4 ways people try to make their lives meaningful — and the one that works best for you

The most unique thing about human beings is this: We are creatures who long to matter.

That’s according to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, the philosopher and author of a new book called The Mattering Instinct. If you’ve ever wondered why we humans are so singularly obsessed with discovering the meaning of life, this book — and her ideas — are for you.  

Goldstein presents an evolutionary explanation that starts off with a law of physics: the law of entropy, which basically says that things naturally tend toward disorder and destruction over time. All biological creatures need to devote a huge amount of energy and attention to resisting entropy — to surviving. But humans also have a special ability to self-reflect, and we can’t help but notice that we ultimately devote the vast majority of our attention to ourselves. To our own thriving, not the thriving of others. And so we feel the need to somehow justify that.

This, Goldstein says, is why we developed the “mattering instinct” — the drive that pushes us to find a “mattering project” that makes our lives feel purposeful and worthy. Goldstein sketches out four main ways people try to do that. 

Some are transcenders, who seek to matter to a transcendent presence like God. Others are socializers, who find purpose in helping and mattering to other people. Then there are heroic strivers, who push themselves to achieve excellence in the domain that matters to them, whether it’s intellectual, artistic, athletic, or moral. And finally, there are competitors, who focus on mattering more than others.

In the newest installment of my Your Mileage May Vary advice column, I suggested that Goldstein’s “mattering map” (see below) can be a useful tool for anyone who’s worried that AI may soon replace them in an arena where they find meaning, like their career. Locating ourselves on the map can help us each think afresh about which of the four categories makes us feel a sense of purpose, so we can consider additional types of work that could form a satisfying mattering project for us in the future.

I was curious about how Goldstein is thinking about automation-induced joblessness, what she’d do if her own work gets automated, and whether she thinks we’re in danger of losing our human dignity. So I asked her for a follow-up chat. Here’s a smattering of our nattering about mattering.

You argue that our drive to matter is one of the cornerstones of human life. What convinced you of that? How have you felt that drive show up in your own life?  

I really feel justified in my righteous anger when people treat me as if I don’t matter! 

I have a very favorite story about that. I mean, just being a woman, there are a lot of stories. But I was once at a party in Princeton with a bunch of physicists, and one very, very prominent physicist wanted to talk to another prominent physicist, and I was in the middle. So he just picked me up — I’m very slight — he picked me up and moved me like I was a potted palm!

And I had this real sense of…but I’m a person! I matter! That feels justified. And if I can justify that about myself, I have to universalize it to everybody. There’s no way it’s going to work for me and not work for everybody else.

Wow, that’s pretty appalling! 

So from that, you offer this evolutionary account of how everybody ended up with a mattering instinct. I always find it hard to evaluate evolutionary stories because there’s an element of speculation in them. Your account about how we evolved the mattering instinct seems plausible, but I could also imagine another account being true. For example, maybe the drive for mattering is a way of making sure that others will think we matter, because we want society to think well of us and take care of us. What convinces you that your account is more likely than others?

To me, it explains more of the variety of ways that people try to go about this. If the more social story were true, we would all be socializers. But I mean, the fact that there is a very strong religious aspect — I spent a good part of my life as a transcender — means that to me, phenomenologically, it doesn’t ring true. And it doesn’t ring true to the diversity [of how different people find mattering]. 

But it might be that I’ve just spent too much time with mathematicians who don’t give a damn about social acceptance!

“What I’m thinking in my most optimistic moments is that the deepest questions, they’re still going to belong to us.”

Yes, we can see that from their fashion! But seriously, I have to say that I really love the mattering map in your book. I feel like I’m mostly one of the artistic-intellectual strivers, but I’m also a bit of a socializer in that I derive meaning from helping others with my work. Do you think most people live on only one island?

No, I don’t think so. I know that I don’t.

And I think all of us have a strong need for connectedness — it’s the other part of flourishing. We need people in our lives, and we often want to make a difference in people’s lives.

Maybe we have our main residence, and then we have our vacation home. You can definitely make a bridge [between the islands].

Why is the island of transcenders exclusively populated with different religions and spiritual traditions? I can imagine other sorts of people — like artists or psychedelic users — who feel there’s a transcendent dimension to the universe, and who derive their sense of mattering by tapping into that.

I think in some sense, all heroic strivers have some notion of the transcendent. They often talk in terms of these ideals. I mean, every artist I know talks about beauty. For knowledge workers, it’s knowledge.

But I really wanted to single out the ones who actually feel that there is some sort of personal presence in the universe that has intentions — that there’s an intentionality that permeates the universe. It’s just so very different.

I had a very religious childhood — I was brought up Orthodox [Jewish] — and it was like, God knows if I cheated and took a bite of a Hostess cupcake! And there was this sense of mattering, that I was created for a purpose. I really felt like I had a role to play in the narrative of eternity. God has his plan, and I’m part of it. And I know that when I went from believing that to not believing that, the universe changed in such a big way for me. It just felt a little meaningless, to tell you the truth. That [form of mattering through transcendence] seemed worthy of its own continent on the map.

You suggest that humans are the only animal that has a mattering instinct — we are “creatures of matter who long to matter.” You also call us “dust with dignity.” How does the mattering instinct connect with the idea of human dignity?

We are wired to take ourselves very seriously — the bulk of our attention is going to somehow be self-referential — and then we ask ourselves for justification. We feel we have to come up with some project, some story, and we devote so much energy to this justificatory project. I find that there’s a certain dignity in that. There’s something estimable, there’s something noble about a species that needs to prove to itself that it really matters.

That leads me to a very timely question: What happens to human dignity if AI replaces us in an important area, like our jobs, which is how many of us carry out our mattering projects? Are we in danger of losing our dignity, or is that some inalienable quality that we’ll just end up expressing in other ways?

The latter. I really think that when one is not able to minister to this, to appease this [mattering instinct], you end up with death within life, which is what extreme chronic depression is. So we will come up with something.

Here’s me at my most optimistic: I think about philosophy, because I’ve been speaking to a lot of philosophers who were worried about it. There’s a lot of shit work that’s done in philosophy, and yes, let AIs do it. Let them explain the 53 ways of interpreting Kant’s deontological argument. They’ll be able to do it and come up with all the utilitarian counterarguments and all of that. 

But there’s still so many problems that I think come out of being human and knowing what it’s like to be motivated by the mattering instinct and how hard it is to live an ethical life, given how much attention we are wired to pay to ourselves. AI can’t do that for us. So what I’m thinking in my most optimistic moments is that the deepest questions, they’re still going to belong to us.

I think plenty of people could listen to this conversation and say, “I don’t get my meaning from my job. What is this obsession with your career? Maybe it’s great if AI takes your job because you’ll finally learn how to find mattering in ministering to others or something!” Should we perhaps start thinking more expansively about where we find our sense of mattering?

Yeah, I think it’s not a bad idea to be thinking about that. But I also think you can’t force mattering strategies on people. It comes from something very deep — temperament, interest, passions, all of this. I’ve always resented it very much when people say, well, this here is the meaning of life.   

So I really want to be a pluralist about this. I do think that there always are going to be heroic strivers. There are people who have to meet or at least approach certain standards of excellence, including ethical and athletic and artistic.

With the artistic — just as when you have a forgery of a great painting and it’s indistinguishable from the original, it’s just not as valuable because it doesn’t come out of a human experience that came out of somebody’s individuality and what they’re struggling with — maybe that extra thing is always important in our aesthetic pleasure. If an AI writes something and it’s comparable to Shakespeare, I don’t believe that our aesthetic pleasure is going to be the same. It’s about knowing: Oh, this is a window into somebody else’s subjectivity!

In my recent advice column, I suggested that even if AI takes your job, you can hang onto a sense of mattering by looking at the mattering map, identifying the broader island of mattering that tends to make you feel satisfied, and seeing what other jobs might be an expression of that. If you yourself weren’t able to work as a philosopher and novelist anymore, what would you do instead to make ends meet while still fulfilling your drive for mattering?

There are two careers that I’ve often thought, Gee, I should have given them more thought. One is to work with children. I just love kids and I think they’re really fascinating. I have a daughter who’s a clinical psychologist, and she deals with a lot of kids, and I think it’s really interesting work. And it is that socializer [drive], which is very strong in me as well. 

The other thing is to go to Africa and just live with animals, observing [them]. I love elephants, I love chimpanzees. And I could see doing that too — a more scientific career.

This is reminding me that ever since I was a kid, thinking of humanity makes me think of an injured animal — I always pictured a three-legged dog. It’s struggling, it’s limping along. And I feel like our search for meaning is that limp. It’s a burden on us, in a way, right?

Yeah, it’s hard to be a living thing. It’s that much harder to be a human and to want to get it right. You can think of that as our limp. But you can also think of it as our crown.

For me it’s precisely because humanity is saddled with this sort of struggle that I’m rooting for it extra, that I feel a special affinity for it. 

That’s almost a protectiveness. And that’s a beautiful emotion. I mean, that is something to cultivate: Wherever there is humanity, there is a struggle, and that matters.