Welcome. I'm Kevin Miller. I have conversations with people that help us make better meaning of our lives.

In this episode, what measures whether you matter or not? So do I intrinsically matter? Do you? And then based on what? I mean, there's almost a saturation of

information and ideas on purpose, you know, what purpose is and having purpose in your life. But if you

dig down into that, I find purpose to primarily be a pursuit to matter at the root.

Do we matter just because we exist?

Many religions say so, though I often find the religious people scrambling to prove they

matter in the same way everyone else is.

So does that testify that we have to do something to matter? Big question. That's the episode. I sat down with renowned

philosopher and intellectual Rebecca Goldstein. Rebecca is an award-winning philosopher and writer. She's the author of actually 10 books

of got a big, a lot of acclaim with all of them, fiction and nonfiction. She holds a PhD

and philosophy of science from Princeton University and is taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard.

In 2015, Rebecca was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama.

So in many ways, from all of Rebecca's philosophical pursuits,

the concept of mattering is somewhat a culmination of what she's come to,

of her wisdom. Her new book is called The Mattering Instinct, How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us

and Divides Us. So in this conversation, we dive straight into how we perceive mattering,

what we generally do to matter, what actually results in feelings of mattering. We discuss the cultural and relational conflicts that we all have,

that the society has around what and who we think matters most. Rebecca defines or identifies four psychological types

based on how people pursue mattering. You'll hear that, but it begs the question, do we have to do

something and prove something so that we matter?

I think it belies that we often think and conceive of mattering as something we must earn.

I found the conversation really revealing and bringing myself to consider some of my core motives for how I

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