The Mattering Instinct (with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)

Jan 12 2026

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.

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Time	Podcast Episode Highlights
0:37	Intro. [Recording date: December 3, 2025.] Russ Roberts: Today is December 3rd, 2025, and my guest is philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. 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 EconTalk. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: It's a pleasure to be here.
1:01	Russ Roberts: So, what is the mattering instinct? What does that mean? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: 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, that's what I'm examining here by the mattering instinct. I try 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 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 was taught the physics of it, but I always thought there's something revelatory about what it is to be a human being that somehow was speaking out of the physics to me. This was as an undergraduate. And, yeah, it's been something I've thought about for a very, very long time. And, slowly, a kind of theory grew up about us--our species--and all centering on this longing to matter.
3:23	Russ Roberts: And I, also--I haven't written a book about it, but I've become increasingly intrigued by this aspect of our humanity over the years. Certainly, it's something that economists neglect. In particular, I like the example of: If you give me $100,000 a year--for whatever mode of 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 wellbeing that economists use, you'd be indifferent. Because, in both cases, you'd 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 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 violence, where it's always a lonely man with a gun. It's almost always a man. It's almost always somebody who is lonely--meaning they don't have the human connections that sustain a life that you talk--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. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Good. Yeah. And, that's an important page, it seems to me. You know, I've never yet spoken to a person who I couldn't reach by talking this language of mattering. And, in the book, 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. He was a felon, I think at the age of 17--but very--but sworn to hate people exactly like me. And, I was brought up on these stories because my family in Europe was decimated by the Nazis. We reached such a deep understanding of each other. When I was able to reach down into that longing-to-matter that was going so unappeased--a terrible family life and he grew up in the mean streets of Philly. It was all gangs and he just--beaten up by his stepfather, his mother a drug addict. Terrible, terrible situation. And then, he happened to run into some 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.' 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 life buoys thrown out to him. And he grabbed it with all the force of his longing to matter. And, to get him to tell his story in the language of mattering, you know, it 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, especially-- Russ Roberts: Yeah, I don't like them either. Yeah-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: I don't like them. My training in philosophy is as an analytic philosopher. We take little small problems and try to analyze them and none of this grand metaphysical--you know, the 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 just the being driven apart, I think so much of our longing to matter: that 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 because I think it's helpful. I can't read the newspaper without seeing this framework and filtering what I'm reading through this framework. Russ Roberts: And I think it's a very useful--you can debate how central it is to all of human existence. 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 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-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. [?Not a lot?]-- Russ Roberts: but we can put that down.
9:58	Russ Roberts: But, I want you to start--and we'll come back 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 has physics accepted? I mean: Okay, people do care about whether they matter or not. What does physics have to do with this? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. I have to say that, again, 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 has been marinating in Spinoza for many, many years at this point. And, this is, in some sense, I think of 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 immensely useful marrying of empirical observation, prediction, and theory, often put forth in the language of mathematics. So, sort of feeling its way towards science. But, he sort of began with what he thought was the fundamental, which was his notion of God, and he ends up with ethics. His magnum opus is called The Ethics. And, when I teach it to students, it takes a long time to get to the ethics. It starts with what he thinks of as the groundwork, which is his very abstract notion of God. Which is very different from the concept of God in the conventional religion, so much so that he was not only exiled or put into what's called haram in Hebrew--he was a Jewish philosopher, that is, he wasn't a Jewish philosopher-- Russ Roberts: He was excommunicated--the Jewish equivalent of excommunication. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Exactly. Exactly. And damned by greater Christian Europe. But, in any case, he began with that manifesto. I think we're at the stage where we can begin with physics and with what is called the supreme law of physics, the one law of physics that physicists have promised us--starting with Einstein and going forth, talking all the big physicists--will never be overthrown. All physical laws are subject to revision. World 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, it 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. 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 law of physics: that entropy tends to increase, and the entropy of the universe is increasing. And, you know, the story of our universe has a kind of sad ending: that it will end in what is called thermal equilibrium. There will be no change that can possibly happen. It will be cold. It will be still. It will be dead. Matter will have dissipated, everything--the stars, everything--will have dissipated. And, that's the story of all physical systems. And we are one: We are a physical system. The laws of biology are the answer. Biologies--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. We know, from the smallest bacteria to us--to these complicated physical systems that we are--we are not closed systems. We require a lot of input of energy--sunlight, food--that is put to work to resist. Vive la résistance. That's the law of life, the resistance 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 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. Something in neuroscience called the default mode network--you know, 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 pay a tremendous--we matter to ourselves. That's the short--and because the way entropy plays out in the biological system, and why attention evolved in the first place? Yeah, we are very fixated on ourselves.
17:35	Russ Roberts: And I like to say we're self-interested, not selfish. You 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 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 I think gets--you say it a number of times, and it goes like this. Quote: 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. Meaning that we have this self-interestedness, driven by our desire to resist--not driven: embodied, 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 does that add? 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 matters.' 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. So, talk about that. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Okay. And, yeah, and that is one of the big moves I make in the book in trying to get, eventually, to ethics. And that, I think that this capacity we have for self-reflection--very complicated operation function that our big brains come equipped with--it is a capacity to sometimes[?] to step outside ourselves and interrogate ourselves the way we do others. You know: Why are you like this? Why are you doing this? What's making you go? What's making you click? We pay attention to ourselves. And, if we were--I define, by the way, this word 'mattering' to mean deserving of attention. So that word, '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 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 it just builds 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 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 isn't true. And that is what causes the kind of unease. Which I think, you know, comes on us in late childhood, in adolescents and young adulthood. And, in some of us, we erupt 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. And, what they say--and oh, some of them are the most talented, brilliant people I know, with good family lives, with loving friends--'I don't matter.' And, there is such self-loathing in this. They can barely tolerate their own presence. We are constantly ourselves, 24/7. And, it is always the sense of this undeservingness of their own self-fixation. 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, 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 this other unappeased cornerstone of our humanness, the mattering instinct, the longing to matter, to do something to justify. So, and that's so interesting to me because this means that we are, in some sense, what a philosopher called normative, that we are thinking about justification-- Russ Roberts: Sure-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: about values. This is what makes us value-seeking creatures. Russ Roberts: So, I think about--I don't think-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: So, that's my move. Yes. Russ Roberts: Yeah. I don't think you quote him, but on this, 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 justify one's own existence. He certainly put many dents in the universe. So, he definitely mattered; still does. But, I just want to put a little footnote here-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Oh, gee-- [?] I'm sorry. I just was going to say, I wish I had that quote in the book. Okay. If it goes into another-- Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's a good quote. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: another edition. Thank you for your quote. Russ Roberts: But I just want to put a footnote here about consciousness. And, 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 going to do a good job later? Is this presentation going to go well? Am I going to get the raise? Am I going to get the person I long 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 don't worry about these things; but we do. And your point, which I think is easily overlooked, it's not just: We're different from animals. We can imagine--say, a dog--we can imagine moving to Brazil or Israel or wherever. And, yet I think we underestimate, because--it's maybe for a bunch of reasons--but we underestimate how dominant and constant that mode is for consciousness. And, it doesn't exactly make sense. I talk about this a lot in the program. It's just that: Why can't we just have a good time? Animals--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. Well, they have a little bit sometimes; we can see, 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.
27:28	Russ Roberts: Before we go any further, talk about the different kinds of ways that people matter. Because one of the other interesting parts of the book is that you create what 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, in the broadest sense, if you think about, 'Well, people pay attention to me, so I matter,' but you go way beyond that. So, talk about the four different kinds of ways that people find mattering appeased. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Gosh. The first book I ever wrote, which happened to have been a novel and what's called The Mind-Body Problem, a very philosophical novel. And, I had my main character come up with this notion of the Mattering Map. That's been simmering for a very, very long--that book was published in 1983. So, this has been simmering to me for such a long time. So, it has many, many different domains. I mean, over my long, long life, I've met people who--I've met pickup artists who, this is their mattering project, to seduce and abandon as many women as they possibly can. And, as I said, this ex-neo-Nazi. And religious people of many, many sorts--conventional religion, the spiritual but not-religious people. You know, just so many different 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 gets you out of bed in the morning? What is it that makes you want to pursue your life, to just gives you the impetus, the energy to get on with it? So, many different ways of mattering. I go into some of the kinkier ways or more eccentric ways in the book. But beneath it all, I've found--and this is open to empirical falsification--but so far what I found is there are just generally four different strategies. I'll just first name the ones. The ones that I call transcendent mattering, and social mattering, competitive mattering, and heroic striving mattering-- Russ Roberts: So, describe each of those-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: And always, I find--describe each of those. Transcendent is mattering to the universe at large--it's got a cosmic mattering--to the universe, because transcenders believe that the universe has a kind of personal attitude towards oneself. This is religious or spiritual. It's this kind of attitude. It is the view that transcenders believe that each of us was created purposefully--intentionally--by whether they call it God or something vaguer, something like that, something God-like, who created the universe, the laws of nature, and ultimately us for a reason. This delivers the highest form of a sense of mattering: that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity; that that which created the universe has a purpose for you. And I don't think--I should say that I started out as a very religious person. 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. I had to think about: Well, what do I do now? You know? And the script was laid out for me, especially as a female. It was laid out for me what I was meant to do in this world. And, now, it was my responsibility. Which was thrilling and terrifying. You know. And so, okay, those were transcenders. And, I think that's fascinating. 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 next to socializers. And, from my conversation, socializers think that what they feel 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: dominating, power over, and all of this. And, fame--fame, to matter to many strangers--is such an important motive in our time because it's become ever easier to become famous. You can bob your head and lip sync on YouTube and have a million followers. And so, these are the socializers. And, from my conversations, it seems to me--this has not been empirically 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 healthy ways and unhealthy ways, I would say. And that's true for all of these strategies. And then, there are heroic strivers. And, they are not striving to matter to others, neither to other mortals nor to a transcendent presence in the universe. They are trying to realize certain standards of 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 a man--he's no longer with us--Baba Amte, 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. 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. Russ Roberts: He gave himself. He gave himself-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yes. So, these are heroic strivers. Russ Roberts: Yeah, I was going to 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, 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.
36:21	Russ Roberts: And then, the last group is competitive matterers. So, who are they? Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: A lot of people, sometimes people will become very abashed when I say, 'Do you matter? Tell me how you think that you matter.' And, 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 that others matter, they're taking something away from me, that it's always a striving to matter more. And, some of the most prominent people--and, again, as I read the newspaper 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 are striving to matter more, to always be the person in the room who matters the most. And, I've met them in my gym and we meet them on the world stage. We really see them on the world stage. So, those are the four types. What is true? I was born into a family that wanted me to be a transcender. I couldn't be, for whatever reasons--the way my mind works, whatever it was. Everybody else, all my siblings, they are transcenders. I am not. Why? I don't know. I am a heroic striver. Yes. My mattering project is--well, you're hearing it. This is my mattering project: Do you understand mattering? And, yeah, it's a cognitive, it's an intellectual thing, or an artistic thing, and sometimes an ethical thing, but definitely a heroic striver. It's temperament, it's culture, it's personal experience. It's--where we end up on the mattering map, what continent we end up on, this is something I would love to have people who are better equipped to understand these things explain. I found some explanations in psychology or personality that I go into in the book, but in any case, I think that's where we are. This is a description of everybody I've met so far. Russ Roberts: So, on the competitive thing-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: They are somewhere or other. Russ Roberts: On the competitive thing-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah, sorry. Russ Roberts: On the competitive thing, I think about Gore Vidal, who said, 'Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.' You encourage us to do the opposite, which I loved. And, I think the ability--you call it kvelling, 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, and that's what Vidal is semi-ironically referencing, although I think he probably meant it. I suspect he may have meant it, although it's kind of a joke; but there are no jokes. But, I do think this idea of kvelling 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 performance--an extraordinary musician, a great athlete--and, you know, athletes get--intellectuals often look down on athletes as just physical. But, I think many of us kvell for others and we root for athletes to succeed and win their nth championship cite[?]. 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 experiencing vicariously. And we want them to--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 for them to even further embellish their reputation and their success and to take our own pleasure in it, even though we don't really have anything to do with it. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's true, and it's beautiful. It really is. In some sense, I think they're--I don't know--they're redeeming us there 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. Russ Roberts: Oh, for sure. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: And I feel--yeah, if we've had more of a sense that there's enough mattering to go around and that it needed be thought of in zero-sum terms, 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 'give me, give me, give me; they're taking, they're taking, they're taking.' It's a little bit like, you know, those of us who have raised children. The most important thing you can possibly do if you take on that project, if you have more than one: it is terribly important that each child feels there is enough mattering to go around. You know. And, if not, you know, there is jealousy of a fierce sort. You can see it with such young children. 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. 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. Russ Roberts: Very important. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. Just one story that pops in there--is that okay? Russ Roberts: Yeah, sure. Go ahead. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: This one story is a mother who--a mother had told me, once. I mean, she had three young sons at the time. And she told me that her middle son--who I thought was an amazing child--had said to her, 'You don't love me as much as you love my two brothers.' And, she said, 'Why do you say this?' And, he said, 'Well, 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 was true and he had a particular kind of mind that she just--she thought he was like a little pedant. He was constantly parsing words and saying what she described to me as things that are absolutely obvious, like a double negative means a positive, this sort of--the kid grew up to be a professor of mathematical logic. So, that was the kind of questions he was asking--the observations he was making--that she found quite boring, but that he noticed that tiny-- Russ Roberts: It's incredible. Yeah-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: little piece of evidence that she didn't turn off the water and said, 'You don't love me as much.' So, it's very, very important for parents to be aware that they are calculating, they are taking this in because--yeah, what matters more than their own mattering to their mother? Nothing matters more. Russ Roberts: I just want to mention--I've mentioned it a number of times on the program; I think it came up recently--the video--which is a little bit hard to find these days, but I've seen it, many people have seen it--of Andrew Wiles, the mathematician, talking about 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 heroic striver. He wants to prove this theorem; and he almost does. Well, he thinks he does. The world thinks he does, even worse. He gets all this honor, all this glory--which is also a competitor part--and he gets some socializing pleasantness, too. And there's something transcendent, because it's math and it's ethereal. 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 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.
47:22	Russ Roberts: But I want to talk about the urge to--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--well, I'll take the fly fisherman, the person who collects exotic feathers to the point of theft. It's a great story. You can read about it 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--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--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. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Not entirely. And, I say that following the footsteps of Spinoza, where he started with his Deus sive Natura--his weird view of God, which is one with nature and ends with ethics. I start with physics and want to end with ethics. That is: Not all ways of pursuing our mattering are okay, I think. But, a whole bunch of them are, right? So, first of all, did you call it the urge to proselytize? Russ Roberts: Mm-hmm. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yes, right? And, I call it the urge to universalize: that, whatever way I am finding to--yes, everybody should be a philosopher. God help us-- Russ Roberts: 'The unexamined life'-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: that to be the case, but-- Russ Roberts: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' [Socrates--Econlib Ed.] Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: It's not. Yeah-- Russ Roberts: Pretty harsh-- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Exactly. Yes. And, I have a bunch of quotes. Pretty harsh, yes. And, it was said by Socrates after he was voted guilty of corrupting the youth in ancient Athens, of all places. That became a crime. 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 more people voted for his death than had voted for his guilt. Kind of irrational there. But, that's what it does. I mean, that's such a good example--Socrates' trial there, and what Plato says he said, and how that so infuriated his audience that more voted for his death. But, religious people--transcenders--are often accused of being the most intolerant: if you're, 'It's my God or it's hell. You follow my way or it's hell,' for those religions that believe in hell. But, I think actually this universalizing, this urge to proselytize, to universalize, to say, 'It's my way or you're wasting your life,' takes place all over the mattering map. 'The unexamined life is not worth living,' or lots and lots of quotes. I have a quote from former editor Diana Vreeland, I think her name is, of Vogue magazine, saying, 'You have to be well-dressed. That's what gets you down the steps in the morning. Without it, you're nothing. Nothing.' 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 not have shown up for your existence at all, for all the mattering that you have.' What is that urge? And, it is the urge to try to found our life or mattering on something objective--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 some of our impulses to proselytize our way. And, I've heard physicists saying, 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. So, there is this contingency of what our talents are, our passions, our culture, that go into our identity. And, the truth of the matter is, I think that we have to 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. And, in fact, our longing to matter is itself indication of something that matters. It's something estimable in us. I admire our species for taking on this burden of justifying, each of us justifying ourselves, ourselves. Russ Roberts: It's very poignant. And in that sense, there's something estimable about our desire to resist entropy, death. And there's something heroic about it, even for the non-heroic strivers, is the way 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. Take your pick. It's not that urge to make a difference, which we inculcate in our children sometimes as a desirable thing. To make the world a better place, say, can have very dark parts to that journey.
56:18	Russ Roberts: I want to close with a, I think, an empirical statement that 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, almost everyone in the United States would be way, way, way to the right-hand tail as material wellbeing. 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, and what you call, and philosophers call, flourishing. And if most people are not flourishing, it doesn't matter what version of the iPhone they have or whether they never get cold or hungry. And our biggest problem is obesity, not poverty, not starvation, in the United States. Well, we have a different problem, and people--it's kind of obvious. 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. 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 gives them a sense of importance. 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--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 going to go well. That's my take. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I just say also: It's not going well. I'm not just saying it's not going to go well. It's not going well. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. Longing, on a large scale--unappeased longing on a large scale--is what makes history. And, it's often the kinds of events that get written in the history books. They're not good events. They are events that can lead to great destruction--towards all sorts of terrible constraints on freedom, all sorts of the events that make for interesting history books. Yes. And longing, there is no longing of which this is truer than the longing to matter. This is the essence. What a human being is, a creature of matter, longs to matter. I think I'm so obsessed with both of those notions--the noun 'matter' and the verb that we derive in English from it, to matter, both of which come from the Latin word mater--mother. Which is interesting, actually. But, 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 it 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 our lives. These, paradigmatically--our family, our friends, perhaps our colleagues--but these are people. And, you may not love them, but they are in your life. And, we all need this at the pain of tremendous loneliness, which is anti-flourishing. You cannot 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--for all of us, there's the mattering instinct. And, it may take the form of being a socializer. We may be transcenders. We may be competitors. 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--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, at 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, 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 life, 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. That--not if you understand human nature. As you've reminded me, Adam Smith understood human nature. Not--to understand human nature is to understand the desperation and the urgency of ministering to every individual's longing to matter. Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Rebecca Goldstein. Her book is The Mattering Instinct. Rebecca, thanks for being part of EconTalk. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Oh, thank you so much. What a pleasure it was to speak with you.

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Podcast Episode Highlights

0:37

Intro. [Recording date: December 3, 2025.]

Russ Roberts: Today is December 3rd, 2025, and my guest is philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. 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 EconTalk.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: It's a pleasure to be here.

1:01

Russ Roberts: So, what is the mattering instinct? What does that mean?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: 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, that's what I'm examining here by the mattering instinct. I try 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 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 was taught the physics of it, but I always thought there's something revelatory about what it is to be a human being that somehow was speaking out of the physics to me. This was as an undergraduate. And, yeah, it's been something I've thought about for a very, very long time. And, slowly, a kind of theory grew up about us--our species--and all centering on this longing to matter.

3:23

Russ Roberts: And I, also--I haven't written a book about it, but I've become increasingly intrigued by this aspect of our humanity over the years. Certainly, it's something that economists neglect. In particular, I like the example of: If you give me $100,000 a year--for whatever mode of 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 wellbeing that economists use, you'd be indifferent. Because, in both cases, you'd 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 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 violence, where it's always a lonely man with a gun. It's almost always a man. It's almost always somebody who is lonely--meaning they don't have the human connections that sustain a life that you talk--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.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Good. Yeah. And, that's an important page, it seems to me. You know, I've never yet spoken to a person who I couldn't reach by talking this language of mattering.

And, in the book, 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. He was a felon, I think at the age of 17--but very--but sworn to hate people exactly like me. And, I was brought up on these stories because my family in Europe was decimated by the Nazis.

We reached such a deep understanding of each other. When I was able to reach down into that longing-to-matter that was going so unappeased--a terrible family life and he grew up in the mean streets of Philly. It was all gangs and he just--beaten up by his stepfather, his mother a drug addict. Terrible, terrible situation. And then, he happened to run into some 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.' 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 life buoys thrown out to him. And he grabbed it with all the force of his longing to matter.

And, to get him to tell his story in the language of mattering, you know, it 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, especially--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I don't like them either. Yeah--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: I don't like them. My training in philosophy is as an analytic philosopher. We take little small problems and try to analyze them and none of this grand metaphysical--you know, the 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 just the being driven apart, I think so much of our longing to matter: that 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 because I think it's helpful. I can't read the newspaper without seeing this framework and filtering what I'm reading through this framework.

Russ Roberts: And I think it's a very useful--you can debate how central it is to all of human existence. 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 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--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. [?Not a lot?]--

Russ Roberts: but we can put that down.

9:58

Russ Roberts: But, I want you to start--and we'll come back 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 has physics accepted? I mean: Okay, people do care about whether they matter or not. What does physics have to do with this?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. I have to say that, again, 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 has been marinating in Spinoza for many, many years at this point. And, this is, in some sense, I think of 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 immensely useful marrying of empirical observation, prediction, and theory, often put forth in the language of mathematics. So, sort of feeling its way towards science. But, he sort of began with what he thought was the fundamental, which was his notion of God, and he ends up with ethics.

His magnum opus is called The Ethics. And, when I teach it to students, it takes a long time to get to the ethics. It starts with what he thinks of as the groundwork, which is his very abstract notion of God. Which is very different from the concept of God in the conventional religion, so much so that he was not only exiled or put into what's called haram in Hebrew--he was a Jewish philosopher, that is, he wasn't a Jewish philosopher--

Russ Roberts: He was excommunicated--the Jewish equivalent of excommunication.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Exactly. Exactly. And damned by greater Christian Europe.

But, in any case, he began with that manifesto. I think we're at the stage where we can begin with physics and with what is called the supreme law of physics, the one law of physics that physicists have promised us--starting with Einstein and going forth, talking all the big physicists--will never be overthrown. All physical laws are subject to revision. World 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, it 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. 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 law of physics: that entropy tends to increase, and the entropy of the universe is increasing. And, you know, the story of our universe has a kind of sad ending: that it will end in what is called thermal equilibrium. There will be no change that can possibly happen. It will be cold. It will be still. It will be dead. Matter will have dissipated, everything--the stars, everything--will have dissipated.

And, that's the story of all physical systems. And we are one: We are a physical system.

The laws of biology are the answer. Biologies--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. We know, from the smallest bacteria to us--to these complicated physical systems that we are--we are not closed systems. We require a lot of input of energy--sunlight, food--that is put to work to resist. Vive la résistance. That's the law of life, the resistance 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 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.

Something in neuroscience called the default mode network--you know, 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 pay a tremendous--we matter to ourselves. That's the short--and because the way entropy plays out in the biological system, and why attention evolved in the first place? Yeah, we are very fixated on ourselves.

17:35

Russ Roberts: And I like to say we're self-interested, not selfish. You 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 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 I think gets--you say it a number of times, and it goes like this. Quote:

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. Meaning that we have this self-interestedness, driven by our desire to resist--not driven: embodied, 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 does that add? 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 matters.' 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. So, talk about that.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Okay. And, yeah, and that is one of the big moves I make in the book in trying to get, eventually, to ethics. And that, I think that this capacity we have for self-reflection--very complicated operation function that our big brains come equipped with--it is a capacity to sometimes[?] to step outside ourselves and interrogate ourselves the way we do others. You know: Why are you like this? Why are you doing this? What's making you go? What's making you click? We pay attention to ourselves.

And, if we were--I define, by the way, this word 'mattering' to mean deserving of attention. So that word, '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 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 it just builds 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 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 isn't true. And that is what causes the kind of unease. Which I think, you know, comes on us in late childhood, in adolescents and young adulthood.

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

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, 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 this other unappeased cornerstone of our humanness, the mattering instinct, the longing to matter, to do something to justify. So, and that's so interesting to me because this means that we are, in some sense, what a philosopher called normative, that we are thinking about justification--

Russ Roberts: Sure--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: about values. This is what makes us value-seeking creatures.

Russ Roberts: So, I think about--I don't think--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: So, that's my move. Yes.

Russ Roberts: Yeah. I don't think you quote him, but on this, 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 justify one's own existence. He certainly put many dents in the universe. So, he definitely mattered; still does.

But, I just want to put a little footnote here--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Oh, gee-- [?] I'm sorry. I just was going to say, I wish I had that quote in the book. Okay. If it goes into another--

Russ Roberts: Yeah, it's a good quote.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: another edition. Thank you for your quote.

Russ Roberts: But I just want to put a footnote here about consciousness. And, 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 going to do a good job later? Is this presentation going to go well? Am I going to get the raise? Am I going to get the person I long 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 don't worry about these things; but we do.

And your point, which I think is easily overlooked, it's not just: We're different from animals. We can imagine--say, a dog--we can imagine moving to Brazil or Israel or wherever. And, yet I think we underestimate, because--it's maybe for a bunch of reasons--but we underestimate how dominant and constant that mode is for consciousness. And, it doesn't exactly make sense. I talk about this a lot in the program. It's just that: Why can't we just have a good time? Animals--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. Well, they have a little bit sometimes; we can see, 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.

27:28

Russ Roberts: Before we go any further, talk about the different kinds of ways that people matter. Because one of the other interesting parts of the book is that you create what 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, in the broadest sense, if you think about, 'Well, people pay attention to me, so I matter,' but you go way beyond that.

So, talk about the four different kinds of ways that people find mattering appeased.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Gosh. The first book I ever wrote, which happened to have been a novel and what's called The Mind-Body Problem, a very philosophical novel. And, I had my main character come up with this notion of the Mattering Map. That's been simmering for a very, very long--that book was published in 1983. So, this has been simmering to me for such a long time.

So, it has many, many different domains. I mean, over my long, long life, I've met people who--I've met pickup artists who, this is their mattering project, to seduce and abandon as many women as they possibly can. And, as I said, this ex-neo-Nazi. And religious people of many, many sorts--conventional religion, the spiritual but not-religious people. You know, just so many different 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 gets you out of bed in the morning? What is it that makes you want to pursue your life, to just gives you the impetus, the energy to get on with it? So, many different ways of mattering. I go into some of the kinkier ways or more eccentric ways in the book.

But beneath it all, I've found--and this is open to empirical falsification--but so far what I found is there are just generally four different strategies. I'll just first name the ones. The ones that I call transcendent mattering, and social mattering, competitive mattering, and heroic striving mattering--

Russ Roberts: So, describe each of those--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: And always, I find--describe each of those. Transcendent is mattering to the universe at large--it's got a cosmic mattering--to the universe, because transcenders believe that the universe has a kind of personal attitude towards oneself. This is religious or spiritual. It's this kind of attitude. It is the view that transcenders believe that each of us was created purposefully--intentionally--by whether they call it God or something vaguer, something like that, something God-like, who created the universe, the laws of nature, and ultimately us for a reason. This delivers the highest form of a sense of mattering: that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity; that that which created the universe has a purpose for you. And I don't think--I should say that I started out as a very religious person. 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. I had to think about: Well, what do I do now? You know? And the script was laid out for me, especially as a female. It was laid out for me what I was meant to do in this world. And, now, it was my responsibility. Which was thrilling and terrifying. You know.

And so, okay, those were transcenders. And, I think that's fascinating. 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 next to socializers. And, from my conversation, socializers think that what they feel 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: dominating, power over, and all of this. And, fame--fame, to matter to many strangers--is such an important motive in our time because it's become ever easier to become famous. You can bob your head and lip sync on YouTube and have a million followers. And so, these are the socializers.

And, from my conversations, it seems to me--this has not been empirically 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 healthy ways and unhealthy ways, I would say. And that's true for all of these strategies.

And then, there are heroic strivers. And, they are not striving to matter to others, neither to other mortals nor to a transcendent presence in the universe. They are trying to realize certain standards of 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 a man--he's no longer with us--Baba Amte, 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. 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.

Russ Roberts: He gave himself. He gave himself--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yes. So, these are heroic strivers.

Russ Roberts: Yeah, I was going to 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, 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.

36:21

Russ Roberts: And then, the last group is competitive matterers. So, who are they?

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: A lot of people, sometimes people will become very abashed when I say, 'Do you matter? Tell me how you think that you matter.' And, 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 that others matter, they're taking something away from me, that it's always a striving to matter more.

And, some of the most prominent people--and, again, as I read the newspaper 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 are striving to matter more, to always be the person in the room who matters the most. And, I've met them in my gym and we meet them on the world stage. We really see them on the world stage.

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

I am a heroic striver. Yes. My mattering project is--well, you're hearing it. This is my mattering project: Do you understand mattering? And, yeah, it's a cognitive, it's an intellectual thing, or an artistic thing, and sometimes an ethical thing, but definitely a heroic striver. It's temperament, it's culture, it's personal experience. It's--where we end up on the mattering map, what continent we end up on, this is something I would love to have people who are better equipped to understand these things explain. I found some explanations in psychology or personality that I go into in the book, but in any case, I think that's where we are. This is a description of everybody I've met so far.

Russ Roberts: So, on the competitive thing--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: They are somewhere or other.

Russ Roberts: On the competitive thing--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah, sorry.

Russ Roberts: On the competitive thing, I think about Gore Vidal, who said, 'Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.' You encourage us to do the opposite, which I loved. And, I think the ability--you call it kvelling, 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, and that's what Vidal is semi-ironically referencing, although I think he probably meant it. I suspect he may have meant it, although it's kind of a joke; but there are no jokes. But, I do think this idea of kvelling 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 performance--an extraordinary musician, a great athlete--and, you know, athletes get--intellectuals often look down on athletes as just physical. But, I think many of us kvell for others and we root for athletes to succeed and win their nth championship cite[?]. 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 experiencing vicariously.

And we want them to--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 for them to even further embellish their reputation and their success and to take our own pleasure in it, even though we don't really have anything to do with it.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's true, and it's beautiful. It really is. In some sense, I think they're--I don't know--they're redeeming us there 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.

Russ Roberts: Oh, for sure.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: And I feel--yeah, if we've had more of a sense that there's enough mattering to go around and that it needed be thought of in zero-sum terms, 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 'give me, give me, give me; they're taking, they're taking, they're taking.' It's a little bit like, you know, those of us who have raised children. The most important thing you can possibly do if you take on that project, if you have more than one: it is terribly important that each child feels there is enough mattering to go around. You know. And, if not, you know, there is jealousy of a fierce sort.

You can see it with such young children. 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. 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.

Russ Roberts: Very important.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. Just one story that pops in there--is that okay?

Russ Roberts: Yeah, sure. Go ahead.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: This one story is a mother who--a mother had told me, once. I mean, she had three young sons at the time. And she told me that her middle son--who I thought was an amazing child--had said to her, 'You don't love me as much as you love my two brothers.' And, she said, 'Why do you say this?' And, he said, 'Well, 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 was true and he had a particular kind of mind that she just--she thought he was like a little pedant. He was constantly parsing words and saying what she described to me as things that are absolutely obvious, like a double negative means a positive, this sort of--the kid grew up to be a professor of mathematical logic. So, that was the kind of questions he was asking--the observations he was making--that she found quite boring, but that he noticed that tiny--

Russ Roberts: It's incredible. Yeah--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: little piece of evidence that she didn't turn off the water and said, 'You don't love me as much.' So, it's very, very important for parents to be aware that they are calculating, they are taking this in because--yeah, what matters more than their own mattering to their mother? Nothing matters more.

Russ Roberts: I just want to mention--I've mentioned it a number of times on the program; I think it came up recently--the video--which is a little bit hard to find these days, but I've seen it, many people have seen it--of Andrew Wiles, the mathematician, talking about 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 heroic striver. He wants to prove this theorem; and he almost does. Well, he thinks he does. The world thinks he does, even worse. He gets all this honor, all this glory--which is also a competitor part--and he gets some socializing pleasantness, too. And there's something transcendent, because it's math and it's ethereal.

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 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.

47:22

Russ Roberts: But I want to talk about the urge to--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--well, I'll take the fly fisherman, the person who collects exotic feathers to the point of theft. It's a great story. You can read about it 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--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--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.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Not entirely. And, I say that following the footsteps of Spinoza, where he started with his Deus sive Natura--his weird view of God, which is one with nature and ends with ethics. I start with physics and want to end with ethics. That is: Not all ways of pursuing our mattering are okay, I think. But, a whole bunch of them are, right?

So, first of all, did you call it the urge to proselytize?

Russ Roberts: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yes, right? And, I call it the urge to universalize: that, whatever way I am finding to--yes, everybody should be a philosopher. God help us--

Russ Roberts: 'The unexamined life'--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: that to be the case, but--

Russ Roberts: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.' [Socrates--Econlib Ed.]

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: It's not. Yeah--

Russ Roberts: Pretty harsh--

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Exactly. Yes. And, I have a bunch of quotes. Pretty harsh, yes. And, it was said by Socrates after he was voted guilty of corrupting the youth in ancient Athens, of all places. That became a crime. 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 more people voted for his death than had voted for his guilt. Kind of irrational there. But, that's what it does. I mean, that's such a good example--Socrates' trial there, and what Plato says he said, and how that so infuriated his audience that more voted for his death.

But, religious people--transcenders--are often accused of being the most intolerant: if you're, 'It's my God or it's hell. You follow my way or it's hell,' for those religions that believe in hell. But, I think actually this universalizing, this urge to proselytize, to universalize, to say, 'It's my way or you're wasting your life,' takes place all over the mattering map. 'The unexamined life is not worth living,' or lots and lots of quotes. I have a quote from former editor Diana Vreeland, I think her name is, of Vogue magazine, saying, 'You have to be well-dressed. That's what gets you down the steps in the morning. Without it, you're nothing. Nothing.'

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 not have shown up for your existence at all, for all the mattering that you have.' What is that urge? And, it is the urge to try to found our life or mattering on something objective--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 some of our impulses to proselytize our way. And, I've heard physicists saying, 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. So, there is this contingency of what our talents are, our passions, our culture, that go into our identity. And, the truth of the matter is, I think that we have to 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. And, in fact, our longing to matter is itself indication of something that matters. It's something estimable in us. I admire our species for taking on this burden of justifying, each of us justifying ourselves, ourselves.

Russ Roberts: It's very poignant. And in that sense, there's something estimable about our desire to resist entropy, death. And there's something heroic about it, even for the non-heroic strivers, is the way 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. Take your pick. It's not that urge to make a difference, which we inculcate in our children sometimes as a desirable thing. To make the world a better place, say, can have very dark parts to that journey.

56:18

Russ Roberts: I want to close with a, I think, an empirical statement that 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, almost everyone in the United States would be way, way, way to the right-hand tail as material wellbeing.

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, and what you call, and philosophers call, flourishing. And if most people are not flourishing, it doesn't matter what version of the iPhone they have or whether they never get cold or hungry. And our biggest problem is obesity, not poverty, not starvation, in the United States.

Well, we have a different problem, and people--it's kind of obvious. 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.

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 gives them a sense of importance.

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--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 going to go well. That's my take. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I just say also: It's not going well. I'm not just saying it's not going to go well. It's not going well.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Yeah. Longing, on a large scale--unappeased longing on a large scale--is what makes history. And, it's often the kinds of events that get written in the history books. They're not good events. They are events that can lead to great destruction--towards all sorts of terrible constraints on freedom, all sorts of the events that make for interesting history books. Yes. And longing, there is no longing of which this is truer than the longing to matter. This is the essence. What a human being is, a creature of matter, longs to matter. I think I'm so obsessed with both of those notions--the noun 'matter' and the verb that we derive in English from it, to matter, both of which come from the Latin word mater--mother. Which is interesting, actually.

But, 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 it 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 our lives. These, paradigmatically--our family, our friends, perhaps our colleagues--but these are people. And, you may not love them, but they are in your life. And, we all need this at the pain of tremendous loneliness, which is anti-flourishing. You cannot 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--for all of us, there's the mattering instinct. And, it may take the form of being a socializer. We may be transcenders. We may be competitors. 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--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, at 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, 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 life, 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. That--not if you understand human nature. As you've reminded me, Adam Smith understood human nature. Not--to understand human nature is to understand the desperation and the urgency of ministering to every individual's longing to matter.

Russ Roberts: My guest today has been Rebecca Goldstein. Her book is The Mattering Instinct. Rebecca, thanks for being part of EconTalk.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Oh, thank you so much. What a pleasure it was to speak with you.

The Mattering Instinct (with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)

The Status Game (with Will Storr)

A Mind-Blowing Way of Looking at Math (with David Bessis)

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Shalom Freedman

Jan 12 2026 at 9:07am

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The Mattering Instinct (with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)

The Status Game (with Will Storr)

A Mind-Blowing Way of Looking at Math (with David Bessis)

READER COMMENTS

Shalom Freedman

Jan 12 2026 at 9:07am

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