The Mattering Instinct (with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein)

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 65 minutes

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Summary

Philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein discusses her new book, The Mattering Instinct, which argues that our lives are a quest to validate our inherent self-centeredness. Tracing this essential longing from physics and biology through to ethics and politics, she explains to EconTalk's Russ Roberts why material success alone can never satisfy our deep-seated need to matter. She describes the four ways people seek significance--through transcendence, social connection, excellence, or competition--and explains how the unmet need to matter is at the heart of some of the biggest problems afflicting modern societies: loneliness, extremism, and polarization.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is December 3rd, 2025, and my guest is philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein.
0:43.1	Her latest book and the subject of today's episode is The Mattering Instinct,
0:50.8	how our deepest longing drives us and divides us.
0:56.5	Rebecca, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:59.5	It's a pleasure to be here.
1:01.0	So what is the mattering instinct?
1:03.4	What does that mean?
1:06.5	Yes.
1:07.4	So it is just longing to matter. It is a longing that I think makes our, it characterizes our species. I've been talking to people about mattering for decades now.
1:38.0	And there's a story as to how it struck me many, many years ago, as so essential to what we are.
1:46.0	I would define us, our species, as creatures of matter, who long to matter. And that's what I'm examining here by the mattering instinct.
1:53.0	I tried to explain how it arose in us.
1:58.0	My first area of study as an undergraduate was physics.
2:05.8	And for the very beginning, I was struck by the second law of thermodynamics.
2:15.5	The law that says that entropy increases, and it takes a lot of energy to resist
2:24.8	entropy.
	...

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