The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us: Goldstein, Rebecca Newberger: 9781324096856: Amazon.com: Books (original) (raw)

Review

"The Mattering Instinct is a testament to the idea that humans find purpose when, as the poet Rumi wrote, we “let the beauty we love be what we do.” In a world fractured by competing claims on what’s important, Goldstein offers a vision that is both intellectually resonant and humane, reminding us that the struggle to justify our existence is the very thing that makes our existence matter."
― John Kaag, The Atlantic

"The novelist and philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein may be playing the same melody, but she’s transposed it from the major key of self-help to the Baroque counterpoint of self-knowledge. Her book,

The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, stems from work she’s been doing for more than 40 years. With her elegant style and an omnivorous command of literature and history, Goldstein argues that our desire to matter has spawned religion, philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and politics, in short, all of human endeavor ― and much of its conflict. . . . It’s a fascinating, if at times demanding, exploration of philosophy, theology, and metaphysics. . . . Goldstein is an experienced professor, always ready to help out."
― Ron Charles, Substack

"[An] engaging book populated with stories of people both famous and ordinary who have sought to bring purpose to their lives."
―

New York Times, "6 New Books We Love This Week"

"

The Mattering Instinct synthesizes ideas that have preoccupied Goldstein for decades. . . . Goldstein is such an engaging and enthusiastic storyteller . . . . [Her] ambitions are grander ― and she suggests that ours should be, too."
― Jennifer Szalai, New York Times

"What emerges from the pages of

The Mattering Instinct is the insistence that while mattering is ultimately a profoundly private process of discovery that cannot be validated or invalidated by any designated arbiter ― not god, not fame, not the person you love ― it is also something we can magnify for each other by the example of how we live our lives. Mattering is the mirror we hold up to ourselves that reflects the universe."
― Maria Popova, The Marginalian

"Incisive.... [Goldstein] catalogs the rich variety of ways people try to carve out purpose: 'socializers' try to matter through relationships; 'heroic strivers' through achievement; and 'transcenders' through communion with whatever spiritual principle orders the cosmos.... Convincingly situating the instinct to matter as increasingly vital in a world that can feel impersonal and starved of meaning, Goldstein takes on some of life’s biggest questions with a loose-limbed exploration of such wide-ranging topics as thermodynamic entropy and Victorian fly-fishing lures made from exotic feathers (which still matter to modern-day connoisseurs of the art). It’s a fascinating take on a profound yet little-understood aspect of the psyche."
―

Publishers Weekly, starred review

"What drives human beings to do both great good and terrible evil? Rebecca Goldstein brilliantly argues that the answer is strangely simple yet incredibly powerful: it is our need to matter in the world. To understand others―and yourself―read this book."
―

Arthur C. Brooks, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Build the Life You Want and From Strength to Strength

"

The Mattering Instinct is an important and truly impressive book that gives us new ways to think about human worth and dignity. Whether you’re leading a team, raising a family, or simply trying to live with purpose, this book shows why aspiring to have a positive impact isn’t just morally right―it’s the key to lasting fulfillment."
― Sheryl Sandberg, founder of Lean In

"

The Mattering Instinct is an extraordinary and urgent book. Rebecca Goldstein helps us to see that so much of our lives, and so much of human history, is driven by the need to matter. As technology weakens our social ties and frees us from needing other people, the crisis of mattering will explode. Giving everyone a generous universal basic income will not help. This book, and its delineation of multiple paths to mattering, will."
― Jonathan Haidt, #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Anxious Generation and The Righteous Mind

"

The Mattering Instinct is a masterpiece. I wept, I laughed out loud, I came face-to-face with the wellsprings of my life, but mostly I marveled at Rebecca Goldstein’s genius. This book should ignite a revolution."
― Martin Seligman, best-selling author of Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

"Rebecca Goldstein―who uniquely combines the gifts of a novelist and a philosopher―writes with rare insight, warmth, and humanity.

The Mattering Instinct is a luminous and often personal meditation on the universal human need to matter. It’s a brilliant and beautiful book."
― Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind

"

The Mattering Instinct changes everything. Whether your focus is on personal life, professional life, social and cultural life, political life, moral life, or spiritual life, this book really matters!"
― Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice

"Rebecca Goldstein’s books always get to the heart of the matter. This one, provocative and timely, gets to the heart of mattering itself.

The Mattering Instinct is a powerful and original book."
― Sherry Turkle, best-selling author of Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries

"How refreshing, in our time of heated antipathies and narrowed hopes, to discover a book that celebrates the “meaning-seeking” imperative that underlies “the wondrousness of what it is to be human.” Rebecca Goldstein’s eloquent and tightly reasoned

The Mattering Instinct will change the way you go through daily life: attuning you to the choices you and others make, offering aid in times of doubt. With its plea for “seeing one another more mercifully,” The Mattering Instinct returns to us “the joy of our own strange lives.""
― Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart

"One of the many pleasures of this brilliant book is the unassuming intimacy the author establishes not only with the reader but with the laws of biology and physics: the elemental urge of every living thing to matter, and the entropic force threatening to unmake every bond. As

The Mattering Instinct movingly demonstrates, those forces live inside all of us and make us who we are, even as they clash like enemy armies. There is nothing Manichaean about this battle, which in Goldstein’s subtle narrative is bound up with the moral force woven into our lives ― a mystery you will have to read this extraordinary book to discover."
― Jonathan Rosen, author of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

About the Author

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of ten books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, including 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. 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. In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.