Our survival isn’t enough.
I make no apologies for providing little of my own words and just going straight to this video and the accompanying text.
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What if the deepest human drive isn’t happiness, survival, or even love, but the need to matter?
Philosopher and MacArthur Fellow Rebecca Newberger Goldstein joins Michael Shermer to discuss The Mattering Instinct, her argument that the desire to feel significant lies at the core of human behavior. That drive helps explain our greatest achievements, from creativity and moral courage to scientific and artistic excellence. It also helps explain some of our darkest outcomes, including extremism, violence, and ideological fanaticism.
Goldstein examines why people will give up comfort, status, and sometimes even their own lives to feel that they matter. She questions why meaning cannot be captured by happiness metrics or self-help formulas, and why the same psychological force can produce saints, scientists, athletes, cult leaders, and terrorists. The conversation moves through free will, entropy, morality without God, fame, narcissism, and the crucial difference between ways of mattering that create order and those that leave damage behind.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University and has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, her work has been supported by the MacArthur “Genius” grant and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting Institute, Radcliffe Institute, and the National Science Foundation. She is the author of ten books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction. Her latest book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.
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So, please watch this video!
Learning from Dogs 
I think we all struggle for meaning in a life which has no clean boundaries, where time death is unknown. Some of us discover it quietly in writing or art, others want desperately to be heard. And many are attached to outcomes. I am not one of them, I release my offerings into the world that cares or it does not. Doesn’t stop the process.
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I would slightly amend your opening sentence and change it to “the great majority ...” For example, I would not thought that Isaac Newton struggled for a meaning in his life. But saying that 99.9 percent of people struggle for a meaning is probably correct.
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Well, “I” would say that’s likely the difference between a scientist’s mind and a poet’s. But point taken 😉 Btw, who says Newton didn’t struggle for meaning in his life? I mean, all these years later, who Can say? xo
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Bela, your remark about Newton is spot on. Who can say?
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