The Mattering Instinct (with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)

Philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein discusses her new book, The Mattering Instinct, which argues that our lives are a quest to validate our inherent self-centeredness. Tracing this essential longing from physics and biology through to ethics and politics, she explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why material success alone can never satisfy our deep-seated need to matter. She describes the four ways people seek significance--through transcendence, social connection, excellence, or competition--and explains how the unmet need to matter is at the heart of some of the biggest problems afflicting modern societies: loneliness, extremism, and polarization.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is December 3, 2025, and my guest is philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Her latest book, and the subject of today's episode, is "The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us." Rebecca, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Pleasure to be here.

• 1:00Speaker 00

  So what is the mattering instinct? What does that mean?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Yes, so it is longing to matter. It is a longing that I think makes our, it characterizes our species. I've been talking to people about mattering for decades now. And there's a story as to how it struck me many, many years ago as so essential to what we are. I would define us, our species, as creatures of matter who long to matter. And

• 1:49Speaker 01

  that's what I'm examining here by the mattering instinct. I tried to explain how it arose in us. My first area of study as an undergraduate was physics. And from the very beginning, I was struck by the second law of thermodynamics, the law that says that entropy increases, and it takes a lot of energy to resist.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Entropy, and that's what living systems are meant to do. Entropy always triumphs at the end, but until then, you're resisting. And I, you know, I was taught the physics of it, but I always thought there is a, there's something revelatory about what it is to be a human being that somehow was speaking out of the physics to me. This is as an undergraduate. And, um, yeah, it's been, it's been, it's been something I've thought about for a very, very long time.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  And slowly, a kind of theory grew up about, about us, our, our species, and all centering on this, this longing to matter, to matter.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I also, I'm writing a book about it, but I'm very, I've become increasingly intrigued by this aspect of our humanity over the years. Certainly, it's something that economists neglect. You know, in particular, I like the example of if you give me $100,000 a year out of, for whatever motive, kindness, a government program, and alternatively, I do something that is deeply meaningful to me, and I earn $100,000 a year, in the narrowest measure of well-being that economists use, you'd be indifferent, because in both cases, you'd

• 4:04Speaker 00

  be able to consume $100,000 worth of goods and services. But I argue, and I think it's correct, that in the first case, you wouldn't matter much, and your sense of self would be diminished. And in the second case, which is possible, and we'll talk about the different ways people matter, for many people, work is how they matter, what they, what they do for money to make a living, support their family themselves. And so, the other place I think about it a lot is the tragedies that feel like they increasingly fill our lives, serial killers, mass murderers, gun...

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Gun violence where it's always a lonely man with a gun. It's always, almost always a man. It's almost always somebody who's lonely, meaning they don't have the human connections that sustain a life of, that you talk called flourishing, that I think is a crucial part of being a human being. And I think we should pay more attention to it. I don't think it's a small thing. So we're on the same page that way.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Good. Yeah. And that's an important page, it seems to me. You know, it's, um, I've never yet spoken to a person who I couldn't reach by talking this language of mattering. And, um, you know, in the book, I, you know, I talk about specific people. You know, one of whom you would think would be my natural enemy. He had been a neo-Nazi. He committed in his life terrible things. Uh, was a felon at, I think, the age of 17, but the very, and, uh, you know, sworn to

• 5:56Speaker 01

  hate people exactly like me. And, you know, uh, I was brought up on these stories because my, my family in Europe was decimated, uh, by the Nazis. We, we just such a, uh, a deep understanding of each other. Uh, when I was, and, and able to reach, you know, down into that longing to matter, uh, that was going so, so unappeased. Uh, a terrible family life. He grew up in the mean streets of Philly. It was all, uh, gangs and, and, and, and he just beaten up by his stepfather, his mother,

• 6:41Speaker 01

  a drug addict. Terrible, terrible situation. And then, um, he happened to, uh, run into some...

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Neo Nazis and they told him, "Look in the mirror and you will see why you matter so much. You are a white, male, heterosexual American and these people are taking your mattering away from you. You know, this notion of mattering as being zero sum that many people have to the extent that others matter, I matter less." And that was just the the lifebuys thrown out to him and he grabbed it with all the force of his longing to matter.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  And to get him to tell his story in the language of mattering was such a deep connection. And yeah, so it's really something, you know, it comes up all over in different places. I have to say that as this theory started to develop in my mind, starting with physics and ending with ethics. And as I slowly built it up in my mind, I was very suspicious of it because I'm very suspicious of big theories that seem to explain everything.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  I don't like them either.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I don't like them. You know, my training in philosophy is as an analytic philosopher, we take little, small problems and try to analyze them. And we don't have none of this grand metaphysical theories. And so, yeah, I mean, so I've been very reluctant to even take it on just because it seemed to explain so much to me. That in itself was a reason against it. But just the more I see things happening in this world and the factionalism and the, you know, just the being driven apart,

• 8:53Speaker 01

  I think so much of our longing to matter. It drives us, but it also divides us. Yeah, that's the subtitle of the book. I just felt, okay, before I leave this earth, I want to get this theory out and...

• 9:10Speaker 01

  And because I think it's helpful, like, you know, I can't read the newspaper without seeing, you know, this framework and filtering what I'm reading through this framework.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  And it's, I think it's a very useful, you can debate how central it is to all of human existence. I, I think it's quite important. We might differ on the percentage, but once you start to think about it, it's very useful in thinking about your interpersonal relations, the, the things that you notice frustrate or traumatize others or make them angry. And as I say, it's not a small thing. I just want to say, you didn't finish the story about the neo-Nazi. I encourage people to read the book. It has a happier ending. But, but we can, we can put that down. But I want you to start. And we'll come back

• 10:04Speaker 00

  also to this question of why it divides us, because in theory, there is plenty to go around. And we're different. And part of your book is explaining the different ways that we pursue this desire. And there are many, many, and you highlight many famous and not so famous people who have pursued different paths. But I want to go back to entropy, because I think, I've read the book, but those who are listening at home, or walking your dog, or wherever you are, commuting, exercising, you might be thinking, entropy? What does physics have to, I mean, okay, people do care about whether they matter or not. What's physics have to do with this?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I want to say that, again, you know, I'm a philosopher, and the philosopher who has meant most to me is somebody actually with a grand theory, and that's the philosopher Spinoza. My brain's been memorating Spinoza for many, many years at this point. And this is, in some sense, I think of as, as, well, if Spinoza knew all the science that we know, he was a 17th century philosopher, science was really just beginning in the 17th century, feeling its way towards its methodology, this.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Immensely useful bearing of empirical observation, prediction, and and theory often put forth in the language of mathematics, you know, so sort of feeling its way towards towards science. And but he he sort of began with what he thought was the fundamental, which was his notion of God. And he ends up with ethics. His his magnum opus is called the ethics. And, you know, when I when I would teach it to students, it was it takes a long time to get the ethics. Starts with what he thinks of as the groundwork,

• 12:12Speaker 01

  which is his very abstract notion of of God, which is very different from the concept of God in the conventional religions, so much so that he was not only exiled or put into what's called the harem in Hebrew. He was he was a Jewish philosopher. That is, he wasn't a Jewish philosopher.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  He was excommunicated. The Jewish people are a lot of excommunication.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And damned by greater Christian Europe. So but in any case, you know, he began with that manifest. I think we're at the stage where we can begin with physics and with the supreme, what is called the supreme law of of physics, the one law of physics that physicists has promised us, starting with Einstein and and going forth, talking. All the big physicists will never be overthrown. You know, all physical laws are subject to revision.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Moral may turn out to give us counter evidence, but not the law. The second law of thermodynamics that says in a closed system, that is one that doesn't have any recourse to outside energy, entropy increases. What is entropy? The shortest answer is it's disorder. A system is an ordered thing. In order to function as a system, it must be highly ordered. And Every system eventually goes towards disorder, which means it's destroyed. It collapses.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Entropy is the collapse of the system quantified. How much entropy is in the system means how much disorder there is in the system. And this is the supreme, as you say, supreme law of physics, that entropy tends to increase. And the entropy of the universe is increasing. And, you know, the story of our universe is, has a kind of sad ending, that it will end in what's called thermal equilibrium. It will be, there will be no change that can possibly happen. It will be cold, it will be still, it will be dead. It will be, the matter will have dissipated, everything. You know, the stars, everything will have dissipated.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And that's the story of all physical systems. And we are one, we are a physical system. The laws of biology are, are the answer. Biology's, the laws of living systems, answer to entropy. And to put it very, very simply, to be a living system is to be in resistance to entropy. We are not closed systems. No, from the smallest bacteria to, to us, to these complicated physical systems that we are, we are not closed systems.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  We are, we require a lot of input of energy, sunlight, food, that is put to work to, to resist. Vive la resistance. That's, that's the law of life, the resistance against, against entropy. And that means that we have to pay a lot of attention to ourselves. The more complicated the system, the easier it is for it to break down. And all living systems are.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  In this resistance to entropy, attention evolved as a way of being able to fight better, to resist better against entropy, so we can pay attention to our environment. Here's the food, there's the predator, and be able to react to it. And what this means is, a creature like us, with our highly-developed sense of attention, we are paying a lot of attention to ourselves all the time. Our attention is very much fixed on us.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Something in neuroscience called the default mode network, you know, where, how, what's going on in our consciousness when we're not paying attention to things outside? And we're thinking about ourselves, we're thinking about our past, we're fantasizing about our future, we're, it's, we pay a tremendous, we matter to ourselves. That's the short, you know, and because of the way entropy plays out in a biological system, that's why attention evolved in the first place, yeah, we are very fixated on ourselves.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  And I like to say, you know, we're self-interested, not selfish. You should say something similar in the book. And of course, listeners, I'm sure, will have at some point already thought about my favorite quote from Adam Smith, "Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely." And Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, when he wrote that, meant by loved, he didn't mean just romantic love, he mainly meant, we want to matter, we want to be admired, respected, honored, and when he says naturally, he means it's hardwired, which is consistent

• 18:14Speaker 00

  with your story, and by lovely, he meant worthy of respect, admiration, and being paid attention to. And so I think this is a very deep thing, but you take it, and so I'm a big fan of this, but you take it in a slightly, I'd say, unusual direction, and here's a quote from the book that, that I think gets, you say it a number of times, and it's, it goes like this. What the mattering instinct is about is trying to prove to ourselves that we are deserving of all the attention that we can't help paying ourselves. End of quote.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Meaning that we have this self-interestedness driven by our desire to resist, not driven in body, hardwired. It's part of our evolutionary heritage to resist entropy. But that's not enough. You also suggest strongly in that quote and elsewhere in the book that we feel uneasy with our self-awareness, our overly attentive, paying attention to ourselves, and we want to feel that it is justified. What is that add? Why do you mention? Why do you do that? Why don't you just say, "We want to matter. It's important. We care what people think of us. It's all, it matters."

• 19:38Speaker 00

  But you say something much stronger and a little bit different, which is our life in some sense is a quest to validate our inherent self-centeredness.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  So, talk about that.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Okay. And yeah, and that is, that is one of the big moves I make in the, in, in, in the book in trying to get eventually to ethics. And that is, that I, I think that this capacity we have for self-reflection, a very complicated operational function that our big brains come equipped with.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  It is a capacity to sometimes step outside ourselves and interrogate ourselves, the way we do others, you know? Why are you like this? Why are you, you know, why are you doing this? What, what's making you go? What's, what, what's making you click? We pay attention to ourselves and...

• 20:58Speaker 01

  If we were, I define, by the way, this word "mattering," you know, to mean deserving of attention. So that word, you know, deserving, worthy, is built into the notion of mattering. To want to matter, to long to matter, is to long to be deserving of attention, which I say, ultimately, the attention we long to be worthy of, deserving of, is our own. Because to step outside of ourselves and to see how much attention

• 21:42Speaker 01

  we pay to ourselves, our fixation on ourselves, even though it's baked into our identity, what am I? I am the person who naturally pays very close attention, special attention, to one Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein. And there is no further fact that I need to produce in order to explain why I do pay so much attention to that particular thing in all the universe, other than that's who I am, that is just built into us. And yet, when you step outside yourself and you think of how much attention you're paying to yourself, and if the amount of attention that you pay to a certain thing

• 22:25Speaker 01

  is a measure of how much you think it matters, we each would seem to think that we matter more than anything else in the whole universe. And short of lunacy, we know that is untrue.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  And that is what causes the kind of unease, which I think, you know, comes on us in late childhood, in adolescence, in young adulthood. And in some of us... We erupts over and over again, that there is that sense of, "Do I really matter? Am I really worthy of all this attention that I pay to myself?" And unfortunately, I know through several friends, what it is like to be severely depressed, I mean clinically depressed, in the sense of having to withdraw from life completely.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  And what they say, and, oh, you know, some of them are the most talented, brilliant people I know, with good family lives, with loving friends, I don't matter. Yeah. And there is such self-loathing in this. They can barely, they can barely tolerate their own presence. You know, we are constantly ourselves, 24/7. And this is, it is always the sense of this undeservingness of their, of their own self-fixation.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  So I think there is, I often look to extreme cases to try to see what normally goes unnoticed in those of us who are more or less functioning okay in this world. And from being in close proximity to people who have suffered from severe clinical depression, this came, you know, that these are the words, "I don't matter." And it's not because of lack of relationships in their case. It's not loneliness. It is, it is this other unappeased cornerstone of our humanness, the mattering instinct, the longing to matter, to do something, to justify.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  So, and that's so interesting to me, because this means that we are, in some sense, you know what a philosopher calls normative, that we are thinking about justification, about values. This is what makes us value-seeking creatures.

• 25:03Speaker 00

  So I think about, I don't think-

• 25:04Speaker 01

  So that's my move.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't think you quote him, but I, on this, we, you know, Steve Jobs talked about wanting to put a dent in the universe, and that, it's a very high standard, a very high level, a high bar to, to, uh, to justify one's own existence. He certainly put many dents in the universe, so, uh, he definitely mattered, still does. But I, and I just want to put a little footnote here-

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Oh gee.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I just was gonna say, I wish I had that quote from the book, okay, in the passage-

• 25:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  To, uh, another-

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good quote.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Another edition, thank you for the quote.

• 25:43Speaker 00

  So, but I just want to put a footnote here, uh, about, uh, consciousness, and I don't, I don't want to digress into this, other than just to mention it, which is that this idea of self-obsession, to put it in the extreme version, but we all have it, it's not extreme, actually, it's all we think about most of the time. Did I embarrass myself? Am I gonna do a good job later? Is this presentation gonna go well? Am I gonna get the raise? Am I going to get the person I longed for romantically? We think about this all the time, and we presume, and this is hard to know, but we presume that most other creatures

• 26:25Speaker 00

  don't worry about these things. But we do, and your point, which I think is easily overlooked, it's not just, you know, we're different from animals. We can imagine, say, a dog, we can imagine, uh, moving to Brazil, or Israel, or wherever, and yet, uh, I think we underestimate, and, cause it's maybe for a bunch of reasons, but we underestimate how dominant and constant that, uh, mode is for consciousness, and it doesn't, um-

• 26:58Speaker 00

  Doesn't exactly make sense. I talk about this a lot on the program. It's just that, why can't we just have a good time? Animals, you know, they're cold, they go inside, they're happy. It's easy. They're hungry, they get food, they're happy. They don't have guilt, they don't have shame. Oh, they have a little bit sometimes, we can see it, it seems. It may be anthropomorphizing, but my point is, is that I think it feels that way. But you've put your finger on something that is a deep part of what it is to be human. Before we go any further, talk about the different kinds of ways that people matter, because the other, one of the other interesting parts of the book is that you create what

• 27:37Speaker 00

  you call a mattering map, a taxonomy of mattering. And it's helpful, and it's sort of interesting to think about the different ways. Because if you're, in the broadest sense, if you think about, well, people pay attention to me, so I matter. But that's, you go way beyond that. So talk about the four different kinds of ways that people find mattering appeased.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Gosh, the first book I ever wrote, which happened to have been a novel, and it's called The Mind Body Problem, very philosophical novel. And I had my main character come up with this notion of the mattering map. It's been simmering for a very, very, that book was published in 1983. Yeah, so this has been simmering in me for such a long time. So it has many, many different domains. I mean, I, over my long, long life, I've met people, I've met pick-up artists, you know, who this is their mattering project, you

• 28:44Speaker 01

  know, to seduce and abandon as many women as they possibly can, as it said, of this ex neo-Nazi and religious people, and of many, many sorts, conventional religion, the spiritual, but not religious people, you know, just so many different.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Regions of this mattering map. But digging and digging and reading some psychologists about theories of personality also, but just digging and digging in these conversations I was having with people. And not because I was planning to ever write about it, but just because I found it the most interesting conversations to have with people. What is, what gets you out of bed in the morning? What, what is it that makes you want to pursue your life? Uh, you don't you just gives you the impetus, uh, the energy to, to, to get on with it. Um, so many different ways of, of, of mattering. I go into some of them kinkier ways or more eccentric ways in the book.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  But beneath it all, I've found, and this is open to empirical falsification, but so far, what I found is there are generally four different strategies. And I'll just first name the ones, the ones that I call a, a transcendent mattering. Um, and a social mattering, competitive mattering, and heroic striving, uh, mattering. So describe each of those. Always I find, better describe each of these. Transcendent is a mattering, uh, to the universe at large.

• 30:31Speaker 01

  It's got a cosmic mattering, uh, to the universe because transcenders believe that the universe has a kind of, uh, personal attitude towards oneself. This is religious or spiritual. It's this, this, this kind of attitude. It's, uh, it is the view that, uh, transcenders believe that each of us was created purposely, uh, intentionally by.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Whether they call it God, or something bigger, something like that, something godlike, who created the universe, the laws of nature, and ultimately us, for a reason. This is the highest, this delivers the highest form of a sense of mattering, that you really, you know, that there is, that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity, that that which created the universe is at a purpose for you. And I don't think, I should say that I started out as a very religious person.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  I come from a very religious household, Orthodox Jewish, extremely Orthodox. I am no longer, and I'm not a believer. But I know what it feels like to think of the universe in this way. And the sense of mattering, when I became at quite a young age, no longer a believer, the universe was so diminished for me. I was diminished. Yeah. I had to think about, what do I do now? You know? And the script was laid out for me, especially as a female, was laid out for me, what I was meant to do in this world. And now with my responsibility, which was thrilling and terrifying, you know?

• 32:35Speaker 01

  And so, okay, those are transcenders, and I think that's fascinating. You know, I think that this way of ultimately dealing with mattering, and the sense that it gives you of mattering, that we ought to understand this. And those of us who are not believers should understand what it is to be a believer. And what it does to one's sense of mattering. Okay. I'm going to go to, next to, socializers. And from my conversation, socializers.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Think that what they feel is it is how they try to justify themselves to themselves is by mattering to others, which is sometimes in beneficial ways, but can also be in very non beneficial ways, you know, dominating, power over and all of this and fame, fame, you know, to matter to many strangers. It's such an important motive in our time because it's become ever easier to become famous. You know, you can bob your head and lip sync on YouTube and have a million followers. And so, but so, you know, they're that these are the socializers and from my conversations, it seems to me, this is has not been empirically

• 34:00Speaker 01

  tested. It seems to me that's how many, many people, maybe the bulk of us, think about what it is to matter in some in healthy ways and unhealthy ways, I would say. And that's true for all of these, these strategies. And then there are heroic strivers. And they are not striving to matter to others, neither to other mortals, nor, you know, to to a transcendent present in the universe. They are trying to realize certain standards of

• 34:36Speaker 01

  excellence that they feel they are born to realize. And it could be intellectual, artistic, athletic, and ethical. So one of the interesting people that I portray in the book is Manti, he's no longer with us, Baba Amti, who was completely irreligious, but was a saint. He devoted himself to wiping out leprosy in his native India and went to tremendous lengths to do so. And he was, you know, driven by

• 35:17Speaker 01

  He was a heroic striver. He always claimed not to be a saint at all. But he had to perfect his own ethics, his own sense of doing what he considered the right thing.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  He gave himself.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  So, yes, so these are heroic strivers.

• 35:39Speaker 00

  I was gonna say, he gave himself a mission. And I think all heroic strivers see that they have a mission. It may not come from the divine or the universe or the transcendent source. It could just be a passion, a hobby. You have some wonderful examples in the book of people who pursue their passions. One example you give is fly tying, which is the idea of fly fishing and making beautiful flies that are tied with extraordinary artistry and materials. It's a small niche, but for many people, that a small niche is all they need. And they are going to get better and better at it. So it's a very beautiful idea. And then the last group is competitive matters. So what are they, who are they?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  A lot of people, sometimes people become very abashed when I say, you know, do you matter? Tell me how you think that you matter. They become rather abashed. And it usually turns out that these are people who understand my question to mean, do I matter more than others? That they really think of mattering in zero sum terms, that to the extent, you know, that others matter, they're taking something away from me, that it's always striving to matter more. And, you know, some of the most prominent people, and as again, as I say, as I read the newspaper

• 37:07Speaker 01

  and I read about some of the really bizarre behavior of various powerful people, I realize that, oh, these are competitive mattering people, that they really, they really are striving to matter more, to always be the person in the room who matters the most. And, you know, this, I've met them in my gym. And we meet them on the world stage. We really see them on the world stage.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  What? So those are the four types.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  So.

• 37:47Speaker 01

  What? What is true? You know, I was born into a family that wanted me to be a transcender. I couldn't be, uh, for whatever reasons, the way my mind works, whatever it was. Everybody else, all my siblings, they are transcenders. I am not. Why? Um, I don't know. I, I am a heroic striver.

• 38:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  Yes, my mattering project is, well, you're hearing it. This is my mattering project, to understand, uh, mattering. Um, and, uh,

• 38:22Speaker 01

  yeah, it's a cognitive, it's an intellectual thing, and sometimes, or an artistic thing, and sometimes an ethical thing, but definitely a heroic striver. What? You know, it's temperament, it's culture, it's personal experiences. You know, where we end up on the, on the mattering map, what continent we end up on. Um, I'm not, you know, this is something I would love to have, uh, have people who are better equipped to understand these things, explain. Um, I found some explanations in psychology or personality, uh, that I go into in the book, but, um, but in any case, I think that's where we are.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  Uh, this is a description of, uh, everybody I've met so far.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  So on the competitive.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  There's somewhere or other, um.

• 39:12Speaker 00

  On the competitive thing.

• 39:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  On the competitive thing, I think about, um, Gore Vidal, who said, every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  You encourage us to do the opposite, which I loved, you know, and I think the ability, you call it velling, which is a Yiddish word, meaning to take pride in. I think it's very interesting. There is a lot of jealousy in the human art, um, and that's what Vidal is semi ironically referencing, although I think he probably meant it. Uh, I suspect he may have meant it, although it's kind of a joke, but, uh, there are no jokes. But, but I do think this idea of failing for others is a really deep idea, which is part of our humanity. And I see it, the way I see it, when you see a magnificent artistic

• 40:04Speaker 00

  performance, an extraordinary musician, a great athlete, and, you know, athletes get, intellectuals often look down on athletes as, you know, it's just physical. But I think many of us fell for others and we root for athletes to succeed and win their nth championship site, which is a weird thing to care about. But we feel, and I think Adam Smith wrote about this too, real Smith scholars can remind me what page this is on, but we love this idea that these other people are doing these beautiful heroic things. They're heroic strivers that we're

• 40:44Speaker 00

  experiencing vicariously, and we want them to often, of course, sometimes we want them to be torn down, we want them to fail, a horrible human urge. But the other human urge we have is to, for them to even further embellish their reputation and their success, and to take our own pleasure in it, even though it's, we don't really have anything to do with it.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's true, and it's, it's, it's beautiful. It really is. And it is, you know, in some sense, I think, they're, I don't know, they're redeeming us. They're, you know, to see that potential and to know the discipline and the hard work that goes into it, but just to see the beauty of which humans are capable, and their athletic feats, and their intellectual, their artistic, and their ethical feats, you know, there is something that we can take pride in. And I think that this should be cultivated.

• 41:48Speaker 00

  Oh, for sure.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  It really, and I feel, um...

• 41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, if we had more of a sense that there's enough mattering to go around, and that it needed be thought of in zero-sum terms, it, yes, enough mattering for all of us, that perhaps, that is a way of encouraging the more generous and happy expansive feelings, rather than the "gimme, gimme, gimme, they're taking, they're taking, they're taking." You know, it's a little bit like, you know, like those of us who have raised children.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  The most important thing you can possibly do if you take on that project. You know, when, if you have more than one, it is terribly important that each child feels there is enough mattering to go around, you know, and that is, and if not, you know, there's jealousy of a fierce sort. You can see it in such young children, and it's really, you know, so this really also, excuse me a moment, this has implications for how we raise our children as well, that each child should feel that they matter as much as anybody else in the family,

• 43:19Speaker 01

  because I think that first pattern, that first model of where one stands in the world vis a vis one's own mattering, which matters so much throughout one's life, that first modeling comes from the family. And so this is, you know, something to be aware of in raising children.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Very important.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, just one story that's in there.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Is that okay?

• 43:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure, go ahead.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  This one story is a mother who Yeah. A mother had told me once, I mean, she has three, she had three young sons at the time. And she told me that her middle son, um, who I thought was an amazing child, um, had said to her, um, "You don't love me as much as you love my two brothers." And she said, "Well, you know, why do you say this?" And he said, "Well, you know, when you're washing the dishes at the kitchen sink at night, if my older brother asks a question, or my younger brother asks a question, you turn off the water. But when I ask a question, you don't." And then she realized, she told me that that is true. And he had a particular kind of mind that she just

• 44:39Speaker 01

  uh, she thought he was like a little pedant. Um, he was constantly parsing words and, uh, saying what she described to me as things that are absolutely obvious, um, like a double, a double negative means a positive, this sort of The kid grew up to be a professor of mathematical, mathematical logic. So that, that was the, the kind of questions he was asking, the observations he was making that she found quite boring. Um, but that he noticed that tiny little

• 45:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  piece of evidence that she didn't turn off the water. Um, and, and, and, and, and said, "You don't love me as much." Uh, so it's very, very important uh, for parents to be aware that they are calculating, they are taking this in because, yeah. What matters more than, than their own mattering to their mother? Nothing matters more.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  I, I just want to mention, I've mentioned it a number of times on the program. I think it came up, uh, came up recently. The, the, uh, the video, it's a little bit hard to find these days, but it, I've seen it, many people have seen it of Andrew Wiles, the mathematician, talking about

• 45:57Speaker 00

  Salvaging his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. And when he tells the story of how it came to be, which is quite extraordinary, he chokes up and we, the viewer, also become, most, many of us, become emotional at the idea that he might not have been able to salvage it, which in some sense is not a big deal. Somebody else would have found it, maybe, or maybe not. But why do we find that so powerful? And I think your book gives us a way of thinking about it. He's a heroics driver. He wants to prove this theorem. And he almost does. Well, he thinks he does. The world thinks he does, even worse.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  He gets all this honor, all this glory, which is also a competitor part. And he gets some socialized unpleasantness, too. And there's something transcendent because it's math and it's ethereal. So, and then it turns out he's wrong. He didn't prove it. And we're rooting for, most of us, I hope, maybe not a few of his colleagues. We'll put them to the side. But we're all rooting for him desperately because we want to see his project come to fruition. We want him, we want him to matter. And in the way that he does. I just think your book helps us understand both our own emotions and some of those around us.

• 47:21Speaker 00

  But I want to talk about the urge, what I would call the urge to proselytize. And you talk about it in the sense that mattering projects can divide us. So let's say you care about, I'll take the fly fisher. The person who collects exotic feathers to the point of theft. It's a great story. You can read about in the book. But here's a person who cares about fly fishing and he wants to tie the most beautiful, best feathers. And one might Inevitably say that that's kind of a small project, that its significance for the world is small,

• 48:01Speaker 00

  and judge that person for choosing that as their mattering project, the way they satisfy this desire. And that's an obvious way that human beings sometimes react. I might try to convince you to go back to your religious roots. You might try to convince me to give up mine, because obviously I'm irrational for believing in God and living a religious life. Similarly, I might tell you, you're competing for this prize, and look what you're doing to yourself and to others. So we lecture and judge not just ourselves, but we tend to think,

• 48:44Speaker 00

  and this is also, I think, a very helpful psychological insight from the book, we tend to think that our mattering project is of course sublime and glorious, and yours is kind of pitiful and trivial and small. And if you knew the way things should be, you'd pick a different one. And I think one of your themes in the book is to be tolerant of what we all have to deal with in choosing our project. And in some dimension, I have trouble being this tolerant, Rebecca, I'll confess. But in some dimension, we should live and let live.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Not entirely. You know, and I do think, I see the footsteps of Spinoza, you know, where he started with his Deo Siwe Natura, his weird view of God, which is one with nature. Hence with Athens, I start with... Physics, and want to end with ethics. That is, not all ways of pursuing are mattering, are okay, I think. But, a whole bunch of them are, right?

• 50:09Speaker 01

  And to, so first of all, you called, did you call it the urge to proselytize? Yes, yes, right? The urge, and I call it the urge to universalize. That whatever way I am finding, you know, to, to, yes, everybody should be a philosopher. God, God help us.

• 50:30Speaker 00

  The unexamined life.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  But.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  The unexamined life is not worth living.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Pretty, pretty harsh.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Yes, and I have a bunch of quotes, you know.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're pretty harsh, yes. And, and it was said by Socrates after he was voted guilty of corrupting the youth in ancient Athens, of all places, that, that became a crime. And, and, and when he was supposed to be trying to negotiate a penalty short of death, and he so offended people by saying that, basically implying that they were living lives not worth living, there was nothing worse you can tell somebody, that they, more people voted for his death than had voted for his guilt, kind of irrational there.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  But, but that's what it does. I mean, it's such a good example. Socrates' trial there, and what Plato says, he said, and how that so infuriated his, his audience, that more voted for his death. But, you know, religious peoples, transcenders, you know, are often accused of being, you know, the most intolerant, you know, if you're, it's my God, or it's, it's hell, you know, you follow my way, or it's hell, for those religions that believe in hell. But I, I think actually, this universalizing, this urge to proselytize, to universalize, to say it's my way, where you're wasting your life.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Takes place all over the mattering map. "Unexamined life is not worth living," or lots and lots of quotes. I have a quote from former editor Diana Friedland, I think her name is, of Vogue magazine, saying, you know, "You have to be well dressed. That's what gets you down the steps in the morning. Without it, you're nothing, nothing." I mean, so from all different corners of the mattering map, you get these universalizing statements, "Do it my way," or "You're just getting life wrong. You might as well not have lived at all. You might as well not have shown up for your existence at all,

• 52:55Speaker 01

  for all the mattering that you have." What is that urge? And it is the urge to try to found our life, our mattering, on something objective, you know, that this really does matter. And if it is objective, if it's not just a figment of my own temperament and personality, and just the contingencies of who I am, then it's really something real, it's objective. And if it's objective, then everybody ought to recognize it. It's this kind of logic, I think, that lies behind

• 53:37Speaker 01

  some of our impulses to proselytize our way. And I've heard, you know, physicists saying, you know, I mean, why doesn't everybody just study the laws of nature? They're grand, they're transcendent, they're something larger than us. They give our life meaning. Why doesn't everybody just do this? Well, that's not where everybody's talent lies. And it's, you know, so there is this contingency of what our talents, our passions, our culture, that go into our identity. And the truth of the matter is, I think that we have to...

• 54:23Speaker 01

  Ground the notion that we each matter in something else. We need these mattering projects. We do. And I think it's something beautiful about us that we want to justify our self-obsession, even though it sometimes leads us to some very dark and destructive places. There are bad places on the mattering map, clearly. But nevertheless, there is, I think, the truth that we each do matter. In fact, our longing to matter is itself indication of, you know, something that matters.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  It's something estimable in us. I admire, I admire our species for taking on this burden of justifying, each of us justifying ourselves.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  It's very poignant. And in that sense, there's something estimable about the, our desire to resist entropy, death, and it's, there's something heroic about it, even for the non-heroic strivers, is what I would, I would think about it. And of course, when you talk about the dark side of this urge, the people who matter the most in the everyday sense of that word are, of course, monsters. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, King Leopold, you know, pick, take your pick.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  It's not that urge to make a difference, which we inculcate in our children sometimes as a desirable thing to make, make the world a better place, say, can have very dark, dark, dark parts to that journey. I want to close with a, I want to close with a, I think, an empirical statement that

• 56:29Speaker 00

  Brings me back to what I said at the beginning about economists, which is that in the West, particularly the United States, the standard of living, there's always debates about it, but there is no doubt that the 300-plus million people who live in the United States are some of the wealthiest and materially comfortable people in the history of humanity. You could pick other countries. I just picked the United States because I used to live there and I know it better than many other places. And so they're in the top 1% historically, maybe 5%, but I think it's probably in the top 1% of all the people who've ever lived. If you ranked them by material comfort,

• 57:13Speaker 00

  almost everyone in the United States would be way, way, way to the right-hand tail as material well-being. And yet, there is a feeling of malaise, and you call it a crisis of mattering. And I think it's pitiful, actually. Somewhat pitiful is a little strong, but it's weird that people find this puzzling. In a way, you have to be an economist to find it puzzling. Economists would say, "Well, we're so wealthy, why aren't we happy?" Well, because money is not what makes people happy. What makes people happy, in the deep sense of the word, the Smithian sense, the Thomas Jefferson sense, is mattering.

• 57:57Speaker 00

  And what you call, and philosophers call flourishing. And if most people are not flourishing, it doesn't matter how many, what version of the iPhone they have, or whether they never get cold or hungry. And if our biggest problem is obesity, not poverty, not starvation in the United States. Well, we have a different problem. And, you know, people, it's kind of obvious. And, you know, I think... We ignore this at our peril in the West and in democracies. Because when people don't think they matter, they will do things to fix that. And many of them are dark.

• 58:41Speaker 00

  So, the only thing I would add before I let you respond, but I think the other piece of this, which you only talk about indirectly, is family. Through much of human history, there are only two ways that most people matter. Unless you're the king. Put the king aside, small sample, the number of monarchs in the world. The rest of average, the mass of human beings get satisfaction and matter because they're loved or love their family, or have those social interactions. Or they make a living and feel that that's, gives them a sense of importance.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  And as we become more leisurely, and as we struggle, as we do in many places in the most wealthy nations, to create family, and to create human connection, forget family, to have friends, to have a social interaction with other people, we're not, it's not going to turn out well. And, you know, I'm a classical liberal, I don't think we should be telling people what to do, and I don't think we should force them to take social media off their phones, or whatever crazy ideas people might have about making this better. But, we can't ignore it. It's not gonna go well. That's my take. Love to hear your thoughts.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  I just say also, it's not going well. I'm not just saying it's not gonna go well. It's not going well.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Longing on a large scale, unappeased longing on a large scale is what makes history.

• 1:00:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  And it's often...

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  The kinds of events that get written in the history books, they're not good events. They are events that could lead to great destruction, to wars, and all sorts of terrible constraints on freedom, all sorts of, yeah, the events that make for interesting history books. Yes, and longing, there is no longing of which this is true, or the longing to matter. This is the essence. We are, what a human being is, a creature of matter, who longs to matter. It is, I'm so obsessed with both of those notions, the noun matter and the

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  verb that we derive in English from it, you know, to matter, both of which come from the word, the Latin word mater, mother, which is interesting, actually. But it is, we can't ignore this, we can't ignore this. I think, you know, Freud had said that the two cornerstones of humanness are love and work, and I would amend that slightly, I talk about in the book, that for love I would substitute connectedness, the feeling that there are people in our lives who will pay us attention whether we deserve it or not. It's just, they are in

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  our lives, these paradigmatically, our family, you know, our friends, or perhaps our colleagues, but these are people, and you may not love them, but you, they are in your life, and we all need this at the pain of tremendous loneliness, which is anti-flourishing, you kind of be a lonely person and be flourishing. But the other piece, and for a lot, as I said, the socializers, this is not another piece, they collapse it, but for a lot of us, there is this other, you know, for all of us, there's a mattering instinct, and it may take the form of being a socializer, we may be transcenders, we may be competitors,

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  we may be heroic strivers. There's nothing, you know, you have the temperament that you do, and you try to make the best of it without causing destruction or misery to others. And that is, of course, the ethical constraint there. But...

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  And without that, without people's feeling that they are living lives that have purpose, coherence, that are meaningful in their own eyes, there is, it's not loneliness that occurs, but it is a feeling of waste and in its worst extremes of self-loathing or resentment, you know, it can be turned outward to the world. Why are you making me feel this way? Why are there other people who matter so much more than I? All of us,

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  it's just as strong, from Putin and Trump to the beggar you see on the street. I mean, really, this is what it is to be human. We have to create ways of being in our companies, in our family lives, in our social relationships, that give everybody the sense that there's enough mattering to go around. We don't have to be grabbing for it like a bunch of kids under a pinata, trying to gather up as much of it as possible. Not if you understand

• 1:04:17Speaker 01

  human nature. As you've reminded me, Adam Smith understood how human nature, not to understand human nature is to understand the desperation and the urgency of ministering to every individual's belonging to matter.

• 1:04:39Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Rebecca Goldstein. Her book is The Mattering Instinct. Rebecca, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. What a pleasure it was to speak with you.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.