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Okay, let's get into it.
Hello and welcome back to the show.
I'm Patrick.
I'm excited for you to be here.
I'm excited for this conversation.
I'm joined by Rebecca Neuberger-Goldstein.
How are you?
I'm great.
Happy to be here.
I'm good.
I'm happy to have you here.
A little bit of bio on you for folks so that we get a little bit of context.
You're a philosopher and a novelist.
I kind of want to talk to you about what it means to be a philosopher these days.
We may get to that.
You're a MacArthur Fellow for your work dramatizing the concerns of philosophy through imaginative storytelling.
You are the recipient of the National Humanities Award, awarded by President Obama, for bringing philosophy into conversation with culture.
You are the author of 11 books spanning philosophy and fiction, and the book we're going to talk about today recently released.
It's called The Mattering Instinct How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.
Thank you so much for being here, Rebecca.
Thank you.
Pleasure.
I'm excited to talk to you about this idea about the mattering instinct.
And specifically, what I really wanted to talk to you about was a concept or an idea inside the book that you've called mattering projects.
I'm a sucker for the word project.
So like it immediately stuck out at me.
And as I was reading, I kept highlighting anything that where you were writing about projects.
So I'm hoping that we can spend most of our time today talking about what that is, why it matters and what we can do with the concept once we have a decent sense of it.
So what are mattering projects and how does it fit into this broader conversation in the book about what you've called the mattering instinct?
Yeah.
So maybe I should start with that.
And maybe I should even start with saying what I mean by mattering.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a word we use all the time.
It's a noun, matter, the very stuff of the universe.
And then we have this verb, to matter, that we apply to questions of what matters and who matters.
And most, maybe most urgently in our lives, do I matter?
Right.
I call this the mother matter.
The mother question of all mattering questions.
And it really motivates us to think about what matters in making for a life that matters because we don't want to waste this one and only life.
So, and that's the mattering instinct pretty much.
Freud had said that there are two cornerstones to our humanness, love and work.
Yep.
And I would amend that to connectedness.
Respectfully.
Respectfully.
Thank you for adding that to connectedness.
You know, that we do, we're gregarious creatures.
We evolve from gregarious creatures.
I've spent a lot of time in Africa watching chimpanzees.
And in some ways, I recognize so much that we have in common with the chimpanzees.
Especially, you know the gregariousness, the fact that there are certain members of our species who we need to have in our lives, who are paying us attention, whether we deserve it or not.
That's our sociability, our connectedness.
And psychologists have paid an awful lot of attention to that.
In addition to that, we may see this one species, I think, on all the earth maybe not in all the universe, but on all the earth has this additional requirement, aside from needing to matter to others, to be paid attention to by special others.
Is this mannering instinct, which involves justifying
Here's where the notion of justifying comes in being deserving of not the attention of others, but our own attention.
And that seems almost paradoxical at first.
We just naturally pay attention to ourselves all the time, incessantly.
You know, there's what the cognitive neuroscientists call the default network mode, when we're not paying attention to external reality.
What are we doing?
We're mostly fantasizing daydreams. about ourselves.
So, you know, it's the default and we can't carry on.
No creature can carry on its life an evolved creature that has attention unless it's paying the bulk of its attention to itself.
But we alone have this self-reflective capacity.
We can step outside of ourselves and ask yeah, and see this self-mattering, this pain, so much attention to the self, and ask Why.
Who am I?
Am I deserving of it?
You know, if we measure how much something matters by how much attention we pay to it, then we would each seem to esteem ourselves a thing that matters the most in all the world.
And short of lunacy, we don't.
We realize that we are not the most important thing in all the world.
And it's that, it's that kind of shock.
It's an existential shock.
And it's a more philosophical than psychological shock, because it causes us to think in terms of justification of norms, of justification of values, which I think comes very, very naturally to us because of this mattering instinct, this need to try in some way to justify how seriously we take ourselves, how much attention we give ourselves.
Yeah.
So that's the mattering and seeing.
And, you know, it's so hidden in us that it takes some work to get people to see it.
And I know this because I've been talking to people about this for decades and mostly because I'm so interested in how people respond to this need for self-justification and bringing these values into their lives.
And that's where I get into mannering projects.
It has to do with the great diversity, which is astounding.
The degree of diversity, real diversity, that we bring to this common longing to somehow ground all this attention that we pay to ourselves and prove to ourselves that we matter.
We may use the attention of others to prove it to ourselves, but ultimately we're trying to prove it to ourselves.
And if you don't have intimate connections, people in your life, the kind of things of mattering to others, if you don't have that, we know what the result is.
It's the pain of loneliness.
If you don't have a way of justifying your self-mattering to yourself.
The pain is actually a sense of, you know, really meaninglessness, lack of purpose, lack of coherence in your life.
And in the worst case scenarios and I've spent a lot of time talking to people who suffer from this depression clinical depression whose characteristic statement is I don't matter.
You know, I don't, my life makes no sense.
I might as well not be here.
And along with suicidal ideation.
So it's deep.
And most of us have it can keep it hidden because our mattering projects are working for us, or our mattering projects our response to, to this longing to matter.
And, but they are myriad.
It's amazing.
I come up.
You know there's and this is an idea I came with over 40 years ago the mattering map, like just all the regions of the map, ways that you know a tattoo artist a a, Oh.
Just one example that I was waiting for my husband in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel.
This was quite some years ago.
And somebody guy comes up to me, he's trying to pick me up.
And He's a pick-up artist.
That is his project.
But it's basically what we use to bury this question.
Do I matter?
And a successful, mattering project is one that makes one feel But your life is meaningful in your own eyes and there's purpose, there's coherence.
So the notion of meaningfulness for me is derivative of the first.
You have to understand what mattering is, why we want to ground it.
And out of that comes these mattering projects.
And out of that, we can define what meaningful, what a meaningfulness and lack of meaning is.
Does that make sense?
It does.
Absolutely.
I want to go back just a little bit to what you were talking about with, well, two things.
One.
You have been thinking about this and working on this in some shape or form for many, many years, as you alluded to.
I think you said that the first book you wrote was a book of fiction and it was the spark of this idea was in there and you've been my word, not yours, but you've been wrestling with it ever since.
And the sort of the culmination of this is that's the right word.
The culmination of it is this book.
And so I want to bring that up because I think that's really interesting.
And as you've had these conversations over the years and as this idea has continued to inspire more thought and more work from you, is the thing that people I don't want to say struggle with, but is the surprising part of this, the fact that we are always trying to justify the attention that we give ourselves, because I think like again, you sort of said it, but I think we can all admit we spend entirely too much time thinking about ourselves and acting, or at least thinking about ourselves as the center of the universe, even if almost nobody would say I am in fact the center of the universe and I and I deserve.
So it's the justification that is the point of tension, right?
It is, and it's hard to, yeah, because, you know, justification, that's the stuff of philosophy.
That's, you know, values and all that.
And what I'm really contending is, in some sense, we are not as shallow as we seem.
Even the shallowest among us is not as shallow that you dig and you find.
Yeah, there is at the heart this need to justify ourselves in our own eyes.
And the mentoring project, you know, and we can change our mentoring project.
And, in fact, as you were asking the question, it just occurred to me that I really changed my mentoring project tremendously.
I set out, I came into philosophy from the exact sciences.
I was a math physics person.
And then I became very, very interested in foundations of physics.
Quantum mechanics did me in.
You know that was where I and you know I was bugging my physics professor asking him what does this all mean?
You know how do I attach this theory to a, to this Byzantine theory, to a world that's recognizably like ours?
And he kept saying, no, you know, shut up and calculate basically.
And he told me, and that's not what I, why I got into physics.
You know, I wanted to know what the world was like.
And he finally said, go, go talk to the philosophers.
And I was Columbia and I, I did.
And so, yeah, that was really what I was interested in.
And I went into philosophy of science and was in fact supported as a graduate student by a National Science Foundation fellowship, even though it was philosophy.
So it was a sort of very technical sort of stuff.
And then I got my first job as an assistant professor and I had been through a really existentially charged life.
First year, I had lost my very beloved father, who was my hero, and I had given birth to my first child.
And Suddenly I was thinking, what's my life about?
What's it all about?
What am I doing? am I doing here?
And I'm a philosopher.
I didn't know how to grieve for my father.
And I didn't know, I felt, I didn't know how to bring up a child, really.
And I was a philosopher.
I had a doctorate in philosophy.
And that didn't seem to be giving me any help here in these big questions of how do I face these new challenges in my life.
How do I partition what I have to give my child from what I have to do to get on with my career and all of that kind of thing?
And I found myself suddenly hearing a voice.
I'm often asked what it's like to be married to a genius.
I was married to a very smart man, was my first husband.
He's a very brilliant physicist named Sheldon Goldstein.
That's where I got his name, last name.
But I had never been asked.
We were both very young.
I had never been asked what it was like to be married to a Jesus.
I knew this was the first line.
Either I was going mad, you know, had made the transition from neurotic to psychotic.
I was hearing voices talking to me in my head, or it was the first line of a novel and I chose to believe it was the second.
You know that it was the first line of a novel.
That's a safer bet.
Yeah, that's a safer route to go down.
Yes, right.
And it was really an interesting adventure into another subjectivity, quite different from mine, interested in philosophy but in much more what I would call, back in those days murkier, more you know messy, existential type of questions.
And anyway, so, and I was able, the editor of that book who went on, he was also very young.
He went on to be a legendary editor.
Jonathan Glossy asked me at our first meeting.
He said you know, you know, he had bought the novel and he liked it.
He said, but I really don't understand your main character.
She's very good looking.
She's very bright. very sexually attractive.
She has lots of affairs and sort of gets the plot going.
But she's so unhappy.
She's always on the edge of despair.
And I thought about that.
And then I heard her saying, yeah, because I don't matter in the way that I most want to matter.
And was like a key insight for me, you know, that we have these different ways of needing to matter.
If what most mattered to her, in feeling that she mattered, was being found sexually desirable by tons of men and have to sort of fight them off, she would have not been in despair.
But that was not the region of the mattering map in which she lived.
She lived in a region where she Really, it was ideas that most mattered to her.
She wanted to make a contribution in some way to the world of ideas in order to feel like she mattered.
And she didn't really feel capable of it.
She was filled with self-doubt and hence despair.
So she marries what she wanted to be.
She marries the man of genius, a mathematical genius.
And yeah, and that was not very satisfying either.
And hence the novel. but it was an insight.
Yeah, it was insight.
I thought a general insight into human nature, but I forgot about it.
And I felt like it was kind of a vague idea.
It was something that my fictional character would come up with, not me.
So I have to say that this really freed me in a way.
And that's why I don't poo-poo novels.
My colleagues did.
And my philosophical career in fact Took quite a hit because, oh my God, you know she's supposed to be a philosopher of physics.
And here she is writing a sexy novel.
But it turned out to be for me and what turned out to be my mattering project, which was to figure out mattering in our species.
It turned out to be a really important move.
Which is another thing to bear in mind, that sometimes the way to finding your true mattering project, the one that's going to lead to your don't know to the most your most interest in your own life the thing that really keeps you going and interested engaged in your own life but also might prove helpful to other people two aspects I think of a successful mattering project certainly not undermining other people that is a bad aspect even if it's serving oneself so there's a certain moral aspect that goes into this as well But first and foremost, it has to keep you as far away from existential despair as possible.
Make you feel as if what you're doing is, in your eyes, justifying your attention to yourself enough so that you can live with yourself 24-7, as we are condemned to do.
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I want to ask you more about the mattering map.
But first you have in the book you have a lot of really wonderful stories of people and you tell the story through the lens of their particular mattering project.
Is there one?
I love the one you just gave us of yours, but is there another one from the book that would demonstrate what a mattering project could look like?
Again, I think we're going to get into the hows and the whys of why a mattering project for a certain kind of person works.
But is there one from the book?
That would be a good illustration of what a mattering project could look like.
Yeah.
Well, what do you think of the Frank Mink story?
He's the, what is the word I'm looking for, the skinhead, former skinhead?
Yes, former.
Please, yes.
And I really I mean he's.
Of all the people I ever spoke to, I mean the one who really impressed me the most because he made the most transformation that I've ever learned about.
So he is really very interesting to me.
So I, a subtitle of my book is, is yes, how our deepest longing drives us.
And I think I explained a little bit about that and divides us.
And that is such an important aspect, especially we're living in very big news headlines.
We're living in very polarized times.
We are extraordinarily divided from each other.
And a lot of these divisions come from the different regions of the mattering map that have become like armed camps, hostile camps, you know, viewing each other adversarially.
And I wanted an example of somebody who really sees their mattering project in terms of really adversarial
It's my and my kind of mattering against these others.
So, and I wanted to speak, to have a deep and heartfelt, empathetic conversation with an incel or with an anti-Semite, a neo-Nazi, a skinhead, somebody of this sort.
I reached out.
You know I was very much online doing research on various people.
I reached out to many people, not surprisingly, given my gender, given my ethnic background, whatever.
I didn't get anybody answering me and it's.
There's nothing like a real conversation.
You know, I can read up and read up and read up, but I really like a Yeah, a real conversation.
And so and finally, there was this guy, Frank Mink.
He was a former neo-Nazi skinhead.
And he immediately called me back.
And he I was in Boston.
He lived there. outside of LA, you know, I flew out to speak to him and he was fascinating.
So first of all, it was, he understood the language of mattering completely.
He's a very smart guy.
And, but you don't have to be smart to understand this.
You have to be human.
You have to be in touch with your humanist to understand this.
And he had come from a really rough beginning, saying born into really, the mean streets of Philadelphia.
His mom was a drug addict.
His father abandoned him.
His stepfather was a brute, would beat him up.
And what felt he was sort of a competitor in the household, wouldn't even allow him to eat in the same room as him.
And he felt like shit.
He just felt like shit.
And he said that he dropped out of school in eighth grade.
But when he was walking home from school, he would try to get hit by a car.
So this is where the mattering instinct is going incredibly badly.
And also, I would say, connectedness also.
Well, he spent the summer with an aunt and uncle who lived in Lancaster Pennsylvania, Amish country.
And of all things, he met a well-organized group of neo-Nazis there.
It was not Amish people.
It was not Amish, neo-Nazis.
And they told him, and they actually used this language.
They were very impressed with him because he had actually and he was in gangs and he had beaten up black people, Puerto Rican people people, non-white people.
And they were very impressed with that because they were neo-Nazis, but they had never met.
It was all white there.
So they said, look into the mirror and you will see that you matter.
You are a white, male, heterosexual American.
These others are taking your mattering away from you.
And that's a type of conceiving of your matter, mattering.
And it's filled with resentment, aggrievement, It's a very zero-sum notion of mattering.
To the extent here it was groups of people, but it can be on an individual level.
To the extent that certain people are rising, you are descending.
They are taking what was rightfully yours.
And he became a very, very... That's when he dropped out of school.
He became a full-time active member, organizer, very...
He has a lot of creativity and he poured it into this project, this mattering project of trying to write the topsy-turvy, mattering that had taken hold as what they called mud people, people of color, are rising and women are rising, taking away what was rightfully theirs.
And that's why their lives are going so bad.
And so he gave his all to that.
He did very bad things.
He'd be the first person to tell you.
He was convicted of kidnapping and torture at age of 17, was sent to a grown-up prison.
And it was there that the first chinks in this really well-defended ideology.
That was a bolstering up that sense of mattering.
And that had been formed into his mattering project.
The first chink in his armor came in prison when he bonded very tightly with two black guys there.
They were all worrying about whether their women outside were going to remain faithful to them.
And you know, as Frank said, there ain't nothing more human than women.
Guys inside worrying about their women being faithful outside.
And so they would read the letters from their girlfriends to each other and parse them.
And what does this really mean?
So he was really bonded.
And by the time he got out, some aspects of his ideology were faltering, but he still hated Jews.
He said that he hated Jews all the more because it was the one thing that tied him to his former ideology.
And he had a great big swastika on the side of his neck, a tattoo wreathed with flames and his knuckles spelled out skinheads.
And when he beat people to a pulp, they would know why they were being beaten up.
And he couldn't find a job. eighth grade dropout, ex-felon, swastika on the neck.
You know, yeah, this guy seems right for, let's hire this guy.
Yeah, he seems like good in human resources, right?
So one guy hires him and he happens to be a Jewish guy and he was at an antique shop, a high-end antique shop.
And And he bonded with this guy.
And this guy, you know, when he first went to get paid, the guy wasn't in the shop.
And Frank thought, yeah, he's going to Jew me.
Yeah.
You know, he'd always heard that phrase, Jewing somebody, you know, meaning gypping.
Same thing, comes from gypsy, right?
Cheating them out of money.
And no, he didn't.
He gave him a bond and he got a bonus.
And he hired him and they had a really amazing relationship.
And so he had to rebuild himself.
You know that the old ideology and what He really the New Mattering Project was really doing, in some sense penance for his first part of his life.
He works to try to talk people out of their hateful ideology, an ideology that's just based on resentment agreement, hate anger.
And that's what he is, that's what his life has been about.
So this is to me, you know, it's like from one mattering project to the other.
This is an extraordinary transformation.
Yeah.
To your point earlier, it's also a good reminder that mattering projects can change.
And sometimes in the case of Frank, it should have changed, right?
Oh, yeah.
I think we would say the world is a better place.
Yeah.
I know my life is a better place.
I mean, my relationship with Frank is very important to me.
He's my friend.
So many people, so many people.
And then ideologies that make you feel really antagonistic and resentful.
And these are not happy emotions.
You may need them very much.
And just let me say that Frank and he would again be the first person he has a tremendous amount of self-honesty, as you must, to have made the journey that he's made and is still making.
He still battles his demons.
You don't come from a childhood like Frank's and not have your internal demons.
And he is the first to say that.
So I'm not saying it's a happily ever story.
There have been a lot of setbacks.
But he keeps pushing on.
And just surprisingly enough, because I wasn't brought up to have the kind of life that I lead.
But I've met amazingly impressive people in my life.
Nobel laureates, quite a few.
President Obama gave me that medal.
Does anybody impress me more than Frank?
No.
No.
No.
Really interesting.
I want to go back to what you mentioned before, the mattering map.
You write this.
Our location on the mattering map influences the mattering projects that we undertake which, in channeling our longing to matter, propel us into our future, giving us a reason to live.
So there's two little bits in there that I'd love to unpack with you.
The first is that the first few words there, which is our location.
And then the second, of course, is the mattering map.
Our location on the mattering map.
Can you talk to us a little bit about the four mattering strategies that you've come up with in your conversations and in your research and in all your reading in terms of like where we sort of live on this mattering map?
Can you just describe that visual for us, perhaps?
Yeah.
And because I wanted to make it very visual, I even sketch in the beginning of the book.
The mattering map surrounded by the sea of longing.
And longing is for me a very important word because, you know, we're never really sure whether we matter or not.
We got to make the leap.
And that's true, too.
I've known many people who have trouble landing on a mattering project sometimes.
And this has been true for some of my students, because they have too many interests, too many talents, too much passion.
And they're stymied.
They're not going forward.
They're caught in indecision.
But yes, the four strategies.
And this is an empirical hypothesis.
As you say, I've been testing it out for many years now, but it's open to falsification.
And so I say this with some degree of hesitation, but this is the way I'm seeing it.
And they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, but there are these four strategies.
And the first is Well, do you have an order that you'd like me to go in?
Sure, I mean, why don't we go?
I think this is the order in.
I might be wrong about the order in the book, but here's the order that I have, and then we can go in this order.
First is heroic strivers.
Second are socializers.
Third, competitors.
And fourth, transcenders.
So do we want to start with heroic strivers and just explain what that is, what that looks like and maybe how we can, as we go through this, the four, any advice you have as to like one of the.
For some people it may be like oh, that's obviously, that's me.
For a lot of people, I think it might be, is that it?
So any advice you might have in terms of like questions to ask ourselves tips to figure out, like is it this one or is it this one?
I think might also be helpful.
Yeah.
And it is helpful.
It's helpful to get clarity about yourself.
Yeah.
Again, just as kind of zoom, I think I wanted to go in this order.
I wanted to sort of talk about matter and projects first, with the thought of like okay, now that we have that in mind, now we can start to give people, give ourselves, a lens through which we can look at our lives, with the North Star of okay, what is the mattering project that makes sense for me?
And so now that we have a sense of what the mattering projects are in theory, and now we can go through each one of these different strategies, I think if we can figure out where we land on the mattering map, the projects become a little bit clearer.
The potential projects could be clearer.
And practice is used in a very open way.
You know, it's not like I have a project to clean out my attic or something.
You know beginning middle and it's existentially charged and it'll probably continue until you die really.
You know, as long as you keep that passion.
What is the phrase that you use?
The heart on fire.
The mattering project is very much about the heart on fire, right?
And as long as you keep that, your mattering project is working for you.
So the heroics drive up.
I'm going to start with socializers, because I have found that most people seem to understand the question in terms of the way a socializer understands it.
And that's another just briefly point I want to make.
When I start talking to people about this and it depends, you know, how I broach.
It is very independent on the kind of person they are.
But I often can tell right away which strategy prevails in them by how they hear the question.
So when I ask about mattering and what keeps you going, what gets you out of bed in the morning, what keeps you in, what kind of failure would be a failure that would really make you doubt the way you're leading your life?
These are the sorts of questions.
That's a good question, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, make you feel like, oh, it's all meaningless.
You know, I put so much effort into this.
But you know, that kind of existential question that we would like to hide from as much as possible, that the way that people hear it often gives me a clue as to what strategy prevails, because socializers hear it automatically, as do I matter to others.
That is what their project is about.
And it might be others who, we all want to matter to others.
I mean, that is what it is to be a gregarious creature.
And I spoke a little bit about that.
We need connectionists.
We need a sense of belonging.
We need to know that, if we don't, we disappear from the face of the earth.
Certain people are going to notice.
Yeah. and care.
This is very basic, right?
That doesn't make you a socializer.
That makes you human, right?
And we all care about that.
But socializers sort of collapse that there being these, or at least one kind of social collapse that you know need for people in our lives into what their lives are really all about and how they justify their lives to themselves.
So you know the mother is really.
Her mattering project is to bring up flourishing children.
Is her flourishing?
That is what her flourishing is all about or romantic partners, or this sort of community members, your neighbors, my colleagues.
This could be what it's all about.
Interestingly, I also count as socializers because it is caring about, once mattering is mattering to others.
I also count people whose mattering project is to be famous.
They want to matter, not to the people in their lives, but Well, what is it to be famous?
To matter to a bunch of strangers, which can seem strange.
I know a lot of people who are famous, but I know a lot of people who really need to be famous.
You know that that is what the Mattering Project was about.
And I can see it.
In some sense it really makes sense because, you know, if a bunch of people are always paying attention to you, they want to know what you wear, what you do, and surely you are deserving of your own attention, of all these people find you so worthy of their attention.
So it's very, can be very strong validation.
And also being a member of a cult, somehow feeling that the cult leader you banner to this cult leader, who may not know you at all.
Personally.
Somebody very close to me had joined a cult in college and she became lost to me and all of her former acquaintances and friends.
And did this cult leader really even know of her existence?
No, but somehow you know, when she had exalted this cult leader onto a higher plane of mattering and that there was this kind of trickle-down mattering.
And we see cults are very, very important. in today's America, politically and religiously.
And so, but this is also a kind of mattering to others and some healthier than others.
All of these ways can go bad for the person and bad for society at large.
You know, they all have that potential because just as Because it's human, and that's what human is.
It can go very bad and very well.
And I actually say and I do believe this is true, it's kind of a stark, bold statement and I'm usually a little wary of those but that our greatest achievements and our greatest atrocities all come from the mattering instinct, you know from this trying to justify ourselves to ourselves.
So that's socializers.
And then let's go to heroic strivers.
Is that enough about socializers?
Okay.
And heroic strivers, they really don't care about mattering to others.
They may need it in some sense to get going in their mattering project.
But heroic strivers have some certain standards of excellence in mind that they want to do well by, in order to reconcile themselves to themselves.
And it could be intellectual.
It can be artistic.
It could be athletic.
It could be entrepreneurial.
It could be military.
It could be ethical.
And if you have certain mannering projects...
You may need the go-ahead of what I call the mattering adjudicators.
I mean, for example...
I wanted to be a philosopher.
I had to impress my undergraduate professors.
Get the letters of recommendation.
Impress my dissertation advisor.
All of these things get published.
Impress the journal keepers.
But I wasn't living to impress these people.
That was not the point.
The point was I wanted to further my philosophical understanding, and so I had a kind of intellectual standards that have with the touch of the ethical, because it's so important to me, to anything that I learn to give over to others if you know who to if And it's first of all for them to test it.
That's so important.
You know the feedback, the criticism, which is why it took me very, very long to decide to publish this.
I wanted pushback.
It was like a, so, so those are, it's the excellence itself.
I should say that there's a theory of a personality, personality psychologist.
There's one theory.
It's called the Murray-McClellan theory and it's by two psychologists who had been at Harvard for a very long time and are now dead.
That kind of maps onto my strategies, or at least three of them.
So this is not totally theorizing in a vacuum.
There is some empirical psychological research that backs it up.
So, so competitors really think of mattering in zero sum terms.
And it's interesting.
They're the one group of people that when I start asking them questions about their own mattering, get they get a little uneasy because they really hear it as my asking do they think that they matter more than other people?
Because that's what they need.
They're in competition with others.
And you know it's.
I read up a lot about the psychology of competitiveness and different psychologists have distinguished between different kinds of competitiveness.
Some mattering projects demand that you be competitive.
I mean, if you're an athlete, you must be competitive.
But even among these athletes, if you read up about different athletes, some of them, their mattering really depends on their body being the best.
You know that those who do better from them, it's devastating.
It's taking something away from them.
And many, many athletes are not like that.
It's like they have contributed to the game.
Their world record will be beaten.
And they celebrate that because it's somehow the game itself that matters to them.
So there's so many divisions here.
You know, there was a philosopher named Jerry Fodor who died about 10 years ago.
And he used to say, the problem with the world is people don't make enough distinctions.
It's very true.
You know, with this, it's, there are so many distinctions to be made.
If only people make enough distinctions, we would all be happy as kings, and we all know how happy they are.
He was very witty, dark wit.
Anyway.
So there are those who, in their field, they're very competitive.
One of my favorite stories is, again, a very accomplished scientist whom I somewhat know.
He bought a Nobel Prize.
And Somebody else who knows him too had commented to me.
You know he was happy for all of 15 minutes when that call from Stockholm came.
And then he realized other people had also gotten the Nobel Prize.
So it was like such a beautiful statement to me of what it is to be a competitor.
And it's very hard.
It's very, you can never rest on your laurels.
Not even Nobel laurels.
You know, this is everybody is a potential.
They are mattering.
Which matters so much to you?
You know, this is so.
And then there are the group competitors.
And Frank Mink was such a. such a one.
It was his group mattered more.
And when you feel this head, that might be just a background assumption.
It's not your mattering project.
But when you feel that society is going wrong and putting these other people up and taking away from you, then it can become your mattering project.
And that had been the case for Frank.
Okay.
Okay.
On to the last, Transcenders.
So Transcenders really hear this question as in a religious and spiritual, religious slash spiritual terms.
It's, do I matter to the universe?
It's, is there?
This is the one way of responding to the mattering instinct that depends on you know what philosophers call metaphysical beliefs, or you know a belief that goes beyond the empirical, beyond space and time and what we can observe of the empirical world, that beyond the empirical world, or perhaps permeated throughout, it is a transcendent being who purposefully created one.
So that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity.
It don't get no bigger than that.
The sense of mattering.
It doesn't get.
And I started out life.
I was born into a very religious family.
And I truly felt that, believed it. acted according to it, planned my life.
It was Orthodox Judaism, planned my life according to it.
When I, you know, Orthodox Judaism is just permeated with so many laws.
You know so many eating and what you do with your body.
Everything is just, and you know when I didn't do the right thing, which is some minor little thing, you know ate a hostess cream pie.
I felt that the Lord of the hosts observed and was dissatisfied with me.
And it was both, you know, it was terrifying.
There's no privacy.
God is always watching.
It was terrifying.
But I felt like I mattered so much.
I mattered to God.
Right.
And when, you know, at the age of 13, I completely lost my faith in that view of the world.
It was a little mini existential crisis.
Oh, so do I matter?
What do I have to do?
Like, how do I get on?
What should I do with the rest of my life?
But I know what that feels like.
And for a long time, you know, I am an atheist.
I'm secular humanist.
I mean, I've written about that.
And I call it organized non-religion.
There are so many different organizations. devoted to free thought, free thinking, secular humanism.
And I've got a lot of awards from them.
I got the Richard Dawkins Award and the American Theist Award.
And often I feel that there's a mistake made.
You know that people are being pulled in by very bad arguments.
The God of the gaps.
And if you only pointed out the fallacies, people would come over to our side.
You know, not believe.
And I, more and more, I ran, remembering you know how I felt as a transgender and how many people I know who are not stupid they're really quite brilliant but that this is the way that they minister to their longing to matter.
And it just feels real. right for them.
And so it's not a matter of stupidity and it's not a matter of, you know, getting the logic right.
There's great diversity in how we respond to this.
So, you know, some of it because of our temperaments.
I would have loved to be a transgender.
My life was all mapped out for me.
I wouldn't have made my family upset. all sorts of things.
There was community.
It's a very tight community.
And you know, in many ways I, you know I, would have loved to.
I couldn't, I couldn't.
It was not my intellectual temperament.
It was not.
It was not my sense of freedom and potential and what I felt I needed to do to be right with me and to be able to do something I could give.
So you know where we end up has a lot to do with temperament culture talents, passions and just chances of one's autobiography.
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One of the things I think you strive to do in the book is and you mentioned it a little bit here in terms of there's no judgment here, right?
Like, when you're thinking about these things, whether you end up you hear about heroic strivers or socializers or competitors.
It's not about one's being really good and one's being bad.
And then.
So therefore, we should all be heroic strivers, because we all kind of want to be a hero, right?
Like it's not that.
I think it's more about the uncovering of a certain kind of truth.
If you can uncover that kind of truth, then you can start to line up or at least you can start to answer the question why do I feel like I don't matter?
Or why do I feel like there's this gap here?
And perhaps it might be because you're chasing a mattering project that makes sense for a competitor.
But when you're really honest with yourself, you're really a socializer.
And so being able to reorient ourselves, I think, is the really useful part of understanding each one of these four and trying to figure out like where do I live more often than I don't?
Yes.
Yeah.
And you, you know what is what is lighting me up, you know, and and it you know.
So it's a very personal.
It takes self-reflection and sadly, but you know we're, we're living, our culture has sort of driving us away from that kind of the self-reflection.
I spoke to, oh gosh, I just forgot his name, but the guy who came up with the idea of FOMO, right?
FOMO, really?
Okay.
Patrick, he has a podcast.
We had a deeply existential conversation, you know.
But that fear of missing out is really, it's a very strong force in our culture and it's very non-self-reflective.
I mean, you've got to sort of, Be with yourself and be trying to understand.
And often we've been influenced not just by our culture and what seems to be getting the most attention and the people who seem to matter the most in our society, but also our families.
And that was certainly true for me.
And, or, you know, I have students who, you know, their parents are academics.
That is what, you know, that's all that that's striving for intellectual excellence.
Well, you know, it's, it worked for their parents and there's a great, you know, I'm a parent.
There's a great to live.
Your life means you have adopted for yourself certain values and you think, you don't just think oh these, you know, these are my values.
No, you really want to think they're objective values.
Otherwise, it's just as arbitrary as your own identity.
And that's what we're trying to get away from.
Oh yeah, I care.
I care about myself because I'm me, but there's got to be something more that justifies all the self-mattering.
And so we come up with our set of values.
And so it's very, very natural to want to give it to the people we're bringing up and whom we love so very, very much.
So, but, you know, there was, I actually just spoke to a mother last night.
And she said, you know, I have a bunch of degrees.
This is what makes my life meaningful.
My kid doesn't like to read.
And it just breaks my heart.
And it's just, yes, that's so natural that it would break her heart.
But it is natural. you know, autonomy.
Autonomy is an important value in human life.
And you know our mattering project.
That's right for us ought to be where we meet our autonomy, where we feel our agency.
I kind of think, you know, free will is a big issue.
I think if it's anywhere, if it exists anywhere, you know it's at this metal level when I'm sort of trying to decide what I want to desire.
It's, you know, trying to figure out what it is that I want to desire.
It's kind of a second order desire.
And that's where free will exists anywhere.
I think it exists up on this level.
But we're not going to get into a discussion of free will.
That'll end nowhere.
Okay, I want to be respectful of your time.
Only maybe one more big question.
There's so much more in the book that we didn't get to, of course.
I didn't even ask you about entropy, which I was tempted to.
I think that would also be a two-hour conversation.
Yeah, yeah.
Fascinating stuff, though.
My last question to you, maybe to harken back to what I opened this with, which is this idea of being a philosopher.
Any advice to us for how to live or to see the world or see ourselves as a philosopher might?
What does that mean and how can we do that better?
Yeah.
Being very open to all sorts of questions and the constant questioning going on and the constant questioning of yourself, your own viewpoint.
You know what one is struggling for is perspective right.
The most perspective that you can.
You know, that's the thing for a philosopher that you're asymptotically trying to approach.
There's this idea, in fact, of the view from nowhere, as if the view from just the universe itself.
And of course, we can't have that.
We always are inhabiting our own point of view.
But for that point of view to take in as much as possible, including other people's point of view and why they have it, and maybe you ought to have theirs.
And for me, the life of philosophy has also, you know, especially since I came in from math and physics, to try to see how it all hangs together in the largest way possible.
I think that's also a philosopher's dream.
You know, the philosopher's dream is how does this all hang together and where can we find ourselves and one another within this?
You know, so this is, I don't know, that sounds very vague, but I actually think it's very human.
I really.
You know, we come into this world and I think we have three major questions like where the hell am I?
What kind of world is this?
And science tells us to a large extent what kind of world this is, what kind of forces there are and what kind of you know, there's matter, and there's antimatter, and there's energy and all this stuff.
And there's thermodynamics and entropy and all this stuff, right?
And this is the kind of world we inhabit.
And it's good to know a little bit about that.
And it gives us perspective.
And is this world, does it care about me?
That's a second step.
Is it, what's my relationship, my personal relationship with this world?
Does it care about me?
Is it indifferent?
Is it on my side?
Is it against me?
We ask these kinds of questions.
And then the last question that we ask is and these are all deeply philosophical questions is and what am I supposed to do with this short time here?
What am I supposed to do?
That will mean that I have not wasted this amazing opportunity I've been given in being born, being alive.
And these are just three, you know, you see them through history.
You can see these three questions being asked.
And I just want to end by saying that I think that these questions make us really something special.
I love animals.
I spent a lot of time with chimpanzees.
I love chimpanzees.
I love elephants.
I love animals.
But they don't do this justificatory thing.
They don't step outside of themselves and say, am I worth all of this self-mattering?
How do I live so that I'm not wasting time?
I find that so, there's dignity.
There's a kind of dignity in that.
You know, I had always heard this phrase the intrinsic dignity of human life.
I never knew what it meant.
It just sounded like bullshit to me.
Now I kind of, I think about it in terms of this mattering instinct.
We bring values into the world.
Values exist.
Sometimes they're bad values.
Frank's values had been very bad.
But that mere fact of bringing values into the world and trying to live in the light of self-justification just seems to me laudable.
And there's some dignity in that.
And it's something I have to go through.
It's almost like a a mantra or a yoga meditation, because you read the newspaper and you get so outraged by how people are doing bad things, working with entropy and disorder instead of against it.
But I think, yeah, but they're trying to prove that they matter.
And there's something in that that is reconciles me to my species and makes me feel that we all want to judge each other with more compassion and mercy.
The book is called The Mattering Instinct, How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us.
Thank you so much for this conversation and for the book, Rebecca.
Thank you so much for having me here.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you so very much for tuning into the show this week.
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