On Our Longing to Matter | Rebecca Goldstein

Jan 15, 2026

57:30

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There is a primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into

one of our most persistent and universal motivations:

The longing to matter.

In her revelatory new book:

MacArthur Fellow, National Humanities Medalist, and bestselling author,

Weaves powerful insights from biology, psychology, and philosophy,

To persuasively argue that our need to matter―

and the various “mattering projects” it inspires,

from parenting,

to scientific discovery,

to transcendence,

art,

creative work,

or the pursuit of mastery―

is simultaneously the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts:

the very crux of the human experience.

Leveraging her gifts as a storyteller,

Rebecca elevates the stories of people pursuing their unique mattering projects:

From the pioneering psychologist William James, who rose above the depression of his young adulthood to become perhaps the first great theorist of mattering;
To an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns from the trash;
To a neo-Nazi skinhead who as a young man dealt racial violence to feel he mattered but ultimately renounced that hateful past after realizing that mattering isn’t a zero-sum game.

In offering these portraits Rebecca illuminates how our shared instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture, and conflict -

But, perhaps most importantly,

They point the way to a future where we all might see that there is, fundamentally, enough mattering to go around.

Through her work, and today’s conversation, Rebecca invites us to consider

how our universal longing to matter -

The primal instinct that so often drives us apart -

may actually be the key to finally understanding each other.

For more on Rebecca, the Mattering Instinct, her other books and writing, please visit rebeccagoldstein.com

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