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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us
MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex and The Mind-Body Problem, returns with a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and universal motivations: the longing to matter.
Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, Goldstein argues that this need to matter--and the various "mattering projects" it inspires--is the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts: the very crux of the human experience.
Goldstein brings this profound idea to life through unforgettable stories of famous and not-so-famous people pursuing their unique mattering projects: the ragtime genius Scott Joplin, whose dedication to his ignored masterpiece, Treemonisha, ended in tragedy; the pioneering psychologist William James, who rose above the depression of his young adulthood to become perhaps the first great theorist of mattering; an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns from the trash; and a neo-Nazi skinhead who as a young man dealt racial violence to feel he mattered but ultimately renounced that hateful past after realizing that mattering isn't a zero-sum game. These portraits illuminate how our instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture, and conflict--and they point the way to a future where we all might see that there is, fundamentally, enough mattering to go around.
Deeply revealing and insightful, and decades in the making, The Mattering Instinct is a must read for those curious about why we seek to matter to ourselves and others--and how this insatiable longing that drives us apart may be the key to finally understanding each other.
Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, Goldstein argues that this need to matter--and the various "mattering projects" it inspires--is the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts: the very crux of the human experience.
Goldstein brings this profound idea to life through unforgettable stories of famous and not-so-famous people pursuing their unique mattering projects: the ragtime genius Scott Joplin, whose dedication to his ignored masterpiece, Treemonisha, ended in tragedy; the pioneering psychologist William James, who rose above the depression of his young adulthood to become perhaps the first great theorist of mattering; an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns from the trash; and a neo-Nazi skinhead who as a young man dealt racial violence to feel he mattered but ultimately renounced that hateful past after realizing that mattering isn't a zero-sum game. These portraits illuminate how our instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture, and conflict--and they point the way to a future where we all might see that there is, fundamentally, enough mattering to go around.
Deeply revealing and insightful, and decades in the making, The Mattering Instinct is a must read for those curious about why we seek to matter to ourselves and others--and how this insatiable longing that drives us apart may be the key to finally understanding each other.
Book Details
- Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
- Publish Date: Jan 13rd, 2026
- Pages: 352
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.90in - 6.30in - 1.30in - 1.35lb
- EAN: 9781324096856
- Categories: • Individual Philosophers• Movements - Existentialism• Emotions
About the Author
Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger: - Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of ten books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, including 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University and has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, her work has been supported by the MacArthur "Genius" grant and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting Institute, Radcliffe Institute, and the National Science Foundation. In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Praise for this book
The Mattering Instinct is an important and truly impressive book that gives us new ways to think about human worth and dignity. Whether you're leading a team, raising a family, or simply trying to live with purpose, this book shows why aspiring to have a positive impact isn't just morally right--it's the key to lasting fulfillment.--Sheryl Sandberg, founder of Lean In
What drives human beings to do both great good and terrible evil? Rebecca Goldstein brilliantly argues that the answer is strangely simple yet incredibly powerful: it is our need to matter in the world. To understand others--and yourself--read this book.--Arthur C. Brooks, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Build the Life You Want and From Strength to Strength
The Mattering Instinct is an extraordinary and urgent book. Rebecca Goldstein helps us to see that so much of our lives, and so much of human history, is driven by the need to matter. As technology weakens our social ties and frees us from needing other people, the crisis of mattering will explode. Giving everyone a generous universal basic income will not help. This book, and its delineation of multiple paths to mattering, will.--Jonathan Haidt, #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Anxious Generation and The Righteous Mind
Rebecca Goldstein--who uniquely combines the gifts of a novelist and a philosopher--writes with rare insight, warmth, and humanity. The Mattering Instinct is a luminous and often personal meditation on the universal human need to matter. It's a brilliant and beautiful book.--Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind
The Mattering Instinct changes everything. Whether your focus is on personal life, professional life, social and cultural life, political life, moral life, or spiritual life, this book really matters!--Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice
Rebecca Goldstein's books always get to the heart of the matter. This one, provocative and timely, gets to the heart of mattering itself. The Mattering Instinct is a powerful and original book.--Sherry Turkle, best-selling author of Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries
How refreshing, in our time of heated antipathies and narrowed hopes, to discover a book that celebrates the "meaning-seeking" imperative that underlies "the wondrousness of what it is to be human." Rebecca Goldstein's eloquent and tightly reasoned The Mattering Instinct will change the way you go through daily life: attuning you to the choices you and others make, offering aid in times of doubt. With its plea for "seeing one another more mercifully," The Mattering Instinct returns to us "the joy of our own strange lives."--Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart
One of the many pleasures of this brilliant book is the unassuming intimacy the author establishes not only with the reader but with the laws of biology and physics: the elemental urge of every living thing to matter, and the entropic force threatening to unmake every bond. As The Mattering Instinct movingly demonstrates, those forces live inside all of us and make us who we are, even as they clash like enemy armies. There is nothing Manichaean about this battle, which in Goldstein's subtle narrative is bound up with the moral force woven into our lives -- a mystery you will have to read this extraordinary book to discover.--Jonathan Rosen, author of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
The Mattering Instinct is a masterpiece. I wept, I laughed out loud, I came face-to-face with the wellsprings of my life, but mostly I marveled at Rebecca Goldstein's genius. This book should ignite a revolution.--Martin Seligman, best-selling author of Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
Incisive.... [Goldstein] catalogs the rich variety of ways people try to carve out purpose: 'socializers' try to matter through relationships; 'heroic strivers' through achievement; and 'transcenders' through communion with whatever spiritual principle orders the cosmos.... Convincingly situating the instinct to matter as increasingly vital in a world that can feel impersonal and starved of meaning, Goldstein takes on some of life's biggest questions with a loose-limbed exploration of such wide-ranging topics as thermodynamic entropy and Victorian fly-fishing lures made from exotic feathers (which still matter to modern-day connoisseurs of the art). It's a fascinating take on a profound yet little-understood aspect of the psyche.--Publishers Weekly, starred review