How our mattering instinct builds and divides our relationships
Below, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein shares five key insights from her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.
Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of 10 books of acclaimed fiction and nonfiction and has held various visiting professorships and fellowships at elite academic institutions. Her first novel was The Mind-Body Problem.
What’s the big idea?
We all want to feel connected to others and know that we matter. The ways we go about making our lives matter shape who we are, the meaning we find, and the mark we leave on the world.
1. Our need to feel that we matter in the way that most matters to us is one of the two prime motivators of human behavior.
The other prime motivator is our need for connectedness. There’s a tendency to confuse these two, since they both have to do, in a certain sense, with mattering. Connectedness is our need to feel that there are certain others who will pay us special attention, whether we deserve it or not. In other words, we need to feel that we matter to certain people. These are the people whom we regard as in our lives, and we crucially need people in our lives— typically our family, friends, romantic partners, sometimes our colleagues, neighbors, or community members. We are born into a helplessness unmatched in the animal kingdom, and if, in our prolonged immaturity, no caretakers regard us as deserving of their special attention, we die. Our need for connectedness, in its most fundamental sense, begins here and continues throughout our life.
We are social animals. But that’s not all that we are. Which brings me to the mattering instinct. Unlike our need for connectedness, which intrinsically concerns our relationship to others, the mattering instinct intrinsically concerns our relationship with ourselves. It consists of our longing to prove to ourselves that we are deserving of our own attention—the monumental attention we have to give ourselves in pursuing our life. And unlike connectedness, which is a trait that humans share with other gregarious species, the mattering instinct characterizes us humans alone. It comes to us by way of our evolved capacity for self-reflection, and it provides us with our existential dimension. The mattering instinct forces us into the sphere of values without equipping us to see our way through. We are social beings, yes, but we are also, because of the mattering instinct, existentially questing creatures.
2. Connectedness and the mattering instinct are essential to life satisfaction, which is a far deeper desire for us than our desire for happiness.
It’s life satisfaction that provides us the sense that we are flourishing in our lives, and we can tolerate a great deal of unhappiness, frustration, and disappointment in pursuit of our flourishing.
In one of his most famous statements, Sigmund Freud said, “Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” Freud was right about the duality at our core, only I would amend his statement. For Freud’s “love,” I would substitute “connectedness,” since our need to feel that we are being paid special attention by those whom we regard as in our lives can assume forms quite distinct from love. And for Freud’s “work,” I would substitute the sense of “mattering,” which in Freud’s case, derived from his work.
There is a strong tendency in all of us, including Freud, to universalize our own way of responding to the mattering instinct, to assert that my response to the mattering instinct must be, if it is right for me, the right response for everyone.
3. Humans display dazzling diversity in responding to our shared mattering instinct.
I represent this diversity with what I call the Mattering Map, an idea which goes back to that first novel. The Mattering Map is composed of a multitude of regions, each of them premised on a different answer to the question of what matters in making a life that matters. The Mattering Map is where we amuse, bemuse, and sometimes absolutely appall one another by our life choices in responding to the mattering instinct.
Depending on where we’re situated on the Mattering Map, we pursue different mattering projects, which, in channeling the mattering instinct, propel us into our future, giving us, in a sense, our reason to live. Our mattering projects can be selfish or altruistic, individualistic or communitarian, competitive or cooperative, religious or secular, creative or destructive. But whether it’s tending one’s garden or one’s cause, one’s relationships or one’s reputation, one’s immortal soul or one’s net worth, these mattering projects become the loci of some of our deepest emotions.
We judge how well our lives are going by how well our mattering projects are going. It’s our mattering projects, at least insofar as they’re working for us, that yield our lives a sense of coherence, purpose, and meaningfulness. While our shared mattering instinct expresses our distinctiveness as a species, our individual mattering projects express our distinctiveness from one another. Just as the language instinct resulted in the great variety of human languages, requiring the art of translation, so the mattering instinct results in the great variety of incommensurable forms of human life, requiring the art of interpretation. But beneath all this diversity among us, there are some general patterns to be discerned.
4. There are four general mattering strategies.
These are transcendent mattering, social mattering, heroic mattering, and competitive mattering. We may employ more than one of these strategies, depending on the circumstances, but typically one of them prevails in us, determined by our individual temperament and life experiences. This sorts us into transcenders, socializers, heroic strivers, and competitors. You can think of these as the four continents of the Mattering Map:
- Transcenders seek their mattering in religious or spiritual terms, striving to matter to the transempirical spiritual presence which, according to their belief, exists and which they may or may not call God, but which they believe has purposefully created them. They look to their mattering from on high. This is the premise of all the traditional religions as well as those views that dub themselves SBNR—spiritual but not religious.
- Socializers seek their mattering from other humans. They essentially collapse the two cornerstones of our humanness into one. To matter existentially, for a socializer, is to matter to those who are in their lives.
- Heroic strivers aren’t seeking their mattering from others—neither from humans nor from on high. Rather their sense of mattering comes from seeking to satisfy their own standards of excellence. These standards may be intellectual, artistic, athletic, or ethical.
- Competitors conceive of mattering, either their own or their group’s, in zero-sum terms. To the extent that they matter, others must matter less.
5. Our mattering instinct is responsible for humanity’s greatest achievements and greatest atrocities.
Notice that in speaking of “greatest achievements” and “greatest atrocities,” I’ve switched to evaluative terms. For most of the book, I confine myself to non-evaluatively mapping out the differences between us—we creatures of matter who long to matter—hoping to provide a framework for how we might be able to see past our deepest and most fraught differences to our even deeper commonality. But inevitably, we have to confront the question of whether some of these ways of responding to the mattering instinct are better than others.
We are the same in our longing, but stubbornly diverse in our responses to that longing, making it imperative that, if we are to live together in recognition of the dignity of human life in all its incommensurable forms, we find an objective standard to distinguish between better and worse ways of responding to the mattering instinct. The very science that explains how we evolved into creatures of matter, longing to matter, also suggests an answer to the evaluative question.
At the heart of the explanation and the suggestion lies the law of entropy, formally known as the second law of thermodynamics, which states that all physical systems are internally heading toward disorder and dissolution. Life itself is a counter-entropic struggle, and the best of our mattering projects are, like life itself, counter-entropic. Everything worth living for—life, love, health, knowledge, peace, compassion, creativity, beauty, flourishing—are highly ordered states that must be hard-won local reprieves from the law of entropy. A life well-lived is a life that, while pursuing mattering in a way that best accords with a person’s individuality, allies itself with life’s own counter-entropic struggle. What better answer could there be to the age-old question of the meaning of life?
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This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.