The Mattering Instinct: Our Desperate Need to Find Meaning | Rebecca Goldstein

In Episode 457 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with philosopher Rebecca Goldstein about her latest book, "The Mattering Instinct," which explores our fundamental human longing to feel that our lives matter—that we didn't just come and go and that it was all for nothing. Rebecca and I spend the first hour exploring the origins of her fascination with the question of mattering, how this instinct manifests differently from our biological drive for self-preservation, and why we long not just to matter to ourselves but to feel that we matter objectively. We discuss the critical role played by attention and deservingness in our sense of mattering, the distinction between happiness and fulfillment, and how parenting and early family dynamics shape our relationship with this fundamental human longing. The second hour is devoted to a more in-depth exploration of Rebecca's concept of the "mattering map," which identifies four distinct archetypes: heroic strivers, socializers, competitors, and transcenders. We examine the relationship between depression and our longing to matter, the role of social media in shaping how contemporary generations experience their own search for validation, and how some approaches to mattering are objectively better than others. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 01/05/2025 RSS Description (Libsyn/Supercast): In Episode 457 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the-mattering-instinct-meaning-rebecca-goldstein/ of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with philosopher Rebecca Goldstein about her latest book, "The Mattering Instinct," which explores our fundamental human longing to feel that our lives matter—that we didn't just come and go and that it was all for nothing. Rebecca and I spend the first hour exploring the origins of her fascination with the question of mattering, how this instinct manifests differently from our biological drive for self-preservation, and why we long not just to matter to ourselves but to feel that we matter objectively. We discuss the critical role played by attention and deservingness in our sense of mattering, the distinction between happiness and fulfillment, and how parenting and early family dynamics shape our relationship with this fundamental human longing. The second hour is devoted to a more in-depth exploration of Rebecca's concept of the "mattering map," which identifies four distinct archetypes: heroic strivers, socializers, competitors, and transcenders. We examine the relationship between depression and our longing to matter, the role of social media in shaping how contemporary generations experience their own search for validation, and how some approaches to mattering are objectively better than others. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Joining our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 01/05/2025

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

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up everybody? My name is Demetri Kofinas and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Rebecca Goldstein, a philosopher, novelist, and MacArthur Fellowship recipient. She is the author of 11 books, including her latest work, The Mattering Instinct, which explores our fundamental human longing to feel that our lives matter, that we didn't just come and go and it was all for nothing. We spend the first hour exploring the origins of Rebecca's fascination with the question

• 0:42Demetri Kofinas?

  of mattering, how this instinct manifests differently from our biological drive for self-preservation, and why we long not just to matter to ourselves, but to feel that we matter objectively. We discuss the critical role played by attention and deservingness in our sense of mattering, the distinction between happiness and fulfillment, and how parenting and early family dynamics shape our relationship with this fundamental human longing. The second hour is devoted to a more in-depth exploration of Rebecca's concept of the mattering map, which identifies four distinct archetypes: heroic strivers, socializers, competitors, and transcenders. We examine the relationship between depression and our longing to matter, the role of social

• 1:25Demetri Kofinas?

  media in shaping how contemporary generations experience their own search for validation, and how some approaches to mattering are objectively better than others. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page.

• 2:06Demetri Kofinas?

  And if you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected] and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this deeply philosophical, heartfelt, and distinctly human conversation with my guest, Rebecca Goldstein.

• 2:30Demetri Kofinas?

  Rebecca Goldstein, welcome to Hidden Forces. Welcome back to Hidden Forces, I should say.

• 2:35Speaker 01

  It's great to be back.

• 2:37Demetri Kofinas?

  So you were on the podcast like almost seven years ago, I think, or maybe six years ago.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:43Demetri Kofinas?

  2018, 2019, December 2018.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Before the pandemic. Yes.

• 2:47Demetri Kofinas?

  It was before the pandemic and it was in studio as well. Those were the good old days where we we got to do things in the studio and it was a privilege to get to meet you and all my other guests. You came on the show back then to talk about your book Play to What the Google Plex, but even then, a conversation about mattering, which is what your new book is about, came up and you even talked to me then about how you were working on this idea. I don't know that you were writing at the time, but it was on your mind. How long have you been working on this book for?

• 3:15Speaker 01

  Oh, let me think. You know, in some sense, I've been thinking about this topic ever since my first book. This is my 11th book, but I I wasn't planning to ever write a book about it. It just became a very interesting topic to talk with various people on. You know, if you're sitting next to me on a plane or a train or a bus and you want to chat, we're going to start talking about your, what I call, mattering project. And I've even, you know, it's funny, but I've even had guys trying to pick me up and

• 3:59Speaker 01

  I will start talking to them about what, why that makes them feel like they matter so much.

• 4:05Demetri Kofinas?

  What an interesting, uh, what an interesting response.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  They don't realize what they're getting into. But yeah, I mean, there's one conversation in particular, I remember it was really, you know, he defined himself as a pickup artist and that was just so fascinating. He had stats.

• 4:22Demetri Kofinas?

  His mattering project was how well he performed in the dating pool.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  In the dating pool.

• 4:26Demetri Kofinas?

  Not uncommon, especially for young men.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 4:29Demetri Kofinas?

  How did you become, I mean, this is a very difficult question to ask because it's like, how do you even answer a question like this? But how did you first become interested in asking this question? Not necessarily like, does my life matter? But realizing the sort of meta question of, why am I asking this question? What does it mean? And why is there a branch of philosophy beyond sort of maybe Aristotelian ethics? Or something along the question of what is a good life? That actually addresses this issue, this question that's burning at the center of my being?

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. Strangely, it was when I was writing my first book, which was a real departure for me because I was trained as a philosopher of science. I did kind of technical stuff, philosophy of science, philosophy of math. I have a book on Gödel's incompleteness theorems. But I found myself writing a novel, which is something I never thought I would do. A first sentence came to me. I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius. It just came to me out of nowhere. It was not my voice. It was not my story. And it was just this gift. And I, I wrote a novel. It was called The Mind Body Problem. It was a philosophical novel.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  But my career as an academic philosopher actually took a big hit. Because, you know, it was a frivolous thing for a young, as yet untenured assistant professor of philosophy to do, to write a novel. You know, and it was kind of sexy novel, you know, which made it all the more frivolous. But I didn't find it at all frivolous. But what had happened when I, I had, I had written the first draft and I, and I sold it. And the editor asked me the following question. Your character is very pretty, very smart, very funny, very sexually desirable. And she's so unhappy. Why is she so unhappy?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  And I thought about this, you know, she was sort of, I had great access to her, but she was a different character, which was what made it so exciting. And then I heard her answering in her, her voice, you know.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  And it was because I don't feel like I matter in the way that most matters to me. And she was the one who came up with, in a sense, you know, this whole idea of the mattering map, which functions very centrally in my more developed theory. But, you know, to me, it's so ironic that the idea that's come to mean the most to me as a philosopher came to me by way of a novel, of a character who was not myself and that somehow was able to give me access to, to this deep question, to stand outside myself and to be able to ask this question from outside, in a way, because it was another

• 7:20Speaker 01

  character. And that's when this obsession or interest, I don't know if it's an obsession, but this interest first took root.

• 7:29Demetri Kofinas?

  Hmm, that's so interesting. Do you think that was because you were able to fantasize, you were able to create an imaginary character that had maybe all the characteristics of a life that you think you would want? And that this character ultimately ended up with the same question that each of us wrestles with, despite the fact that she seemed to have everything?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, that is it. And I've found, you know, I've written to other novels and I find that this sort of, you're in the character, you know, so you have great access to it, but it really is quite different, you know, or at least I always write characters who are very different from myself. That's the fun of it. It seems that I can get to something that is essential to all of us. Anyway, that's the way it happened.

• 8:13Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, to be clear, I didn't, I hadn't read The Mind Body Problem, so I actually don't know if that accurately captures what your intentions were when you wrote the character. But anyways, it was interesting for me to contemplate what allowed you to access that through an imaginary person. Let's get to the subject of the book more specifically, because I think people will also be wondering, like, what does this even mean, like, mattering? So what is mattering and what does it mean to matter?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we talk about what matters.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  There are tons of books that use that matrix for a title, you know, why X matters, you know, why money matters, why Jesus matters, why good sex matters. There are just tons of books, why baseball matters, why... And so we do talk about what matters and we care about that a great deal. And we talk about who matters. And that matters a lot to us. I mean, we all want to be counted among those who matter. And that's what the mattering instinct is all about. But what matter means, I think, at its core, is being deserving of attention. And that's already extremely interesting. Attention is very interesting.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  We're always talking about, we live in an attention economy, everybody wants attention. But deserving, deserving is so interesting because deserving is a concept that's what philosophers call normative. It involves norms of justification. When we're asking if something is deserving, we're bringing into this what counts as deserving. How are you assessing this? What are your norms here? And so that already gets us into questions of values of ought. You know, in philosophy, we make a big distinction between is and

• 10:03Speaker 01

  ought. And if, in fact, we are creatures who want to feel deserving of tension, of whose attention, ultimately, our own attention, that means that we are, in our very essence, normative creatures, creatures who care about values. So it right away gets us, shows how very, very interesting we humans are.

• 10:29Demetri Kofinas?

  So obviously, and I think this is something that you write in the book, and it's something we even talked about, you know, last appearance on the show, that... We subjectively matter to ourselves. That's like a default mechanism of survival. If you don't subjectively matter, then you have really no willpower to go on living.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 10:45Demetri Kofinas?

  But what's interesting is that we seem to also feel that we need to matter objectively. In other words, and this, I guess, gets to your point about deserving, that we need to be deserving of not just other people's attention, but also of our own attention.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 11:00Demetri Kofinas?

  Can you help me understand what explains this need to prove that we objectively matter when clearly we subjectively matter in almost all circumstances? Because otherwise, we have no point in going on living. So what explains that?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's self-mattering, you know? And in fact, we're set up biologically, as all creatures are, to first and foremost, want to survive and to flourish. You know, from the bacterium to us, you know? This is built into any biological creature. I mean, I can talk more about the science behind this, you know? But let's just start there, you know? That, of course, it's pounded into our very identity that we matter to ourselves. That is, that we feel ourselves to be deserving of our own attention. You know, that, that, that is what it takes.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Attention evolved as an adaptation to help us in our own survival, to find sources of low entropy energy, in other words, food, sunlight, and to be able to pay attention to sources of energy, food, sunlight. I pay attention to threats to our own survival and flourishing, you know? Predators, fire, pandemonium, so we can flee it. And so, of course, you know, we are constantly paying attention to our environment and how it affects us. We pay ourselves a tremendous amount of attention. That's just a given. So we matter to ourselves.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  But here's the thing, and this is true, of course, for all living creatures. Or all living creatures, certainly, who have evolved attention. We have these big, big brains. And one of our capacities of our brains is self-reflection. And I could talk about how we, I think, we evolved this. But what this allows us to do is to, in some sense, step out of ourselves. The way I actually already described it, I do it to a very great degree when I'm inhabiting a fictional creature. But we all have this capacity to step outside ourselves and to think of ourselves as just

• 13:12Speaker 01

  another object in the world that we can ask questions about, that we can discover new things about. People go to therapy in order to discover new things about themselves that will help them to survive and to flourish. And one of the things that we notice about ourselves is how much damned attention we pay to ourselves obsessively and constantly, just in virtue of being ourselves. That's pounded into our very identity. I mean, when there's not somebody on this planet who pays the amount of attention that I pay to one Rebecca Newberger-Goldstein, that is another way of saying that I will

• 13:57Speaker 01

  be dead, right? That nobody else pays that much attention, as a matter of biology, to me, myself. Actually, Spinoza captured this idea back in the 17th century, the great philosopher Spinoza, who has had such an influence on me. He captures this idea in the notion of konotas, that what our identity consists in is the striving to persist and to flourish in our own being, which means we pay a lot of attention to ourselves. We notice this, and we ask, you know, why am I so deserving of all of this attention? We all have this capacity to step outside of ourselves. I think it's most heightened in adolescence, in early adulthood.

• 14:41Speaker 01

  And this step outside ourselves is what turns us into the normative creatures that we are, that we don't want it to just be this arbitrary thing, I pay so much attention to myself because I am myself. We want to justify it in some way. We want all of that attention we pay to ourselves.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  For us to feel deserving of it, not that other people think we're deserving, that we ourselves think we're deserving of it. And if you don't feel that, you're going to say something like, "I don't matter," meaning I don't objectively matter. And that is the most characteristic thing that people who are suffering from depression say. You know, to feel that you don't matter, that you can't matter, that others matter, but that you don't and you never will, is to say something almost self-loathing. It's almost as if you can't stand to be in the company of yourself anymore, which is, you know, what depression is.

• 15:46Demetri Kofinas?

  I can relate to that. And I think I would actually love to explore that shortly in the conversation when we get into the four different types of mattering archetypes. Because I experienced that certainly in my twenties, and I find that a lot of people have. And I wish that, actually, I had this book. I wish this book was around back then, then I could have read it. I think it would have eased my suffering. So, you know, on that note, there's a word that comes up a lot in the book. And I mean, I would say this insight, or this distinction between objective versus subjective mattering is very important. But I think even more important is the word longing. Why was it important to describe the way in which mattering manifests within us

• 16:29Demetri Kofinas?

  as an instinctual longing to matter? In other words, why is it important to acknowledge that this isn't just a want or a need, but it's a longing?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  A longing. I love that word, longing. And one of the things about it is, you know, it is a long thing. It is, it can never be entirely satisfied. That's the uncertainty that we live with in being creatures who long to matter. We know, in our deepest selves, that we may not, and that we, you know, one of the big themes of the book is the diversity of ways in which people go about trying to appease this, not satisfy it, because we know in our deepest selves, maybe we're getting it wrong.

• 17:20Demetri Kofinas?

  Or we have doubts about whether we matter or not.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  We have doubts. I mean, and, you know, some of the people who perhaps are the most difficult... To live with, or who make the most trouble for others on this planet, are those who can't suffer these doubts, who can't face up to these doubts, who have to feel that this is the way, there is no other way, this is how you matter. And that can be very, very dangerous to other people, actually. But yeah, the truth of the matter is, we don't know. You know, that there is a kind of leap of faith that comes from that we stake our lives, our own individual lives, and the answer that we come up with,

• 18:04Speaker 01

  we're trying to appease, to solve this longing. But it's a longing, meaning we never really know. And if you want proof of it before, you're gonna end up missing out on your life.

• 18:21Demetri Kofinas?

  Do we find that, not to get ahead of ourselves, because some of this is addressed in the book under the different archetypes that we're about to analyze. But do you find that people, or in reflecting on this or thinking about this, do you find that people tend to, that those doubts tend to ease over the course of one's life, but that they're especially intense in childhood and early adolescence? And if so, why?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I think that here again, there's great diversity among us. That's one of the things in talking to people about this, that I've really become impressed with, the diversity among us. So for some people, you know, the doubts remain very present. I think it depends a lot on what I call the mattering project that you've chosen, ways that I can, you know, that I offer to distinguish among us in terms of the projects that we choose. But for some people, those who go into, say, the creative

• 19:26Speaker 01

  Arts that are where you have what I call a mattering adjudicators who decide, you know, I'm myself, for example, much subject to mattering adjudicators in both of my careers as a philosopher and as a writer. There are reviewers, there are editors, there are publishers, critics, readers, who are judging my attempts to do something that matters. And I think when, you know, you are subject to others adjudicating you, it's very easy to feel those doubts, you know, every work is here I am once again

• 20:07Speaker 01

  going out into the world trying to offer something that other people think matters and they may, they may reject it. So, you know, it depends a lot on, I think, one's own psychological temperament and also just how you have decided to try to appease the longing to matter, whether you are going to be subject to a lot of judgments from others. So it differs, it differs.

• 20:32Demetri Kofinas?

  So you're trained in philosophy. We might be venturing into the world of psychology here.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:38Demetri Kofinas?

  I'll do so judiciously, but it seems to me that as human beings, the first real instance in our lives where this instinct manifests itself is in our relationship with our parents. Because if we don't matter to our parents, well, that puts us in existential danger at a very young age. And so I wonder like, what does the research say, to the extent that you're familiar with it, about the role of parenting in sort of impacting the manifestation of the mattering instinct as we grow older? And how we sort of emotionally relate to that instinct? So that if, for example, have parents that show us lots of love and attention,

• 21:19Demetri Kofinas?

  make us feel that we matter versus parents that, you know, abandon us or we never get to meet or whatever, like, are there, are there similarities and differences between, let's say, these two extremes of the distribution?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yes, no, this is our first model of the world is our, is our family. And it has a lasting impact on us, you know, how much we feel like we matter in this world. That first model is the family with these authority figures. These are mattering adjudicators, if ever there are some in our lives. And I have, oh my gosh, I have so many stories about this. But general, a general answer in terms of both the research of psychologists who are testing this and my own informal research, basically four decades, talking to everybody I can talk to about this, and also reading lots of biographies.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  You know, that's also a very good source of life stories. Because I think, you know, it's the life story that's the, that gets at this mattering instinct. But yeah, there are people whose families, in some sense, make them feel like they matter too much, right? And that they are, expect the world to revolve around them. And, and, and they're going to be rudely awakened to the fact that that's not the case. And so I've, I've certainly met people's, people whose lives have been blighted by expecting the world to behave as their overly attentive parents behaved.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  But then, you know, the other people, and there's somebody who I, I highlight the book. I weave a lot of stories into, into the book because I, you know, I think that this is, you know, the most dramatic way of showing how belonging to matter plays out in people's lives. But, you know, I'm thinking particularly of this one person who, who was, is a, an ex-Nazi skinhead, whose, whose parents were abusive. I mean, it was, it was a terrible situation. His mom was a drug addict. He grew up in the mean streets of Philadelphia. His stepfather would, I think had been in the wrestling team in Navy and used this kid as a, as a punching bag.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  And, uh, and, and he would get beaten up in school. He was a white kid in a black school. And he, it was just, it was terrible. And then, you know, he, he just felt completely like he didn't matter. And walking home from school, he would actually try to get hit by a car. I mean, this was someone who hated being himself, self-loathing. And then he ran into these skinheads and they told him, "You matter. Look in the mirror and see what you are. You are a white, male, heterosexual, American. That's all you need to know." And they used the word "maverick," right? And it was, so it's just so interesting. And

• 24:26Speaker 01

  so, you know, he became a significant force in the neo-Nazi movement and did terrible things, violent things. He came out of it, and the way he came out of it is very, very interesting. But yeah, you know, he is like the extreme. But let me just say, you know, it's so hard. This is why being a parent is so hard. It depends on the temperament of your child and all so many things, you know? What works for one child is not going to work for the other. One story I heard was from this mother, a wonderful mother, who had three sons. And her middle son said to her one day, and he was about five or six at the time, said to her, "You don't love me as much as you love my brothers."

• 25:11Speaker 01

  And she said, "Why?" And he said, "When you're at the kitchen sink doing the dishes, if my older brother asks you a question, you turn off the water. If my younger brother asks a question, you turn off the water. But when I ask you a question, you don't turn off the water." So look at that, you know, how, and she said to me, "You know what? He's right." I find him very pedantic. You know, he asks these very pedantic questions that I find very boring. And, and, and you know, but he spotted this. So like, kids are so

• 25:45Demetri Kofinas?

  Perceptive.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  So receptive to the slightest, you know, and to, you know,

• 25:51Demetri Kofinas?

  They're always watching us.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Parents give themselves away. It's tough to be a parent. It's a very tough thing.

• 25:56Demetri Kofinas?

  They're also always watching. They're always watching. They're always so focused on where your attention is.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. So it's a good thing for parents to be aware of. And somehow at times, you know, we just, we betray ourselves. Yeah, I find this kid boring.

• 26:11Demetri Kofinas?

  I mean, I know you know Jonathan Haidt, and I think it was Jonathan, but it could have been so many other people. I mean, I did so many episodes on this back in the early days on, on social media, on the impact of social media and mobile devices and ubiquitous connectivity on ourselves, on our families and on our children. And I learned, again, it may have been with Jonathan, that the reason that many psychologists believe that children, and I think, I assume this is pretty established now, but again, this is, the data is always open to interpretation, that the reason that cell phones generate so much anxiety in young children, isn't necessarily because they're using them, but because they're around their parents while their parents are using them. And so the cell phone is essentially like the smartphone, is this portal that takes attention away from them,

• 26:56Demetri Kofinas?

  their parents' attention away from them, towards the phone. And so I think, a lot has come out in the years since, you know, that, that early period of smartphone usage. And I think, hopefully, a lot of folks have moderated their behavior. But one more question about parenting, before we get into the archetypes, because it raises this distinction between a fulfilling life, or what the Greeks or Aristotle called a demonia, and happiness. And I think it's, is it Dan Gilbert that came up with the term, the parenting paradox?

• 27:24Speaker 01

  I don't think so. I

• 27:28Demetri Kofinas?

  Was it Dan that had that video?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Jennifer.

• 27:30Demetri Kofinas?

  On Ted, on the TED Talks, where he says that parenting, it makes you, it's just about, makes you just about as happy as scrubbing the toilet?

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. He talks about that. Yeah.

• 27:41Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah. So I mean, I think this is really interesting, right? And let me get, tell me if I've got this wrong, in your response. But my understanding is that, essentially, like, when, when you look at the survey data, If you randomly sample a parent in the course of their normal life versus someone who's not a parent, parents are less happy. But if you ask the parent specifically about having a child or having a family, they will tell you that it's like the most fulfilling or one of the most fulfilling things that they ever could have done. And very few presumably say that they regret having had kids. So what is that? I mean, that's the paradox, right? Like the paradox between like, so you're saying that you're really fulfilled. This is what's meaningful. You want to pursue this thing, but pursuing this thing makes you less happy than someone else who doesn't pursue it.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:23Demetri Kofinas?

  How does that make any sense?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. So happiness, you know, is an emotion. And like, like all emotions, it is a response to present circumstances. Our emotions, they're not just gut feelings. Emotions have cognitive content. And so it's giving us feedback about how well our major project of trying to survive and flourish in this world, how well is it going? And happiness is that feeling, that report that, yeah, it's going well. But like all emotions, it's, it's not meant to last. It's not a long lasting thing.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  And, and we know now, you know, we know the neuroscience of happiness, you know, that do you know, there's serotonin and, and you know, that there are certain chemicals that are being emitted in our, in our brains and telling us, yeah, we, you know, we feel good. This is a good situation. And the way that we measure, you know, in these tests, you know, measure happiness, the way he, Dan Gilbert was able to report that most parents, especially of young children, and there are ways that we can actually qualify this. There are more factors that go into this, but. Are not feeling happy a lot during during the day. They're feeling frustration, boredom, anger, worry.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Oh, my God, if you, you know, to be responsible for these very vulnerable little things is there's a lot to worry about, stressed.

• 29:57Demetri Kofinas?

  Exhaustion.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Exhaustion, sleeplessness, you know, which makes everything worse. So, yeah, that sort of moment to moment, how, you know, my circumstance is good right now, yeah, there's not that much, you know.

• 30:14Demetri Kofinas?

  And of course, one of the other interesting things in the context of this discussion is that becoming a parent almost necessarily requires, especially true for anyone that isn't, you know, inordinately wealthy, that you sacrifice some portion of yourself in the course of doing so. It's an ongoing surrender of your own, you know, needs and wants in order to satisfy those of your child.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's very interesting that you you mention, you know, unless you're inordinately wealthy, and that, of course, is one of the qualifying factors here, like how much money do you have for childcare or what country do you live in? What kind of social support do you have? Those a thousand mothers, it was mothers, who were interviewed where this happiness statistic came up that Dan Gilbert refers to were American mothers. And compared to other countries where there is more social support for mothers and fathers, the statistics change. So that's a very important factor also, how much social support is there or how much

• 31:23Speaker 01

  money do you have? But, so, you know, in terms of happiness and the way you test this is you ask your subjects to keep a journal, an emotions journal during the day, writing down, just one more burden for these overworked mothers to have, writing down how often you're feeling happy and what are the circumstances that are making you feel happy? And from, and that's how he's able to get the statistic. Yeah, you feel about as happy as you do, not even when you're buying the things to to clean your toilet, but about as happy as you do as when you're cleaning your toilet, it's about as often as when you're cleaning your toilet. So.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  But that's that moment-to-moment episodic happiness. But there's something else, you know, that you had gotten and you spoke about, you know, the ancient Greek notion of eudaimonia. And that is the sense of flourishing. And that's a long-range view that we take of our lives. And again, that's so tied up with the very capacity, self-reflective capacity that we have that gives us the longing to matter in the first place, that we can sort of step outside of our lives, the moment-to-moment, living the life, and look at the long view and say, you know, how well am I doing here? How satisfied?

• 32:48Speaker 01

  And there's a very interesting test that psychologists have come up with to test this, this notion of flourishing, of well-being. And it's called the Cantrell test. And so it's quite abstract. So it's imagine a ladder with 10 steps and imagine different ways that your life could go. And compare this, different ways that your life can go, to your actual life. And then tell me, what step are you? How much better can you imagine your life? Can you imagine it? Are you at a 10? That is, you are living your dream life. You can't imagine it going any better. Or one, you know, almost anything would be better.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  You know, this is the, my life is, it's bad. It's just, nothing makes me feel good about myself. This would be somebody who's really in depression. And what they find is you can be tolerating a tremendous amount of unhappiness in terms of your episodic journal, emotions journal, and still feel that your life is going pretty damn well. And that's what they find with parents, right? So that's a way of resolving this paradox. It's two different things that we're assessing when parents who are, you know, who are day-to-day not terribly happy, filled with stress and sleeplessness, boredom, frustration, anger.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  And guilt and guilt over all of those negative emotions because you feel guilty about it and yet are saying, you know, this is no, I would not trade this life for a life without my kids.

• 34:27Demetri Kofinas?

  So this is a distinction that I'd like listeners to really keep top of mind. There's distinction between a happy life versus or a life filled with happy moments and a life that feels fulfilling or meaningful at the end of it. And actually, this reminds me of part of the discussion you and I had seven or eight years ago, however long it was, where we talked about Achilles and the Song of Achilles, which was the Iliad. And you mentioned that he had spoken to his mortal mother because of course he was demigod. He was the child of a god and of a mortal woman and his mother told him that he could either have a long and ordinary life or a short and extraordinary one. And he preferred the short and extraordinary one.

• 35:12Demetri Kofinas?

  And I think that this is a very common, common impulse and certainly among heroic strivers who are the first of the four archetypes that you talk about. So let's go there. You have this thing you describe as the mattering map and there's a graphic in the book which actually lays it out. Each, each of these four archetypes is represented as a continent with, within the sea of longing. There goes longing again. The first one was the heroic striver. I felt, I mean, this was the one that I felt captured so much of how I've sort of longed to be meaningful in my own life. But, you know, there are parts of me that I find in some of these other ones as well. And I think that's probably true for, for everyone. What are these four archetypes? And let's start with the heroic striver one first.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we have this longing and we try to appease it. And the heroic strivers are, are people who have in mind certain standards of excellence and they can be intellectual, artistic, athletic, or ethical, or some combination of these. It's not, not an either or. And they need to feel that they have.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Met these standards or are on their way to meeting these standards. It's a long term thing. All of these ways of trying to appease our longing to matter are long term. But that's what it takes for them to feel like they're flourishing, that they are making progress in meeting these standards of excellence. And it's really, there's a, some personality psychology theories that I use to try to explain these different ways, these different continents of the mattery map. And so, you know, so there's some real psychology behind this. But I have to say, in my decades of talking to people,

• 37:10Speaker 01

  I've never found anybody who doesn't fit somewhere into these four strategies. And in academia, or also in the world of writers, most of them are heroic strivers. You know, that they have some standards of excellence for themselves that they have to feel that they are making progress towards. And, and I tell stories of, you know, some very, very famous writers who got all of the applause, all of the prizes you can possibly want, and yet don't feel like they have met their own standards of excellence. And John Barryman is somebody, the poet John Barryman,

• 37:54Speaker 01

  a very, very important poet of the 20th century, ends up killing himself, right? And so, he was on the cover of Life magazine. You know, he's got every, every prize you could possibly want, produced, was very, very influential as a confessional poet. And yet, right? So that this is, you know, heroic strivers are not after fame. They're after their own internal standards of excellence. It's very hard to be a heroic striver. I also tell the story of someone who I knew very well. He's Passed away. He was also a poet and he was a friend and nobody knew he was a poet. He had gotten so many downward thumbs from the Mattering adjudicators.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  He couldn't get his stuff published that he just decided to give it up. And none of us knew that he was constantly working and perfecting his poetry and was in fact becoming an ever more superb artist until he died. And his partner, my good friend, Megan Marshall, a wonderful writer, and her on her own account, discovered these poems and all of the work that had gone into them, which really to me brought home it's to feel like he was making progress in his life. Didn't didn't depend on other people approving of him. It was an internal thing, an extreme example of a heroic striver.

• 39:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, there's a beautiful line in the book where he says that, "Megan, maybe the thing I'm best at is loving you."

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:31Demetri Kofinas?

  When she, I don't remember how it came up.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:33Demetri Kofinas?

  Essentially that that was enough for him at that time.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  That was enough for him, yeah.

• 39:36Demetri Kofinas?

  So it's like she became his Mattering project.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 39:40Demetri Kofinas?

  Which can be dangerous sometimes, depending on who you're who you're attached to.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Exactly, you know, and she flourished under, you know, they they found each other quite, you know, well, they had been lovers in college and then they went off, married other people. And then she they reconnected and and she her career, her writing career. She's a biographer. She's won a Pulitzer Prize. And she really flourished under his attention. And I thought, oh, this is his Mattering project. Megan Marshall's career is his Mattering project. But no, it wasn't. His own poetry was really, it was both. It was both.

• 40:17Demetri Kofinas?

  So let's, I want to talk about one more thing with respect to heroic strivers before we move to the second hour. And it it'll also give us an opportunity to discuss the appearance of depression. When sort of one's Mattering project isn't going well or we aren't where we feel like we should be in life, which is something I can really relate to, as I said.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Well, me too. Me too.

• 40:39Demetri Kofinas?

  And something else also, just to just to mention now, maybe we'll have a chance to explore, or you can address it in the course of your answer, which is that. What also feels to be true is that when we have a mattering project, let's say we're a heroic striver and we sort of build our lives around becoming something, someone, or achieving something, and then we get it.

• 41:00Demetri Kofinas?

  Sometimes that creates depression because now you're left without a sense of purpose. So that's something also I just wanted to highlight it as we proceed through this part of the discussion. But I really enjoyed the section in the book where you have this dichotomy of William James, the famous sort of father of psychology, and his sister Alice James, both of whom you, interestingly enough, identify as heroic strivers. Now, it's obvious in the case of William why he would qualify, but it's not so obvious in the case of Alice, at least initially. Can you explore this example for our audience, why you chose it, what William James, his personality type, his life history can tell us about

• 41:42Demetri Kofinas?

  what this archetype typically looks like, and then the interesting example of Alice and her depression?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's almost like, almost like a controlled experiment comparing those, those two. And it was an extraordinary family. It also included the novelist Henry James, the great novelist, and William James. I mean, I've always been terrifically interested in him because he's both a philosopher and a psychologist.

• 42:09Demetri Kofinas?

  Back when that distinction wouldn't have needed to be made.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, very, very important psychologist. And I think, I think his, his contributions have been overpowered by Freud's example. And they have a very different attitude. Freud kind of medicalized psychology, and James resisted that. He saw it in sort of existential terms, very much the kind of terms that I, that I present here. But in any case, he was, as you can already, I mean, he was a, he- An incredibly gifted person. He was not only a thinker, great thinker, an original startlingly original thinker, terrific writer.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  His Principles of Psychology read like a novel at times. But he, as well as the varieties of religious experience. But he was an artist. He was a, that was his first thought was to be an artist. He was a very, very good painter or a sketcher. So he had multiple talents. And he also suffered from a debilitating clinical depression in his early twenties. And that is really interesting. He, you know, describes, you know, he describes in some letter apologizing to a friend for not answering the letter, but he has not been able to get up the energy for months

• 43:39Speaker 01

  at a time to even answer a letter. You know, he lay prone in his bed contemplating suicide. He had a wonderfully supportive family. In fact, he got a tremendous amount of attention from his very, very interesting father. He was the eldest born, William James. And yet here he was not able to get on with his life. And until he decided, he said, my first act of free will will be to believe in free will, that he was going to just pull himself up by sheer will.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  He was going to decide that life was worth living and to garner as much energy as he could in putting it to some purpose, you know. And so he already had, by the way, did he at this point? I think, yes, he already had a medical degree, but he didn't want to practice medicine. I mean, he was just this multi-talent. What he needed to decide on was what I call a mattering project. You know, that this was going to be the thing that he would heroically try to appease his own need to matter by pursuing. I mean, you can't be all over the place. You've got to have a purpose. You've got to have a goal.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  And that's what he decided to do, you know, when he, he went into studying psychology. That's where he. And philosophy. Yeah, he was first, first actually a philosopher.

• 45:12Demetri Kofinas?

  Is that especially difficult? In other words, being a heroic striver, is that especially difficult when you don't have a set path? When you're, I don't know, an entrepreneur or someone at the frontier of a new field of study that doesn't exist?

• 45:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:28Demetri Kofinas?

  Is there something especially painful about for those people? Again, I'm asking you to the, I mean, subjectively, we can answer this question anecdotally, but I'm curious to what the, where you've actually looked into it objectively, which is like, is there something uniquely difficult about going through that path?

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:45Demetri Kofinas?

  That sort of like not well-defined path that you have to create for yourself because it's so full of doubt, because there's so many instances in which you can say, you know, what am I doing? I'm a total failure. I'm a total disappointment to my parents. I went to medical school and look at me here. I don't even want to practice medicine. I'm nothing. I'm garbage. I shouldn't live. I should be dead. Maybe I should kill myself.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. So, you know, that's why I say when you, you know, that it varies so much individually. And one of the big variables is what your mattering project is. And if it's something really new and or something that you weren't trained for, something that goes against what your parents wanted from you. And his father very much wanted him to be a man of science. That was the thing that his father, who was a theologian and had this theory, he was a Swedenborgian, if you know what that is. And, you know, his father was also, the whole family, their whole mattering instincts were, were so intense, heroically.

• 46:49Demetri Kofinas?

  And he had put so much, he must have put so much pressure on his son to effectively be the conduit through which he could actualize his own mattering project.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. And there were, let me see, one, two, three, four, five. Children and the two youngest sons, the father put all the sort of mattering attention on his two eldest sons, not on the two youngest sons or on the daughter. And they suffered in their own way. You know, that's one of the, as that mother who, with the kitchen faucet attested, you know, that the whole plan in the family, the whole model of the family, are your siblings getting much more attention than you are, is feedback about how much you matter in the world. So, but in any case, yeah, to go back to your, it depends so much on the mattering project. And here was James setting out on something

• 47:40Speaker 01

  that he didn't even feel that he was qualified to do. And it was a real problem to him where to put his enormous energy and his enormous talent, you know.

• 47:50Demetri Kofinas?

  And it can't just go anywhere. It's got to go somewhere that feels right.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:54Demetri Kofinas?

  It's got to be aligned with some inner sense of longing, of meaning.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 47:58Demetri Kofinas?

  Of who I am. It's like the process, it's really the process of self-actualization. And for some, that is just much more painful than for others, especially if you're forging your own path.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. But he did, you know, he did. He was always very, very sensitive to melancholy, you know, to depression and melancholy of others. And it's interesting, there's somewhere in his journal where he writes, he says melancholy gives the truer values. It's interesting. I mean, if you have to sort of battle against this kind of temperament that is filled with the doubts about your objective mattering, in some sense, that keeps you very alive to the leap of faith that we all have to make in getting on with our lives. So, you know, it's not surprising that he was also a very good ethical

• 48:48Speaker 01

  thinker. But I think maybe we can move on to his sister now because she had so much of the same temperament. But because she was a Victorian woman, I mean, they were, you know, they were mainly figures of the 19th century. James died in 1910. She had no outlet. She had no outlet for her intelligence, her talent, her heroic longing.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  And she was an invalid for her whole life. You know, she spent a great deal of time being hysterical. You know, the doctors couldn't really help her.

• 49:28Demetri Kofinas?

  She was a, but to be clear, she was an invalid because of certain psychological

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Psychological.

• 49:32Demetri Kofinas?

  illnesses she manifested.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But she was really incapacitated and she, it was only after she died and her journal was discovered that one could see the enormous talent she had, this heightened talent for, of consciousness that both William James and Henry James, you know, the great novelists had, you know, all of these shades of, of being able to describe with an intense ability of expression, the shades of subjectivity, the differences in what we feel that both William and Henry used to great purpose.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  William in his psychological pursuits and Henry in his novelists, in his artistic pursuits. And she had nothing. She had nothing. And so it was just a brief period in her life when she was involved with a program for women's self-education, a reading program for women's self-education, where she cursed her hysterical symptoms disappeared. And so, anyway, it's just a sort of interesting, almost, as I say, it's almost a controlled experiment, two people with very similar temperaments who needed mattering projects that would make them feel like they mattered in the world. When William James died, the tributes that came in, I have an entire book of tributes

• 50:59Speaker 01

  to William James on the occasion of his death. Whereas, you know, Alice, James died and nobody knew about it except the people who were in her lives, in her life, rather.

• 51:10Demetri Kofinas?

  So I have a few more questions to explore on the subject of depression and I want to use Alice as a jumping off point. I'm going to hold that part of the conversation for the second hour, Rebecca.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 51:20Demetri Kofinas?

  Where we're going to also explore the other three archetypes, which are socializers, competitors, and transcenders. Like a classic example of an extreme version of the competitor archetype is Michael Jordan, who, if you ever watched his speech that he delivered when he was being inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame, he describes his deep need to compete as the driving force in his life. And transcenders, I think of someone like Ram Dass. Socializers, it's hard to tell. Is it a Kardashian-type person? I can't quite tell. I mean, you actually make a point in the book to distinguish between intimacy versus not intimacy socializers. Yes. So there are different flavors of this.

• 52:04Demetri Kofinas?

  But we're going to get into all of that in the second hour with Rebecca. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener-supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Rebecca, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers. All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Rebecca, stick around. We're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the premium feed.

• 52:46Demetri Kofinas?

  If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at @Kofinas and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.