The Mattering Instinct
How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Jan 13, 2026
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
“[An] extraordinary and urgent book.” —Jonathan Haidt
“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
A paradigm-shifting work that explores humanity’s most fundamental desire.
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stubborn desire to matter—to oneself, to loved ones, to God—explains much about human nature and its discontents, according to this incisive study. Philosopher Goldstein (The Mind-Body Problem) posits a "mattering instinct," or a desire to be deserving of attention, that arises in childhood and matures into a habit of organizing one's life around "mattering projects" that encapsulate one's "reason to live." She 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. She also traces the myriad ways mattering shapes society, from spurring progress to inciting evil. (Noting that it can inspire mass murderers to kill and religious zealots to persecute non-believers, Goldstein profiles a man who, as an abused teenager, joined up with neo-Nazis who made him feel he mattered—then repudiated them and converted to Judaism). 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.
