Why the Need to Matter Can Save Us or DESTROY Us | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

What this episode is about

The discussion centers on the concept of the "mattering instinct," emphasizing the deep human desire to feel significant and how our diverse identities shape responses to this need. It explores the critical distinction between constructive and destructive ways of fulfilling this longing, ultimately underscoring the potential for this instinct to either elevate our lives or lead to turmoil.

Key takeaways

• Individuality fuels our collective quest for meaning—your uniqueness shapes how you answer, 'Do I matter?'
• In a room full of top psychologists, philosophy found its footing—the intersection of heart and mind sparks innovation.
• Mattering isn’t just philosophical fluff; it’s a fundamental human instinct driving behavior across cultures and generations.
• Rebecca Goldstein's pivot from rigid philosophy to exploring mattering shows that life’s best insights often break the mold.
• The 'mattering instinct' transcends discipline, proving that existential questions are just as vital to scientists as philosophers.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Rebecca Goldstein (Guest)
• John Armiles (Host)

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Marty Seligman, The Mattering Instinct, Barry Schwartz, David Yaden
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Passion Struck, The Mattering Instinct, Angela Duckworth
3. 20:00 – 30:00: The Mattering Instinct
4. 30:00 – 40:00: The Mattering Instinct, Joshua Green, Victor Frankl
5. 40:00 – 50:00: The Mattering Instinct
6. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: The Mattering Instinct
7. 1:10:00 – 1:12:27: Passion Struck

Notable quotes from "Why the Need to Matter Can Save Us or DESTROY Us | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein"

• I am absolutely honored today to have Rebecca Goldstein join me. Rebecca is the author of a brand new book, The Mattering Instinct, which I absolutely have just devoured given my passion for this topic. But I think we're kindred.

  about The Mattering Instinct · at 1:25

• That was meaningless, imprecise. And but this novel came to me and in order to understand my character, I came on this notion of mattering that it's everybody needs to feel…

  about The mindbody problem · at 3:34

• Book I had written was called Plato at the Google Plex, why philosophy won't go away. And Marty Seligman, he was able to see there are few paragraphs or two pages I give to…

  about Plato at the Google Plex · at 5:26

• On this, but I said, You were missing an a very important ingredient. Grit alone is just grit. And I actually in the book used entropy as the missing ingredient because when…

  about Passion Struck · at 16:38

• I recently had a discussion with Joshua Green and it was basically on those whole that whole line.

  about Joshua Green · at 34:19

• Yeah. I And I think an interesting take on this is if you look at Victor Frankle. So if you look at how he defined the ways we achieve meaning, he did identify work as one of them. But he also identified relationships that we.

  about Victor Frankl · at 36:08

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Rebecca Goldstein — Person · Main guest · 2 mentions · first at 1:25
  Primary interview subject discussing her book and theory of the 'mattering instinct' and the 'mattering map' framework.
  I am absolutely honored today to have Rebecca Goldstein join me. Rebecca is the author of a brand new book, The Mattering Instinct, which I absolutely have just devoured given my passion for.
• John Armiles — Person · Host · 2 mentions · first at 0:37
  Hosts the Passion Struck podcast episode, frames the discussion, and connects mattering to leadership and workplace engagement.
  I want to start out by talking about something before we get into your book.
• Marty Seligman — Person · Referenced expert / convenor of workshop · 5 mentions · first at 2:09
  Credited with organizing the 2019-ish workshop on mattering and motivating Goldstein to write the book; central figure in positive psychology context.
  To as the dream team. Some of them I know fairly well. Some of them have yet to meet, but it included Marty Seligman, my friend David Yaden, Barry Schwarz, who's becoming a…
• Angela Duckworth — Person · Referenced expert · 2 mentions · first at 8:40
  Referenced as Seligman's mentee and as the origin of the 'grit' concept; used to connect mattering to grit/entropy and to attempt to reach Seligman.
  So, two things. One, one, in my first book, Passion Struck, I open it up with discussing grit by Angela Duckworth, and I actually had a conversation with her on this, but I said, You were missing an a very important ingredient. Grit.
• Barry Schwartz — Person · Referenced expert (workshop participant) · 3 mentions · first at 2:05
  Named as part of the workshop group discussing mattering; referenced to show interdisciplinary/positive-psychology involvement.
  Around 2019, I understand you were part of a group of individuals that I refer to as the dream team. Some of them I know fairly well. Some of them have yet to meet, but it…
• David Yaden — Person · Referenced expert (workshop participant) · 3 mentions · first at 2:09
  Named as part of the 'dream team' of psychologists who met to discuss mattering; used to establish credibility of the workshop.
  To as the dream team. Some of them I know fairly well. Some of them have yet to meet, but it included Marty Seligman, my friend David Yaden, Barry Schwarz, who's becoming a…
• Roy Baumeister — Person · Referenced expert (workshop participant; skeptic) · 2 mentions · first at 2:15
  Named as part of the workshop; Goldstein notes he remained more skeptical, providing intellectual pushback.
  To meet, but it included Marty Seligman, my friend David Yaden, Barry Schwarz, who's becoming a friend, Roy Bowmeister, and a few others. And I understand that you all met to…
• Victor Frankl — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at 36:10
  Referenced for his framework of meaning (work, relationships, suffering) as a parallel to individualized routes to mattering.
• Joshua Green — Person · Referenced expert · 2 mentions · first at 33:45
  Referenced in connection with effective altruism-style reasoning (earning to give) and moral philosophy/psychology discussion.
• Sheldon Goldstein — Person · Referenced person (personal relationship) · 1 mention · first at 3:14
  Mentioned as Goldstein's husband at the time she wrote her novel; provides biographical context for her early thinking about mattering.
  Mindbody problem. I was a young untenured professor of philosophy and my husband at the time Sheldon Goldstein had said you're going to ruin your career before it's struggling to exist. And because I was doing very technical kind of.

Books & papers

• The Mattering Instinct — Book · Primary recommendation · 9 mentions · first at 1:32
  Central topic of the episode, discussed extensively by the guest Rebecca Goldstein as her latest work exploring human motivation and existential questions.
• Passion Struck — Book · Referenced work · 4 mentions · first at 0:37
  Host's own book mentioned in the context of discussing grit and entropy, providing a personal perspective on the topic of mattering.
• Plato at the Google Plex — Book · Referenced work · 3 mentions
  Previous work by Rebecca Goldstein mentioned as containing early thoughts on the mattering instinct that caught Marty Seligman's attention.
• The mindbody problem — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at 3:07
  Early novel by Rebecca Goldstein where the concept of mattering first emerged, providing background to her current work.

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 We are so different by temperament, belief systems, value systems, culture, our talents, our passions and that all the individuality all goes into how we respond to this shared motivation that we have deep motivation that shapes our lives. And we none of us want to waste our life. We want to respond in the right way to this instinct. And we all recognize we make the distinction that there are right ways and wrong ways. And we want to teasing this longing and answering the question, do I really matter? That motivates all this.

0:37 Welcome to Passion Struck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long- form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators scientists military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become passionruck.

1:25 I am absolutely honored today to have Rebecca Goldstein join me. Rebecca is the author of a brand new book, The Mattering Instinct, which I absolutely have just devoured given my passion for this topic. But I think we're kindred spirits and I can't wait to have this discussion with her. Rebecca, it's so great to see you here today. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you so much, John.

1:53 I want to start out by talking about something before we get into your book. Around 2019, I understand you were part of a group of individuals that I refer to as the dream team. Some of them I know fairly well. Some of them have yet to meet, but it included Marty Seligman, my friend David Yaden, Barry Schwarz, who's becoming a friend, Roy Bowmeister, and a few others. And I understand that you all met to have a really deep philosophical discussion around mattering. And I was hoping you might be able to take us into that room with those people, what was occurring.

2:34 Well, thank you actually. Thank you for bringing that up because it was really important to me and they are I like the way you describe them that they are a dream team. All of them top-notch psychologists. No, I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a philosopher. That's my academic field. And it was Marty Seligman. Well, let me go back a little. I've been thinking about mattering a very long time. They had snuck up on me while I was playing hookie from philosophy and during a summer vacation wrote a novel called the mindbody problem. I was a young untenured professor of philosophy and my husband at the time Sheldon Goldstein had said you're going to ruin your career before it's struggling to exist. And because I was doing very technical kind of philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of math. I was in what they call an analytic philosopher.

3:31 None of this existentialism stuff. No, that was meaningless, imprecise. And but this novel came to me and in order to understand my character, I came on this notion of mattering that it's everybody needs to feel that they matter in the way that most matters to them. And the diversity creeps into that second half of the sentence that there there is just an abundance of ways in which we try to prove to ourselves that we matter. And and I thought, well, this this is interesting. This helps me understand my character.

4:11 And my character presented the idea I know I did, but of the mattering map. But the interesting thing was I would never have thought of these things on my own um because they were too imprecise. I couldn't quantify it. I couldn't put it into symbolic logic. I could the kind of training that I had just gone through made me think of these as as imprecise and therefore not useful. But in the because I was inhabiting this fictional character, I could present these ideas. So that was weird. But these ideas began to grow in me and I started to pay a lot of attention to them, pay a lot of attention to other people and what it was that most mattered to them and proving to themselves their own mattering. And a theory began to develop, but I never had any intention of writing about it or first of all the theory got too big. And I'm suspicious of big theories. analytic philosophers are suspicious of big grand

5:17 theories, especially my own, but little pieces of it leaked out into almost everything else I wrote. And the last book I had written was called Plato at the Google Google Plex, why philosophy won't go away. And Marty Seligman, he was able to see there are few paragraphs or two pages I give to what I call the mattering instinct. I didn't call it that then but I talk about it as a way of trying to explain one of the great mysteries in the history of ideas and that is why in a certain period of time call it the axial age all religions that are still extent emerged as well as philosophy as well as western philosophy and I hazard by hypothesis that life became stable enough so that the mattering instinct could emerge Marty Celigman alone of all my everybody who read that book grabbed on to that and he organized a workshop around this idea of mattering for me to present this idea and it was so encouraging

6:30 to have these psychologists not philosophers psychologists pain psychologists who I knew were top-notch all of them connected with positive psychology paying this kind of attention to it and we were supposed to write I was supposed to write a paper for it and I started the paper and it the paper just got getting more and more complicated and I so I just had to write a book. So Marty Seligman of everybody is responsible for me writing this book and I couldn't get the paper out. It's the first time I've ever been assigned a paper I couldn't complete because all the ideas connected in a very strict deductive way almost and I had to try to get it all out in a in the most readable accessible fashion I could and being a novelist that helped because I'm good at telling stories as well. I I can tell a story this being stories about real people not made up stories. I tried to demonstrate the various ideas, these stories of people.

7:33 But anyway, it was a very intense three days. Everybody started out or not everybody, not Marty, but everybody was a little skeptical and by the end they seemed most of them convinced. I'm not sure about Roy Bmeister, but everybody else. But that was good, too, because he was pushing. So, you need that. Yeah. Thank you for pointing that out because it was really just personally very important to me and and yeah was responsible for my sitting down and writing the book.

8:07 For anyone who wants to look at the output of that meeting, I'm going to drop a link to the paper that was produced by that dream team that applies mattering to work environments specifically and work cultures which I have read and utilize. I just want to touch on Marty for a second because I interviewed Gabriella Kellerman.

8:29 She was there too. Yes. Who was part of this and Marty wrote a book a few years ago and I was hoping to interview Marty for this book and he declined personally to me in an email and I even tried

8:42 to get Angela Duckworth who's a close mentee of his to see if he would reconsider and he wouldn't. But what she told me which really gives this so much merit is she told me that Marty is dedicating the remain remainder of his life to studying mattering which I think tells you the weight that he has given to this topic.

9:04 And I hope somewhere along the line he might reconsider and have that discussion with me.

9:09 I hope so. I'll add my voice if that helps at all. and his students have been getting in touch with me. Hopefully some real empirical research will come out of this. There are many empirical hypotheses that I suggest that could be tested. I'm not in that business. I'm not an empirical psychologist. I'm not even a psychologist. But Marty had said he wrote the first sentence of the paper that I never completed which was that some of our the most important ideas in psychology can be traced back to philosophy that it's the philosophers who come up with these ideas and I just the generosity of Morty Seligman is is really something for all of us to celebrate. It's he is so many academics you find or rather competitive and everything he no he is so beyond that he is dedicated to ideas themselves ideas for the betterment of all of us so it's positive psychology and a most positive psychologist

10:20 well I love hearing that I want to go now to the book you you open up the book and you go through what we just discussed, how you've been studying this for so long, but you call the mattering instinct the most peculiar and the most human thing about us. What makes this longing just not a motive but something that fundamentally distinguishes human life

10:50 and the most poignant thing about us too? They think the poignency of our life is captured by this longing that we have to matter. And I really want to ground it on solid science. Going back to physics, the most solid of all the sciences and there the most robust of physics, the one that physicists tell us can never be negated. And that's the second law of thermodynamics. that entropy which is disorder. It's nature's score card for disorder and disorder of a system means the system is you can't get any useful work out of it. So entropy is kind of a downer story and all life is in resistance to entropy that to ground everything starting with that but

11:44 and maybe we could just I can intervene right there because for a listener who might not be familiar with entropy can you just explain this because people might not be making the connection between entropy and matter. All systems, especially closed systems that don't have access to external sources that can be turned into energy, they just they dissipate. They become more and more disordered and useful work can't be gotten out of them. So that to the extent that entropy which means disorder is growing the system is running less and less efficiently until suddenly it can't not suddenly gradually at the end it can't run at all. it. If it's a living system, it means it dies. And all physical systems are running according to this law. And it's the laws of probability show you why disorder is much more probable than order. And so that's the drift. That's the direction of all physical systems, including us.

12:56 Great news. We're going to die, right? We're going to die just like everything else. And all biological systems, us included, are taking in energy in food, sunlight, certain chemicals, in order to resist entropy. All of the laws of biology are actually derable from this fundamental fact about physics. It's not even an instinct, the fact that every physical every biological system matters to itself. It's the organizing principle of all of the instincts derivable from entropy. But we alone of all biological systems of which we know, at least of all biological systems on this earth, we have the capacity because of these amazingly complicated big brains that we've evolved to be able to step outside of ourselves, see how much we matter to ourselves, how much attention we pay to ourselves incessantly pay attention to ourselves. That doesn't mean we're selfish. It doesn't mean we're self-centered. It means our brains

14:10 are running as they evolve to run, to defeat, to push against as long as possible against entropy. We can step outside ourselves and see oursel mattering and ask why. Why of all the things in the universe do I pay so much attention to this one thing that if the measure of how much I think something matters is how much attention I give it seems to follow that I think I matter more than anything else in the universe and short of lunacy I know that's wrong that's the sanity in all of us and that sanity because of this capacity to step outside of ourselves and fears gives rise to this longing to matter. To in some way try to prove to ourselves that the amount of attention we give to ourselves is somewhat commenurate with how much we deserve that we're we do deserve this.

15:15 It's not just arbitrary that I just don't I just happen to be who I am as everything else just happens to be what it is. No, there is something about me that can prove to myself that yeah I just a little more a little more commenurate. a Nobel Prize economist I mean failer his famous failer is when I was discussing this with him because I discuss this with everybody he said he was economist he said but he said I'm thinking how much mattering do we need he said a smattering of mattering just enough but some people need a lot more than a smattering of mattering and we differ a lot in how much we need and how we go about doing it and that's what makes us different from all other organisms and That is what makes us values seeking creatures. We're looking for norms to justify ourselves and that brings us into the realm of values and that ultimately I think is what has produced the greatest achievements

16:19 of our species and also the greatest atrocities that is it's deeply human. So, two things. One, one, in my first book, Passion Struck, I open it up with discussing grit by Angela Duckworth, and I actually had a conversation with her on this, but I said, "You were missing an a very important ingredient." Grit alone is just grit. And I actually in the book used entropy as the missing ingredient because when you apply entropy to grit, you have to be intentional about where that entropy is being directed.

16:57 If not, that grit can go to either something that is going to take your life to a greater place or it's going to take it in the opposite direction.

17:06 Exactly. So I I personally loved how you used it in the book and understood what you were saying. I want to get back to what you were just talking about though with how mattering is something that really distinguishes us from all the other species on the planet because I think it gets back to that moment we began asking ourselves whether our lives deserve the attention that we give them and I think that's where we cross into a distinctly human problem. Why does self-reflection turn life into an existential question at that point rather than merely a biological one?

17:46 Because it brings us into that realm of justification that we the whole so I define mattering whether we're talking about what matters or who matters as deserving of attention. Deserving is actually both those words deserving and attention are really interesting. Attention. Yeah, that's something to be empirically explored. Bi neuroscientists and cognitive scientists. It's a scientific question. Attention deserving. That's what philosophers call a normative concept. It has to do with ought rather than is. And the fact that we are asking this question of ourselves, am I deserving of my attention brings us into this realm of justification that we are trying to justify ourselves to ourselves. We have to live with ourselves 24/7 and be very aware of how much attention we are paying to ourselves. There's the default network mode when you're not being paying attention to external stimuli when you're fantasizing and

19:05 daydreaming and what psychologists have told us. What are you thinking about then yourself? You're fantasizing about yourself or you're remembering about yourself that we and we have to do that. This is what our brains are wired to do. attention evolves as an adaptation to help us survive and to flourish. And of course, you know, we're always paying attention to ourselves. When we're paying attention to the environment, we're paying attention to how that environment is affecting ourselves. So, we have to put ourselves front first and foremost. But when we step outside ourselves and it may not be very conscious, but it's there at some level.

19:47 We step outside ourselves and we see how much attention we pay to ourselves as if we're the most important thing in the universe. I think it sets up a kind of unease and we want to address that unease and that brings us into the sphere of justification of values something entirely different under the sun. I think it's beautiful. I think it is what we mean when we talk about the intrinsic dignity of every human that we all claim to acknowledge that there's a certain intrinsic dignity to every human. It is because we take on this extra burden of justifying the application of the laws of nature to ourselves. Are we really worthy of we have to act this way? This is what biology has determined for us. But we can ask the justificatory question. It brings us into an entirely different realm and that's what it is to be human.

20:48 So we take on this extra burden. It makes human life all life is hard. You got to struggle against entropy. It's hard. But human life is so much harder. You have to convince yourself that you are deserving of the struggle. That's amazing. And that is what we all hold within us. That's something estimable. That's something even when we lose patience with things that our fellow human beings are doing, it's good to remember how hard it is to be human.

21:22 So I want to go to my origin point on mattering and how I got involved with this and then we'll come back. I was taking a deeply spiritual course somewhere around 2005 2006 time frame where I immersed myself in a 34-week study of the Bible. I met twice a week in a small group and we explored all aspects of this from a philosophical standpoint because the person who was guiding it not only had a doctorate in theology, he also had a doctorate in philosophical history. And so it it was really an eye-opening experience. But throughout this process, I started to get these unworldly callings that I was supposed to go out and help the lonely, the broken, the burned out, the battered, the helpless of the world. And I had no idea at the time. I was a senior executive at Lowe's in the IT group. Had no idea why I was being asked to do this thing or how these things were even interrelated.

22:36 But now as I have seen the loneliness epidemic and the staggering statistics that we have in both adolescent and adult rises and depression and anxiety and more people burned out and disengaged and helpless. I started to figure out these all these things can't be isolated. They have to be symptoms of something that is larger.

23:02 Yeah. And when I started to really analyze this and started looking at this from a spiritual layer, a scientific layer, a philosophical layer, it all took me to matter.

23:16 Yeah. And when you lose it, these are the things that starts happening across society when this most important thing of our human makeup starts to erode. So I wanted to put that out there so you understood how I came at this. Yeah.

23:33 But I think it's important for listeners because you draw an important distinction in the book and I think it's an important one that people don't contemplate and that is the distinction between connectedness which a lot of people are talking about today and mattering.

23:49 Yeah. We often treat them as the same but philosophically they're very different. And I'm hoping you you might help with that explanation.

23:58 Thank you. Thank you. That is I have found in trying to discuss these ideas that is the conflation that people seem to naturally make that makes it very hard for me to talk about what I actually mean here to try to uncover it. One is very obvious to us that we need to matter to others. So we the same notion mattering is used in connectedness that we need there need to be certain people in our lives who will pay us attention whether we deserve it or not. Hopefully all of us had this experience as very young children in our families. That is the point of families to make everybody in the family but most especially children if there are children in the family to feel that they matter that they're deserving of attention. We are born exceedingly helpless, more helpless than all other animals. And that's because again these big brains are in order to get these heads out of the birth canal, which is difficult enough. Take it from

25:12 someone who gave birth that in order to get these big brains out of the birth canal, they have to come out very prematurely. only 30% developed in that first year of of life. The brains grow enormously. That's why when you bring an infant to the pediatrician, they are measuring the circumference of their heads because those heads have got to double in size or something. I don't remember exactly what the number is, but they grow really fast. And so, we're born incredibly helpless. And it takes a very long time for our brains to develop into our early 20s when the most important the preffrontal loes the place of maturity of responsibility of taking being accountable of thinking before you act all of that stuff you impulse control finally comes into being locks into place. So it's like there's very little time between your brains finally coming into maturity and the first wrinkle you start. So why there's the these

26:24 brains are the most complicated thing we've yet discovered in the universe. Yeah. Anyway, so it we have got to be born into families into caretakers who will pay us attention even if we don't deserve it. How much detention does a little baby deserve? They're not doing anything extraordinary. Six months, they finally roll over and we're all applauding that. How helpless we are, right? Because if we don't have these caretakers taking paying us exquisite attention, we die. And that need for there to be others in our lives, friends, family, lovers, co-workers, community members, whoever you have in your life. That continues throughout our lives that they're my friends are paying me attention even when I screw up when I don't have to prove to them how worthy I am. They are my friends. That's what it is to have people in your life. And that is a need we all have this mattering to others and it has to do with our relationship to

27:33 others. Hopefully it's reciprocal. Hopefully we also pay them attention but not everybody does. They just want the attention and they don't give it back. Anyway, mattering instinct is something else. It's our relationship with ourselves. It comes from this existential moment. It's it's almost like a Becket play. In fact, Samuel Beckett writes about this moment over and over again. this kind of strangeness when we step outside of ourselves and interrogate ourselves as if almost we're another person saying, "Well, who are you? Why are you so devoted single-mindedly to your own survival and flourishing? Why are you paying yourself so much attention? You're not so very important. You're no more important than anybody else." And then you try to do something to close that gap. And that's what I mean by the mattering instinct.

28:23 And you may do it through your social relationships. That's what I call socializers, but you may do it spiritually, religiously that you the kind of studying that you were talked about. You may do it in terms of your you have certain standards of excellence that you need to realize in order to to feel okay about yourself. It may be very grand. Steve Jobs had said you have to make a dent in the universe. Well, not all of us are born to make a dent in the universe. It may raising prized patunias. It may be raising flourishing children. There are different ways that we standards that we may have intellectual artistic entrepreneurial athletic, military, ethical that we need to realize in order to feel yeah I'm okay. I'm I can tolerate my own existence. It may be competitive when these are the four different what I call the continents of the matter map and just about everybody I've spoken to over

29:26 the past 40 years since I've been interested in this subject. I wouldn't say just about just yeah everybody falls into one of these four grand categories. But then there are so many ways that these are realized. So many and that's just so fascinating this kind of diversity in us.

29:48 Thank you for sharing that Rebecca and I want to go into those quadrants here in just a little bit but summarize what you were just saying is

29:56 connectedness concerns how we matter to others and this is how most people perceive mattering.

30:05 Yeah. However, you and I would say I argue that mattering really concerns how we matter to ourselves.

30:11 Yeah. And this turn inward carries so much more moral and psychological weight when you think of it this way. And I started to think about this because at that same time I was given that calling, this group I inherited at Lowe's out of 300 something thousand employees was the most disengaged group in the entire company. And when I got to the root of the issue, it the issue wasn't about how they were relating to others. Everyone else thought they they were a bunch of buffoons and I should get rid of the entire group. But what I realized was the breakdown was happening because almost to a person, none of the people in the group understood how they mattered to themselves. Yeah. how the role that they were doing mattered in the bigger scheme of Lowe's. Like how does my job as a computer operator or someone in the data center or working in a call center impact a customer experience? And when

31:15 they don't understand that, and I think this is what so few companies really understand, they're never going to gonna be able to do the things you want them to. And that's why I really think

31:28 and I recently wrote a CEO weekly article about this that the group of people that we are not spending enough time with in these organizations if you think about it that way is frontline managers. When I was in the military these are your corporals or sergeants but they're the frontline supervisors. And if those people don't have

31:50 a return on energy if they don't believe they matter Yeah. then everything else in your company is going to break down.

31:58 Yeah. Is what I realized. And so when I rebuilt this group, I had to start from there. How do you start making those employees, those frontline supervisors feel that they matter? Because then it carries the ripple effect forward and then they develop the relationship with their subordinates and teach them that they matter too. And that's how mattering the mattering instinct starts expanding. That's what I found.

32:27 I think that is extremely interesting. But I do just want to point out that for a lot of people, they really don't derive their mannering from their work. They work in order to make a living, to support themselves and perhaps their family. And so many people I've spoken to are of that kind. But that they're the real mattering that what I mean this existential project that makes them feel that they have a reason to live and that gives us them the impetus to get on with the future because it's hard to live a human life. They just can't stress that enough that they're deriving it from something else. So, of course, it's very good to make people feel as if they matter in the workplace. It's a moral imperative to try to make people feel they matter wherever they are and to make them aware of how much they matter in that situation. Your Uber driver, the cashier in the grocery store, everybody to treat

33:30 them as if they matter and to make that and and point out the special things that they do that make them matter is it's just it feeds the soul. It really feeds the soul. But I do want to just say that for some people, for example, there's this movement that's rather big among philosophers, effective altruism. And I said, take any job that's going to pay the most money so you can give the most charity. Work for Wall Street, work, work for whatever, even if it's not meaningful work for you. What will give it meaning is that you're doing it in order to be an altruist, to make as much money as you can, in order to give it away. So these are people who definitely do not are not going to derive any their mattering from the work itself but from what they're going to do with this money.

34:19 I recently had a discussion with Joshua Green and it was basically on on those whole that whole line.

34:25 Exactly. But there there's this interview I did a while back with this gentleman Dr. Abraham George and he came over here from India to escape India and became a prominent business person in New York, built all this wealth and then actually went back to India because he saw how big a gap was there for so many people and he ended up creating this institution called Shanti Bavin I think is the name of it and put his altruism to work and since that time he has now taken 15,000 children who are in the lowest cast system and these children now are New York Times bestselling authors and have attended Ivy League schools and he has changed the complete dimensions for now tens of thousands of people and I think it does show how that ripple effect that you were just talking about can change lives. It is Freud had said that the two cornerstones of humanists are love and work. And I think the fact that he said work or I would say

35:35 mattering it shows us a lot about Freud no surprise he derived his sense of mattering from his scientific work which was revolutionary and but not everybody deres their sense of mattering from their work and that to me is has been the most interesting thing to to use this framework to try to understand

35:57 other people and it's to get to the core of other people, what is it that's driving them? How are they trying to appease this longing?

36:08 Yeah. I And I think an interesting take on this is if you look at Victor Frankle. So if you look at how he defined the ways we achieve meaning, he did identify work as one of them. But he also identified relationships that we find ourselves in. So you could be a caretaker to a loved one who's going through a terrible sickness and you find meaning in that or you could find meaning in the love that you have for a child or a partner. But he also finds you can find meaning or I would extend it to mattering in suffering. So it's not just about work this and I think that's what makes it unique is mattering is completely dependent on each of us as individuals. It's so that's where yeah it's where our real individuality comes out and free will is a big issue for philosophers right and I would say if it exists anywhere it exists on this plane this plane of trying to respond to this shared mattering instinct and which

37:12 brings us into this realm of values and we choose different values and some are choosing I tell stories of people who choose what I would call wrong values and I tried to give the criterion for distinguishing for between better and worse ways of responding to this. And if I wake up tomorrow morning and decide I have to invade Poland, my my sense of mattering demands it. Well, then my sense of mattering may demand that, but I must be stopped because this is a destructive way of responding to the mattering instinct.

37:47 And we do see very destructive ways of responding to it. And I would say some of the worst atrocities we've seen throughout history. And if we open today's newspaper, we will see very damaging ways of responding to this. But it's deeply human. So no wonder it can lead to atrocities and no wonder it can lead to beautiful acts of altruism and achievement and scientific discovery and artistic creativity and all of that. Let's take a break here before we go into the four quadrants, which I definitely want to go into to maybe talk about one of these stories. So, I'll maybe let you pick one. But in the book, you talk about Spinosa, you talk about William James, you talk about Freud, who you brought up earlier, but is there a particular story that you feel might resonate the best for the listeners?

38:43 Yeah, I bring up these stories in to illustrate different aspects of this mattering longing, but but perhaps William James because I think the story of William James, the great philosopher and psychologist. In fact, at Harvard down the street from where I am now, the psychology building was called William James Hall. Harvard is very proud of him. I think he illustrates it especially when you could put him in a combination with his sister Ellis James. But it so William was born into a an amazing family. His younger brother by 18 months was Henry James the novelist. William James is the oldest of five children and then there were two other boys after Henry and then a sister Alice James. And William James the father was a kind of he didn't have to work for a living. He had inherited money but he was a independent scholar Swedenborgian mystic and William James was extraordinarily talented intellectually

39:54 artistically scientifically philosophically a very close-knit family. The connectedness was there. Super there. When William decided he wanted to be an artist, they all took off and moved from Boston to Newport, Rhode Island, so that he could study with a famous artist there. The whole family decamped and he certainly in terms of connectedness, it was all in place. And he suffered, he decided he was not going, he wasn't a good enough artist. And there's nothing more contemptable than being a mediocre artist. He had these already, this is a heroic strivver, right? That that he has these standards of excellence that must be met in order for him to live in peace with himself. So he then he goes to medical school and he's not inspired by medical school. He goes through it. He becomes a doctor. He never practices. He goes into a deep depression, almost a catatonic depression where he would just lie in

40:54 bed and contemplate suicide for months and months on end, right? And he doesn't not commit suicide because he wouldn't do that to his family. But that is how tenuous his hold on life was, his engagement with life. And it's such a amazing he doesn't he writes about it in one of his great books the varieties of religious experience. He says it w he attributes it to an a French doctor but he told his son and also his translator his French translator that it was himself that he was describing here was a first-person account of what it is like to be in a deep clinical depression. Then he pulls himself out of it. He decides his first act of free will be to believe in free will and he will act as if his life is worth living and he latches on to what I call a mattering project. He becomes a philosopher and all of that energy was that was all over the place and is focused on this one area which then

41:58 merges into psychology and he is a man of extraordinary energy. Everybody writes about him. He was physical energy and mental energy and social energy. He is but constantly battling a kind of melancholic what they called in the 19th century a mel depressive temperament when he accomplished a tremendous amount. His principles of psychology still read. It's magnificent. And he's a psychologist who who writes like a novelist. and his brother Henry James is a novelist who writes like a psychologist. Two extraordinary talents.

42:36 He was a heroic ster. He needed that project to to carry that so that he could accomplish these great things in order for him to be able to live with himself. His sister on the other hand Alice was a Victorian woman. There was no outlet for her when she she kept a diary and it was finally published in the 1970s. It was feminist project to bring out this diary of this Victorian woman and she did suffer her entire life from depression. She constantly was fighting off suicide. She became a per a permanent invalid. Couldn't leave her bed and did get a lot of attention from her family in this way but was was life was not a joyful endeavor for her. And when she actually got breast cancer at the age of I think 41 or 42, she greeted it with glee. Now she could retire. Now she had a diagnosible disease and she could just retreat and wait for death. It's almost like a controlled experiment. Two people raised

43:44 in the same household, the same close-knit connected household and the same kind of temperament. Neurotic. Yes. Both of them had were neurotic, but one was given an a way to find himself to a mannering project that could allow him to live with himself and feel like he was realizing what he was meant to do and the other wasn't. And you see the results, you know, how it was. So for me, this family, this amazing family and especially these two siblings really demonstrate something about the distinction between connectedness and the mattering instinct.

44:23 I just wanted to share a couple more things about this because I this is one of the things I loved about your book is how much detail you you put into these stories. So what you just left out that I think is important is that out of these five kids, their father chose the the two oldest to be his a parent and the ones that he wanted to glorify the family name that he wasn't able to in his lifetime. So he did extraordinary things for William and Henry, including the fact that he moved the whole family just so that William could try to pursue his artistic ventures. And then when it failed, he moved him back. And when William James went to Harvard, Harvard isn't what we think about today. Harvard was a stumbling, not nearly as well respected institution as it is today when William arrived there. And I think he in many ways I can see why they put so much behind his name because he in many ways put them completely on the

45:27 map. But another distinction that you really make is that the father allowed the two younger boys to go out to war when they were 16 and 17 years old, which caused both of them to end up with unfulfilling lives because of the experiences that they had in battle in many ways. And then the daughter who was brilliant, as brilliant as the two older boys, was never given the same mattering foundation as the two older boys were, which I think impacted her own self mattering.

46:07 Yeah. In huge ways. And it was only in the twilight of her life when she found her partner who who made her feel like she mattered that I think she truly became alive. So I think those are other really important parts that you bring about in the book.

46:24 Yeah. Well, actually the most fulfilling part of her life when she just did not have the ideation, the suicide ideiation was a brief period when she was able to teach other women. there was a some kind of group that allowed women to teach other women and and then she felt fulfilled and then was she was and she did it's true that her Katherine Luring partner towards the end of her life was it was a very fulfilling relationship but she needed when you have that much talent you need a way of expressing it of trying to develop these ideas or develop your beautiful sentences. She had the writing gift and she had that heightened consciousness of consciousness that all of the James siblings had. But yeah, they're extraordinary family. But I have a novel called The Dark Sister in which William James is is a character there. But the way that William, you know, that the way he was able to pull himself out was just

47:32 I'm going to commit to life and that means committing to a certain project. It turned out to be a highly intellectual project, not artistic, but he was a heroic ster. And I think there's some there is some evidence comes from p the psychology of personality that we have a a structure to our temperament. So that some of us are more interested in close relationships, some of us in achievement, some of us in power. This so there's this theory, the Murray Mlelen theory of personality that groups us into these three different types. And there's some correlation with my quadrants, my continents, the four continents of the matter map.

48:17 Transcenders, what I call transcenders, those who seek it in some manner, in some religious or spiritual way is not included in this. But transcenders, I think, come in three different forms. Affiliator, those who are driven by need for affiliation, those who are driven by achievement, and those who are driven by the need for power. So the religious impulse can express itself in many different ways. Well, this is where I wanted to go anyhow. So,

48:49 great. So, in the book, in the mattering map, you bring out transcenders, which you just mentioned, socializers, heroic strivvers, which you mentioned William James was, and competitors. And the reason you do this, as I interpret it, is you're trying to show how widely human responses to the same instinct diverge. And another thing that I thought was really important is that the matter mattering instinct is not circular. What I thought is the fact that we long to matter doesn't automatically justify how we pursue mattering was an important distinction that you made.

49:28 So with that setup, can you take us through the four quadrants? Thanks. Thanks for mentioning it's not circular. That would be very damning if it was and I gave that a lot of thought that it not be circular. So transcenders, heroic strivvers, socializers and competitors and I can say they can all go right and they can all go wrong. Then I'll talk about how I try to distinguish between right and wrong responses. But transgenders this is a very this is a kind yeah religious spiritual response to mattering. It requires the person the transcender to have a belief that there is some transcendent transmpirical beyond space and time being to whom one matters. that the trans whether you call the transcendent being God or something more spiritual and vague but yet that the universe is is permeated by the goals the intentions of this being and this being intentionally created oneself that you exist by reason of this transcendent

50:41 being God or whatever you call it and that and that that means that this being thinks that felt that you have a purpose to play in the narrative of eternity. This is the grandest narrative that that could possibly exist and that this results in a great sense of mattering. You you cosmically matter. That which created heaven and earth and the moral otter created you. I was born as a in into a transcender field of family. That's my background. I was born into a very religious family. I was raised very religiously and I was very religious.

51:26 I'm have a serious nature. So when I was religious, I took it very seriously. In my tradition, for example, men are required to pray three times a day every day. Women are not. I did right. I took that on myself. and and the sense of mattering I've experienced it is very strong. I felt then I did something wrong when I violated one of the many laws that go into lead leading a a Jewish orthodox life. Orthodoxy is what I was brought up in. I felt that I was displeasing God himself. That God was paying attention that and that was terrifying. But I never doubted how much I mattered. I mattered to God. My very action all my actions mattered to God.

52:13 That is a very strong sense of mattering and and pe as we well know transcenders will give up their lives. That's what religious martyrs do if they feel that that is required by what grounds their mattering which is one of the points I make in the book that our our need to matter is stronger our will to matter is stronger than the will to life itself. you will you can sacrifice your life if you think that it your mattering demands that. So those are transgenders and they're really interesting to me especially given my background and

52:49 Jonavar is a great example of someone who gave up her life. Yes. Exactly. Because she pursued her mattering in

52:56 Exactly. And she says as the fire is lit, hold the cross up so that I can see it. Okay. I'm going to start crying. I mean this is very moving. Hold the cross up so I can see it through the flames. This is very moving. You know that this is many members of our species have this is the way they ground the and I think one of the reasons that we feel this crisis of mattering is that most of us are no longer religious in that way. We may go to church, synagogue, mosque, but we don't ground our very mattering on on these religious beliefs and other things have moved in to take its place. fame, power, money, these sorts of things shallower. And that also I should say that not everybody can achieve, not everybody can be famous, not everybody can be a billionaire, not everybody can be powerful. But when the days of religion or spirituality really grounding the sense of mattering, everybody could have a part in that. And

53:59 so that is that has some things to do with why mattering has a lot of other things have to do with it as well. But one of the factors that goes into why there is a crisis of mattering not that I'm in favor of or all be it's so interesting I I'll get this literature sometime saying showing that believers religious believers have the greater sense of meaningfulness in their life of manner in this life. This is not surprising to think that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. Nothing else can compete with that. You I'll get this literature and it's put in the guise of so therefore be religious as if that's not how religion works.

54:40 It's not It always reminds me it's like joining the health club, you'll be healthier. Well, become a religious believer, you feel like you matter more. That's not how religious belief works. I know because I was once a believer. So there are heroic strivvers and heroic strivvers also very interesting the these are people who have some it's not mattering to God it's not mattering to others in a heroic strive a true heroic striveor it really is a matter of these standards of excellence that you have to fulfill or at least feel like you're getting closer to making progress toward in order for your life to feel meaningful. in order for you to have a purpose and for it to make sense. And I do pay a lot of attention to heroic strivvers in the book. And maybe that's shows something about me, but these are a kind of person I understand very well. But I'm particularly interested in those who were really not trying to impress others

55:45 that were to really show that this is about realizing a standard of excellence for yourself and so that you can respect yourself, respect, redeem yourself in your own eyes. And one of the for me most touching stories comes from my personal life. I have a very good friend. She's a writer and Megan Marshall. She's a Pulitzer Prizewinning biographer and she had a partner who had once named Scott Harney who had hopes of being a poet and studied at Harvard with Robert Lowell and it wasn't going at all well. He sent out his poems. They were not published. He tried to get he entered every contest. He did not win and then he turned away from poetry and after unfortunately he died young and he after Woods Megan found a stash of poetry on which he had been constantly working. He never sent it out again. The rejections were poisoning it for him, right? But he worked just as hard and he and his poems are magnificent and you

56:55 see all of the effort and that was his mattering project. He was going making progress towards this and it was not to win other people's applause or anything like that. It was just to feel like he was doing something with his life that it was not a waste. He was in dialogue not with his contemporaries but with the great poets of the past. And so this really to me this story really demonstrated what it is to be a heroic stver. And it's the applause. They may come they may not. They couldn't come for him because nobody else not even his partner knew what he was up to. After his death his book was published to great acclaim. This reminds me of the story of I recently had Mark Nepo on the show and he was telling me that people now are very aware of the book of spiritual awakening because it sold like 30 million copies. But it wasn't his first book. It was many books in the way. And up until Oprah discovered it

58:00 through her yoga teacher, he told me it it had sold maybe 1,200 copies and it was really her who propelled it. So he's another one who I think the purpose was more in the mastery of what he was trying to put on words than it ever was the global attention and recognition that he deserved from it.

58:24 Yeah. Yeah. How I took my meeting with him. Yes. So, should we go on to the next one? I could talk more about her role.

58:30 Yes. No. Let's go to the next one. Socializers. Most people who I speak to, and I tell you, if you're sitting next to me on a long trip, on a bus or a train or a plane, sooner or later, I'm going to be asking you questions about what gets you up in the morning, what, you know, what could go wrong in your life that would make you feel like you're living your life all wrong. these kinds of existentially probing questions and everybody eventually has a story to tell me about it. But most people as soon as I start talking about mattering they just automatically supply the term mattering to others. Now part of that is because of this connectedness that is a need for all of us. Without deep connections, people in our lives to whom we matter, oh what do we feel?

59:20 Lonely. That's what loneliness is. when you don't have people who are just going to pay you attention who think that you matter but mattering when it's mattering the result of not feeling like you matter as we see from William James story is depression it's and in fact the suicide helpline in the US is www.youatter.gov you

59:48 matter.com and I have spent a lot of time talking to depressed people. I since heroic strivvers by the way are very prone to depression of this sort. It's hard to be living a living thing. It's even harder to be human. It's extremely hard to be a heroic stver, right? You have these standards of excellence that you have to feel like you're making progress towards otherwise you feel disgusted with yourself. That's what depression is. It's self- disgust. You don't want to be in the presence of yourself any longer. It's like a psychological autoimmune disease. You're fighting against yourself. So, how did I get back on heroic strivvers? Yeah, there you go. I But we're talking about socializers. For socializers, it's the mattering to others that really satisfies the mattering instinct and and it might be mattering to others who are in your life. So that the need for connectedness and for mattering are

1:00:52 really collapsed into one. So a mother who's living for her children or romantic partners who are living for each other or that really that's what the mattering is grounded on or it could be mannering to others with whom you who are really not in your life who may be a bunch of strangers. That's what the desire for fame is. And the desire for fame I found especially among young people is very strong that many pe young people I've spoken to they want to be influencers they want to be paid a lot of attention by a lot of people most of whom are strangers that's what fame is and it makes sense if you're trying to convince yourself that you're deserving of all your of of your own attention the fact that so many others are paying you so much attention is good evidence that you're deserve serving. It makes you feel like you matter. It's it seems to quench that existential need. So, it's understandable. I've spoken to a lot of

1:01:55 famous people and some of them find that fame is the piss. They don't like it and it's very insecure. I'll tell one story about that that to me captured it. Again, it was something I personally witnessed. I was at a party and there was a very famous writer there. It was an academic party, but this was a writer in residence, extremely famous. So the name would be known by everybody and a fellow philosopher came up and was in the little conversation cluster and he's philosopher. He's he's clueless, right? And he asked her name and she told it and then he said, "Oh, and what do you do?" She said, "This conversation is over." Turned on her heel and walked away. And that really to me epitomized what an insecure grounding fame is. If you can't tolerate one clueless philosopher not knowing what you do and that that would hurt you that that's shows the kind of insecurity of going after your mattering by way of fame. It's nice to

1:03:09 have a lot of people paying attention to you. And there's one story. It's a movie star. I forgot his name. He's a famous movie star. I can't remember his name. But anyway, he wanted it. He was a little sick of always being swamped when he went out and everybody wanted to take selfies with him. So, he put on a prosthetic nose and glasses and changed his hair and he went to a mall in LA and he said, "Yeah, this really sucks. Nobody was coming over to me and want telling me how much they love me and how can I curse on this?

1:03:42 Sure. Well, no. Well, he just said, "No, nobody nobody I had to wait online to get a freaking cup of coffee." This sucks. I want to be famous. That's true. People treat the famous very nicely. And for some people, it works. And for for some people, it doesn't. But it is a kind of insecurity. The public is fickle. They're paying a lot of attention to you today. But as it dips, if that's what your mattering is founded on, you can find yourself in a very bad place. So yeah, and in the cults, this also has to do with mattering a lot to the cult leader. And there's a called trickle down mattering.

1:04:18 There are socializers come in very many different flavors as well. And then there are competitors that that's the last and those are the one kind of person that when I would talk about mattering they would become uneasy and a little defensive because sensitively questioning it is revealed that they think of mattering as zero sum. They are in competition with others as to their mattering. To the extent that others matter they matter less. was a piece of the pie and and here too I notic there are two very different kinds of competitors some of which are individually competitive and it may be in one sphere for example one scientists who I know who won a Nobel Prize and his another friend of his a mutual friend said to me that ex was happy for all of 15 minutes when he got that call from Stockholm And then he remembered that other people had also gotten Nobel prizes and of happiness. So he was a very strong

1:05:28 competitor but he did very wonderful work. He contributed to science. So even he's contributed something. You can do wonderful things if you are driven by competition. Then there are those who are group competitors. They feel like they belong to a group that most matters and and they're in zero sum competition with other groups, especially if they feel that these other groups matter less but yet are being regarded as mattering more. It's taking away their mattering. And one person that I go into great detail telling his story because his story is amazing is a former neo-Nazi skin head who grew up rough and bad in his family. His mother was a addict. His stepfather was a brute and Frank dropped out of school by the age of 13. He came into contact with some neo-Nazis. They said to him, "Look in the mirror. You matter. You are a white male heterosexual American. You matter more than anybody else in the world because

1:06:38 of this group identity and these other people whom they call the mud people of color. They are taking away your mattering and the Jews are behind it. The great replacement theory. So he became a fervent a full-time neonazi activist. He did terrible things. He'll be the first one to tell you. He came out of it. He saw the fallacy, the idiocy, he would say, of his ideology, but he grabbed hold of this way of trying to answer his own need to matter with all of his life force and devoted everything to it and did terrible things as he would tell you and has spent the rest of his life doing penance for that.

1:07:22 This is one of the most amazing stories of somebody who changed his location on the matter map. He lives for something else now. He lives for you. I would call him a heroic an ethical heroic stver. Anyway, those are the four types.

1:07:38 Rebecca, thank you for taking them through us. So, I want to close on this. Rebecca, one of the mattering instincts most humane implications is that mattering makes us vulnerable to being wounded by the world. How should that change how we judge one another?

1:07:54 Yeah, it's hard to be human. It really is hard to be human. This is crazy. I still didn't hear makes us vulnerable to say it again to

1:08:03 being w to being wounded wounded by the world. So that how does that change that woundedness? How does that change how we judge one another?

1:08:14 That it might be that our mattering project makes us dependent on on others even if we're heroic strivvers. I tell the story of Scott Joplain the great ragtime composer but he wanted to do something so much grander he composed operas couldn't get them produced gave everything to this and they're marvelous there's a tree we know about treemanitia which was one of the operas and but he was a black man in Jim Crow times nobody was going to produce his opera ragtime jazz that was acceptable but so sometimes there is a sort of clash between what we need to do to feel that we matter and what the world wants from us and they don't want that from us and we need them to want this from us or sometimes a romantic longing. This is the person whose love you need in order to quench your thirst to matter and maybe they like you for a little while but then they leave you or maybe they never. It makes us depending

1:09:21 on what our mattering project is. It can make us dependent on getting the right response from the world and that makes us that can wound us deeply and we have to think about how to respond to that. We sometimes we have to change how we seek our mattering. AI now faces us. It may be stealing our mattering away from us. Able to do our creative tasks better than we can. And so all creatives will be facing an existential dilemma. Can they really matter when AI can do it better? So there are all sorts of things that can go wrong here which is I think there are practical ways that we can try to meet this depending how it plays out in our lives and the lives of others.

1:10:10 But one thing we really ought to be giving freely is our kind of mercy toward one another. And in in realizing this burden that everybody faces wherever there is human life, there is the quivering longing to matter that makes us vulnerable to being wounded by the world and we should have mercy on one another. Rebecca, my last question to you, and I'm interested to hear your reply, is what does it mean for you to live a passion struck life?

1:10:46 Yeah. Well, my passion, I think, is obvious. I love knowledge. I'm going to tell you the truth. I want to know everything. I just want to know everything. And I want to be able to fit that all together in some meaningful way that will be helpful to add something to if I'm not for myself then who will be for me but if I'm only for myself then what am I? I live by that and but for me personally it's understanding things un trying to understand things on a large scale how it all fits together. Yeah, that is that that's my passion. My passion is also to love others and that's is very hard sometimes. We are all extremely flawed and this framework that's allowed me to I think try to understand others is it's not to forgive everything about others.

1:11:44 We do terrible things to each other by getting I think this wrong this mattering instinct wrong. But I would say love and knowledge. This these are my passions.

1:11:55 Rebecca, it was such an honor to have you today. Thank you so much for joining me on Passion Struct and congratulations on this amazing work mattering instinct that you've brought to the world.

1:12:06 Well, thank you so much for understanding what it's about. Um, thank you very much.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Why the Need to Matter Can Save Us or DESTROY Us | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein"?

Rebecca Goldstein (Guest), John Armiles (Host).

What is "Why the Need to Matter Can Save Us or DESTROY Us | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein" about?

The discussion centers on the concept of the "mattering instinct," emphasizing the deep human desire to feel significant and how our diverse identities shape responses to this need. It explores the critical distinction between constructive and destructive ways of fulfilling this longing, ultimately underscoring the potential for this instinct to either elevate our lives or lead to turmoil.

What is mentioned in this John R. Miles episode?

14 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including The Mattering Instinct, Rebecca Goldstein, John Armiles, Marty Seligman, Passion Struck, Angela Duckworth. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Why the Need to Matter Can Save Us or DESTROY Us | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein"?

The episode runs 1 h 12 min; the transcript is about 11,045 words in 103 timestamped sections.

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