Why Mattering Matters With Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

Live Happy Now

Live Happy LLC

Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Health & Fitness:mental Health

4.7 • 522 Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2026

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We all have a deep desire to matter, but do we know why? In this episode, host Paula Felps sits down with philosopher and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein to explore the “mattering instinct” and why it shapes everything from our personal fulfillment to our political divides. She explains our longing to feel significant influences our choices, our relationships, and even our conflicts — and how reframing our own mattering projects can lead to a more meaningful, connected life. In this episode, you’ll learn: Why the need to matter often drives us more powerfully than the need to be happy. How different “mattering projects” shape our behavior and our relationships. What we can do — individually and collectively — to create a world where everyone feels they count.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Thank you for joining us for episode 555 of Live Happy Now.
0:08.5	All of us want to feel like we matter, but this week's guest is here to explain why it's not just a want, it's a need.
0:15.7	I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm joined by philosophy professor and author Rebecca Newberger Goldstein,
0:21.7	whose latest book is The Mattering Instinct, How Our Deepest Desire Drives Us and Divides
0:27.0	She's here to Talk about how our need to feel that our lives matter can open the door to
0:32.2	more empathy and compassion, but also fuels some of the deep social conflicts we're experiencing right now.
0:38.6	Let's have a listen.
0:40.3	Rebecca, thank you so much for coming on the show with me today.
0:43.4	It's such a pleasure.
0:44.8	This is such a wonderful topic, and it's one that you say has been on your mind for quite a few years.
0:50.4	So to give our readers some context, tell us about that.
0:58.4	Yeah, quite a few years. So to give our readers some context, tell us about that. Yeah, quite a few years. So I, yeah,
1:07.4	decades, yes. I am trained as a philosopher and I, you know, professor of philosophy. But I did what actually my colleagues had thought was a kind of goofing off thing is I, when I'm still very young and I'm still on tenured, I wrote a novel. And it was a philosophical novel, but it was called the mind-body problem. And I sold it to an editor. And then the editor said to me at one point, you know, I don't understand your protagonist. She's very smart. She's a very good looking, sexually
1:29.0	desirable, which made it a very sexy novel, but she's so unhappy. You know, what does she
1:35.0	have to be unhappy about? And so I thought about that for a while. And then I heard her telling
1:40.9	me, because that's one of the really cool things about writing novels. You
1:44.3	actually hear your characters talking to you. Then you think, oh, either I'm going psychotic or
1:50.1	this is the artistic process. And she said, because I don't matter in the way that most
1:57.0	matters to me. And yes, she was sexually desirable and very smart, you know, and all these good things
2:03.6	going for her.
2:04.9	But what she wanted, the thing that most mattered to her, wasn't being fulfilled.
2:10.6	And she was miserable.
	...

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