they become more and more disordered, and useful work can't be gotten out of them. So that to the extent that entropy, which means disorder, is growing, the system is running less and less efficiently, until suddenly it can't, not suddenly, gradually, at the end, it can't run at all. If it's a living system, it means it dies. And all physical systems are running according to

• 15:20Speaker 01

  this law. And it's the laws of probability show you why disorder is much more probable than order. And so that's the drift, that's the direction of all physical systems, including us. Great news, we're gonna die. We're going to die, just like everything else. And all biological systems, us included, are taking in energy.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Food, sunlight, chemicals, in order to resist entropy. All of the laws of biology are actually derivable from this fundamental fact about physics. It's not even an instinct. The fact that every biological system matters to itself. It's the organizing principle of all of the instincts derivable from entropy. But we alone, of all biological systems, of which we know, at least of all biological systems on this earth, we have the capacity, because of these amazingly complicated big brains that we've evolved,

• 16:32Speaker 01

  to be able to step outside of ourselves, see how much we matter to ourselves, how much attention we pay to ourselves, incessantly pay attention to ourselves. That doesn't mean we're selfish. It doesn't mean we're self-centered. It means our brains are running, as they evolved to run, to defeat, to push against as long as possible against entropy. We can step outside ourselves and see ourself-mattering and ask, "Why? Why, of all the things in the universe, do I pay so much attention to this one thing? That if the measure of how much I think something matters

• 17:16Speaker 01

  is how much attention I give it, it seems to follow that I think I matter more than anything else in the universe. And short of lunacy, I know that's wrong." That's the sanity in all of us. And that sanity, because of this capacity to step outside of ourselves, gives rise to this longing to matter, to in some way try to prove to ourselves that the amount of attention we give to ourselves is somewhat commensurate with how much we deserve. That we do deserve this. It's not just arbitrary, that I just happen to be who I am,

• 17:59Speaker 01

  as everything else just happens to be what it is. No, there is something about me that...

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Can prove to myself that yeah, a little more, a little more commensurate. A Nobel Prize economist, I mean, failure, it's a failure, is when I was discussing this with him, because I discuss this with everybody, but he said, he was economist, he said, but he said, I'm thinking, how much mattering do we need? He said, a smattering of mattering, just enough. But some people need a lot more than a smattering of mattering. And we differ a lot in how much we need and how we go about doing it. And that's what makes us different from all other organisms. And that's what makes us values-seeking creatures.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  We're looking for norms to justify ourselves, and that brings us into the realm of values. And that ultimately, I think, is what has produced the greatest achievements of our species and also the greatest atrocities. That is, it's deeply human.

• 19:05John R. Miles?

  Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment. One of the insights running quietly through this conversation is that the longing to matter does not begin in adulthood. It begins early, before we can articulate it, before we can defend it. That realization sits at the heart of my upcoming children's book, You Matter Luma, launching February 24th. You Matter Luma is a story designed to help children understand intrinsic worth before the world teaches them to measure themselves by achievement, approval, or comparison. If the ideas in this series resonate with you, especially if you care about how the next generation comes to understand their value, you can now preorder You Matter Luma at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, bookshop.org,

• 19:49John R. Miles?

  or go to the website, youmatterluma.com. Your help supports bring this message of mattering to the lives that will carry it forward. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

• 20:06John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network. Now, back to my conversation with Rebecca. Rebecca, so two things. One, in my first book, Passion Struck, I opened it up with discussing grit by Angela Duckworth. I actually had a conversation with her on this. And I told her, Angela, I think you're missing a very important ingredient. Grit alone is just grit. And actually, in the book, I used entropy as the missing ingredient. Because when you apply entropy to grit, it shows that you have to be intentional about where that entropy is being directed. If not, that grit can go to either something that is going to take your life to a greater place, or it's going to take it in the opposite direction.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 20:51John R. Miles?

  So I personally loved how you used it in the book and understand what you were saying. However, I want to go back to what we were just talking about. How mattering is something that really distinguishes us from all the other species on the planet. Because I think it gets back to that moment we began asking ourselves whether our lives deserve the attention that we give them. And I think that's where we cross into a distinctly human problem. Why does self-reflection turn life into such an existential question at that point, rather than merely a biological one?

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Because it brings us into that realm of justification that we, the whole, so I define mattering, whether we're talking about what matters or who matters, as deserving of attention. Deserving is, actually, both those words, deserving and attention, are really interesting. Attention, yeah, that's something to be empirically explored by all neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. It's a scientific question, attention. Deserving, that's what philosophers call a normative concept. It has to do with ought, rather than is.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  And the fact that we are asking this question of ourselves, am I deserving of my attention, brings us into this realm of justification, that we are trying to justify ourselves to ourselves. And we have to live with ourselves 24/7. And be very aware of how much attention we are paying to ourselves. There's the default network mode when you're not paying attention to external stimuli, when you're fantasizing and daydreaming. And what psychologists have told us, what are you thinking about then?

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yourself, you're fantasizing about yourself or you're remembering about yourself. That we, and we have to do that. This is what our brains are wired to do. Attention evolved as an adaptation to help us survive and to flourish. And of course, we're always paying attention to ourselves. We're paying attention to the environment. We're paying attention to how that environment is affecting ourselves. So we have to put ourselves front first and foremost. But when we step outside ourselves, and it may not be very conscious, but it's there at some level. We step outside ourselves and we see how much attention we pay to ourselves, as if we're the most important thing in the universe.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  I think it sets up a kind of unease and we want to address that unease. And that brings us into the sphere of justification of values, something entirely different under the sun. I think it's beautiful. I think it is what we mean when we talk about the intrinsic dignity of every human that we've all claimed to acknowledge, that there's a certain intrinsic dignity to every human. It is because we take on this extra burden of justifying the application of the laws of nature to ourselves. Are we really worthy of, we have to act this way.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  This is what biology has determined for us. But we can ask the justificatory question. It brings us into an entirely different realm. And that's what it is to be human. So we take on this extra burden. It makes human life, all life is hard. You've got to struggle against entropy. It's hard, but human life is so much harder. You have to convince yourself that you are deserving of the struggle. That's amazing. And that is what we all hold within us. That's something estimable.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  That's something, even when we lose patience with things that our fellow human beings are doing, it's good to remember how hard it is to be human.

• 25:01John R. Miles?

  So I want to go back to my original point on mattering and how I got involved with this. And then we'll come back. I was taking a deeply spiritual course around 2005, 2006 timeframe, where I deeply immersed myself in a 34 week study on the Bible. I would meet twice a week in a small group and we explored all aspects of this from a philosophical standpoint, because the pastor who was guiding it not only had a doctorate in theology, but he also had a doctorate in philosophical history. It was really an eye opening experience. Throughout this process, I started to get these unworldly callings that I was supposed to go out and help the lonely, the broken, the burned out, the battered, the helpless

• 25:44John R. Miles?

  of the world. And I had no idea at the time what I was supposed to do. I was a senior executive at Lowe's, leading the IT group, and I had absolutely no idea why I was being asked to do this thing, or how these conditions were even interrelated. But now, as I've seen the loneliness epidemic and the staggering statistics that we have in both adolescent and adult, rising in depression and anxiety, more people burned out and disengaged, helpless, I started to see that all of these things can't be isolated. They have to be symptoms of something that is much larger. And when I started to really analyze this and started looking at this from a spiritual layer, a scientific layer, a philosophical layer,

• 26:28John R. Miles?

  it all took me to mattering. And when you lose it, these are the things that start happening across society. When the most important thing about a human starts to erode, we start to erode. I wanted to put that out there so you understand how I came at this. It's important for listeners, because you draw an important distinction in the book. I think it's an important one that people don't contemplate, and that is the distinction between connectedness, which a lot of influencers are talking about today, and mattering. We often treat them as the same, but philosophically, they are very different. And I'm hoping you might help me with that explanation.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Thank you, thank you. That is, I have found in trying to discuss these ideas, that is the conflation that people seem to naturally make. That makes it very hard for me to talk about what I actually mean here, to try to uncover it. One is very obvious to us, that we need to matter to others. So the same notion, mattering, is used in connectedness. That we need, there need to be certain people in our lives who will pay us attention, whether we deserve it or not. Hopefully, all of us had this experience as very young children in our families.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  That is the point of families, to make everybody in the family, but most especially children, if there are children in the family, to feel that they matter, that they're deserving of attention. We are born exceedingly helpless, more helpless than all other animals. And that's because, again, these big brains are, in order to get these heads out of the birth canal, which is difficult enough, I take it from someone who gave birth, that in order to get these big brains out of the birth canal, they have to come out very prematurely,

• 28:34Speaker 01

  only 30% developed in that first year of life. The brains grow enormously. That's why when you bring an infant to the pediatrician, they are measuring the circumference of their heads, because those heads have got to double in size or something. I don't remember exactly what the number is, but they grow really fast. And so we're born incredibly helpless. And it takes a very long time for our brains to develop, into our early twenties, when the most important, the prefrontal lobes, the place of maturity, of responsibility, of taking, being accountable, of thinking before you act, all of that stuff.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Impulse control finally comes into being, locks into place. So it's like, there's very little time between your brains finally coming into maturity and the first wrinkle. So why? Well, because these brains are the most complicated thing we've yet discovered in the universe. Yeah. Anyway, so it, 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.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Six months, they finally roll over and we're all applauding that. How helpless we are, right? Because if we don't have these caretakers taking, paying us exquisite attention, we die. And that need for there to be others in our lives, friends, family, lovers, coworkers, community members, whoever you have in your life, that continues throughout our lives, that they are, 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.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  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. In 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.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  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. But 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 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, maybe raising flourishing children. There

• 32:10Speaker 01

  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. I'm, I can tolerate my own existence. It may be competitive. And these are the four different, what I call the continents of the mattering 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, and that's just so fascinating,

• 32:54Speaker 01

  this kind of diversity in us.

• 32:58John R. Miles?

  Thank you for sharing that, Rebecca. I want to go into those quadrants here in just a little bit, but I want to summarize what you were just saying. Connectivity concerns how we matter to others. And this is how most people perceive mattering. However, you and I would argue that mattering really concerns how we matter to ourselves. And this turn inward carries so much moral and psychological weight when you think of it that way. And I started to think about this because at the same time, I was given that calling, this group I inherited at Lowe's, out of something like 300,000 employees, was the most disengaged group in the entire company. And when I got to the root of the issue, it wasn't about how they were relating to others. Everyone else thought they were a bunch of buffoons and told me

• 33:43John R. Miles?

  I should get rid of the entire group. What I realized was it was a greater breakdown because almost to a person when I would speak to them, none of the people in the group understood how they mattered to themselves or how the role they were doing mattered in the bigger scheme of flows. Like, 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 this is what I think 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 recently wrote a CEO weekly article about this, that the group of people that we're not spending enough time with in these organizations is frontline managers.

• 34:26John R. Miles?

  When I was in the military, these are the corporals or sergeants or the petty officers. In the civilian world, they're the frontline supervisors. If these 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. This is what I realized. So when I rebuilt this group, I had to start from there. How do you start making those employees, those frontline supervisors, feel like 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 mattering, the mattering instinct, starts expanding. That's what I found.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  I think that is extremely interesting, but I do just want to point out that for a lot of people, they really don't arrive their mattering from their work. They work in order to make a living who support themselves and perhaps their family. And so many people I've spoken to are of that kind. But that their, their real mattering, that, what do you mean? This existential project that makes them.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  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. I just can't stress that enough that they're deriving it from something else. So 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 Uber driver, the cashier in the grocery store, everybody to treat them as if they matter and to make that and and point out the special things that they do that make them matter. It's just it feeds the soul. It really feeds the soul. But I do want to just say that for some people, for example,

• 36:22Speaker 01

  there's this movement that's rather big among philosophers, effective altruism. And it's like, take any job that's going to pay the most money so you can give the most charity. Work 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 do not are not going to derive any their mattering from the work itself, but from what they're going to do with this money.

• 36:58John R. Miles?

  I recently had a discussion with Joshua Green, and it was basically on those same lines. However, there's this interview I did a while back with this gentleman named Dr. Abraham George. He came over to the United States from India and became a prominent business person in New York. He built all this wealth and then actually went back to India because he saw how big a gap there was for so many people. He ended up creating this institution called Shanti Bhavan and put his altruism to work. Since that time, he has taken over 15,000 children who are in the lowest caste systems, and these children are now New York Times bestselling authors. They've attended Ivy

• 37:41John R. Miles?

  League schools. They're professors. He has changed the complete dimension for tens of thousands of people. And I think it shows how the ripple effect that you were just talking about can change lives on a global basis.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Freud had said that the two cornerstones of humanists 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, he derived his sense of mattering from his scientific work, which was revolutionary. 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 it's to get to the core of other people. What is it that's driving them? How are they trying to appease this longing?

• 38:39John R. Miles?

  I think an interesting take on this is if you look at Viktor Frankl and 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. So you can be a caretaker to a loved one who's going through a terrible sickness, and you can find meaning in that. Or you can find meaning in the love that you have for a child, or a loved one, or a partner. But he also finds that you can have meaning, or I would extend it to mattering, in suffering. It's not just about work. And I think that's what makes it unique, is mattering is completely dependent on each of us as individuals.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so where our 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, which brings us into this realm of values, and we choose different values. And 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...

• 39:57Speaker 01

  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. But 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.

• 40:40John R. Miles?

  Let's take a break here before we go into the four quadrants. I definitely want to go into them, but I want to explore one of these stories. Maybe I'll let you pick one. 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?

• 41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I break up these stories to illustrate different aspects of this mattering longing. But 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, Alice James. But so William was born into a amazing family. His younger brother by 18 months was Henry

• 41:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  William James, father was a kind of, he didn't have to work for a living. He had inherited money, but he was a 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.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  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. He 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.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  But that is how tenuous his hold on life was, his engagement with life. And it's such an amazing, he doesn't, he writes about it in one of his great books, The Varieties of Religious Experience. He says it, 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 batches onto what I call a mattering project.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  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. His sister, on the other hand, Alice, was a Victorian woman. There was no outlet for her. When she, she kept a diary and it was finally published in the 1970s. It was 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.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  She became a permanent invalid, couldn't leave her bed and did get a lot of attention from her family in this way. But was, was, 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. Now 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.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Neurotic, yes. Both of them were neurotic, but one was given a way to find himself to a mattering 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.

• 46:41John R. Miles?

  I 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, William James' father chose the two oldest to be his heir apparent and the ones that he wanted to glorify, the James family name, that he wasn't able to do 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 what followed is he moved him back. And when William James went to Harvard,

• 47:21John R. Miles?

  Harvard back then isn't what we think about today. Harvard was stumbling, not nearly as well-respected when William arrived there. And I think he, in many ways, put them on the map. But another distinction that you really make is that the father allowed the two younger boys to go to war when they were just 16 and 17 years old, which caused both of them to end up leading unfulfilling lives because of those experiences that they had in battle. And in many, many ways, then the daughter, Alice, 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. And it

• 48:04John R. Miles?

  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 in the book.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, actually, the most fulfilling part of her life, when she did not have the ideation, the suicide ideation, was a brief period when she was able to teach other women. There was a, some kind of group that allowed women to teach other women. And, and then she felt fulfilled and then what's, she was, and she did, it's true that her Catherine Loring, partner, towards the end of her life, was, it was a very fulfilling relationship. But 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.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  She had the writing gift, and she had that heightened consciousness of consciousness that all of the James siblings had. But yeah, they're an extraordinary family. But I have a novel called The Dark Sister, in which William James is, is a character. They're, 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 striker. And I think there's some, there is some evidence, comes from the psychology of personality, that we have a, a structure to our temperament.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  So that some of us are more interested in close relationships, some of us in achievement, some of us in power. This, 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, but transcenders, I think, come in three different forms: affiliator, those who are driven by need for affiliation, those who

• 50:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:38John R. Miles?

  This is where I really wanted to go. Great. So in the book, in The Mattering Map, you bring out transcenders, which you just mentioned, socializers, heroic strivers, 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 different human responses to the same instinct diverge. And another thing that I thought was really important is that 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 setup, can you take us through the four quadrants?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  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'll talk about how I try to distinguish between right and wrong responses. But 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. That the, whether you

• 52:02Speaker 01

  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, or...

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Whatever you call it. And that, and that, that means that this being thinks that felt that you have a purpose to play in the narrative of eternity. This 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 field 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'm have a serious nature.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  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, right? I took that on myself. And the sense of mattering, I've experienced. It is very strong. I felt that 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, and that was terrifying. But I never doubted how much I mattered. I mattered to God. My very, all my actions mattered to God.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  That 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 is required by what grounds their mattering, which is one of the points I make in the book, that our, our need to matter is stronger, our will to matter is stronger than the will to life itself. You will, 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.

• 54:32John R. Miles?

  Joan of Arc is a great example of someone who gave up her life because she pursued her mattering.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And she says, as the fire is lit, "Hold the cross up so that I can see it." Okay, I'm gonna start crying. I mean, it is 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 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, on these religious beliefs. And other things have moved in to take its place. Fame, power, money, these sorts of things, shallower.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  And 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 is, that has some things to do with why mattering is, 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, or all, it's interesting. I'll get this literature sometimes saying, showing that believers,

• 56:02Speaker 01

  religious believers, have the greater sense of meaningfulness in their life, of mattering in this life. This is not surprising to think that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. Nothing else can compete with that. You, 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, you'll 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, also very interesting. These are people who have some It's not mattering to God, it's not mattering to others.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  In a heroic striver, a true heroic striver, it really is a matter of these 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.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  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, respect, redeem yourself in your own eyes. And 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.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  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. He 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.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  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. They 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.

• 59:23John R. Miles?

  That reminds me of this story. I recently had Mark Nepo on the show and he was telling me that people now are very aware of his book Spiritual Awakening because it sold like 30 million copies. But it wasn't his first book. It was one of many books at that point he had written. And up until Oprah discovered it through her yoga teacher, he told me it had sold maybe a thousand or 1,200 copies. And it was really her who amplified it. So he's another one who you think purpose was more in the mastery of what he was trying to put into his words than it was ever the global attention and recognition that he derived from it. That's how I took my meeting with him.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So should we go on to the next one? I could talk more about heroic

• 1:00:07John R. Miles?

  Yes, no, let's go to the next one.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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. Now, part of that is because of this connectedness that is a need for all of us. Without

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Deep connections, people in our lives to whom we matter. Oh, 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's story, is depression. It's, and in fact, the suicide helpline in the US is www dot youmatter dot gov. And youmatter dot gov. And I have spent a lot of time talking to depressed people. I, since heroic strivers, by the way,

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  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. And 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? Yep, there you go. I, but we're talking about socializers. For socializers, it's the mattering to others

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  that really satisfies the mattering instinct. And, 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 mattering 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.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Is very strong that many 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. And it makes sense. If you're trying to convince yourself that you're deserving of all your, 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

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  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. The name would be known by everybody. And a fellow philosopher came up and was in the little conversation cluster and his philosopher, he's clueless.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  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 tolerate one clueless philosopher not knowing what you do and that that would hurt you, that 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. And there's one story, it's a movie star. I forgot his

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  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 LA and he said, you know, this really sucks. Nobody was coming over to me and telling me how much they love me. And how do, can I curse on this? Well, no, he just said, "Nobody, nobody had to wait online to get a friggin' cup of coffee. This sucks. I want to be famous." It's true. People treat the famous very nicely. And for some people, it works. And for some people, it doesn't.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  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 your mattering is founded on, you can find yourself in a very bad place. So, yeah, and then the cults. This also has to do with mattering a lot to the cult leader. And there's a book 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.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  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. And 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,

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  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. You 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."

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  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. This 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.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  Anyway, those are the four types.

• 1:09:16John R. Miles?

  Rebecca, thank you for taking us through that. I wanted to hone in on a couple of things that I think are important. One is that 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. You could look at 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?

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  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. None of us want to waste our life. We want to respond in the right way to this instinct. And 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.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  And it's, we never, there's never the voice of God. Well, some people think there is the voice of God, but most, 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, then we start thinking, look, everybody ought to be living the way I'm, I'm living, and they're living it all wrong. And they maybe will even go so far as to say, and they don't matter. They don't matter, even they're inhumans. They're, they just are not worthy of any respect or dignity. We want to get it right.

• 1:11:18Speaker 01

  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 roommate, who 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. And there, but there are ways that are Ugly and are. And how do we distinguish? Because from the inside, the ugly way is being the right way. How do we distinguish? And again, I want to, I don't want to, I can't.

• 1:12:02Speaker 01

  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. And again, I go back to that supreme law of physics that motivates this in a convoluted way. This longing to matter.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  But I think that that can give us the distinction. Entropy is destructiveness. It's death. It's decay. Life is putting everything we have against this thing. So, you know, it 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,

• 1:13:26Speaker 01

  with living true to our potential, living, fully living engaged, that's good. But 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.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  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 of Belgium, a Putin, and maybe some of our own leaders, but who are increasing chaos, disorder, suffering.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  And 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 being on the side of life, that can be the meaning of life. You are on the side of life itself. That's not arbitrary. And 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.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:15:45John R. Miles?

  Wanted it to be male.

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  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 thirty little girls. And she brought home more babies that she could find homes for. 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. When I asked her, did you ever want to find your birth mother?

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  And she started crying. I had the best, okay, I'm gonna 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?

• 1:17:09John R. Miles?

  Yeah, that story reminds me of Schindler's List. And there's this moment where he's sitting in a movie theater and they ask all the people around him, please stand up if you were someone who Schindler saved. And he looks around him and the whole room is filled with survivors. And that's how you realize the ripple effect of your actions on generations.

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Yes, 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 Ruby 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, what matters to yourself so you can live with yourself, but matters in some more of objective sense of being on the side of life

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  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 or 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.

• 1:18:51John R. Miles?

  So I want to close on this. Rebecca, one of the mattering instincts, its most human implications is that mattering makes us vulnerable to being wounded by the world. How should that change? How should we judge one another?

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's hard to be human. It really is hard to be human. This is crazy. I still didn't hear. Makes us vulnerable to? Say it again? To?

• 1:19:12John R. Miles?

  Being wounded.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  Wounded, okay.

• 1:19:16John R. Miles?

  By the world. So that, how does that change? That woundedness? How does that change how we judge one another?

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  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, of 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. There's a tree, we know about Truman Ishib, which was one of the operas. And, 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

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  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 you, they never, it makes us, depending on what our mattering project is, can make us dependent on getting the right response from the world. And that makes us, that can wound us deeply. And we have to think about how to respond to that. We, sometimes we have to change how we seek our mattering. AI now faces us.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  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 in, in realizing this burden that everybody faces wherever there is human life.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:21:46John R. Miles?

  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?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, my passion, I think, is up. 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 to add something to. If not for myself, then 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, trying to understand things on a large scale, how it all fits together. Yeah, that is, that's my passion.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  My 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. It's not to forgive everything about others. We do terrible things to each other by getting, I think, this wrong, this mattering instinct wrong. But I would say love and knowledge. These are my passions.

• 1:23:03John R. Miles?

  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 have brought into the world.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much for understanding what it's about. Thank you very much.

• 1:23:21John R. Miles?

  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. Third, entropy places a boundary on meaning. Some ways

• 1:24:03John R. Miles?

  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. Watch the full conversations on YouTube at John R. Miles or Passion Struck Clips. Explore intention-driven apparel at startmattering.com.

• 1:24:45John R. Miles?

  On Thursday, we continue the inquiry we started today with Daniel Coyle in his new book, Flourishing, where we examine how environments, culture, and collective practices shape who grows and who quietly withers.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  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. But 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. It is a core need of us to be in community and growing.

• 1:25:38John R. Miles?

  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 Passion Struck.