Why So Many People Feel Lost

Human beings are “creatures of matter who long to matter,” says novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein, whose new book is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us. She talks with Nick Gillespie about how all humans struggle to figure out how to lead lives that justify our existence, both in the eyes of others and ourselves, and she describes remarkable cases of people who rescued children discarded during China’s one-child policy era, atheists who led leper colonies so the afflicted could die with dignity, and former neo-Nazis who seek to reform racist skinheads.

A MacArthur “genius” award winner who has taught at Harvard University, New York University, and Rutgers University, among other places, Goldstein has published highly acclaimed novels such as The Mind-Body Problem and 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, and nonfiction works including Plato at the Googleplex and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

The Mattering Instinct investigates what happens when inherited authorities—church, state, family, tribe—lose their power to dictate meaning and individuals must fend for themselves, typically employing strategies she calls transcendence, competition, social belonging, and heroic striving. She invokes Friedrich Hayek’s “knowledge problem” to illuminate the dispersed and dynamic qualities of how we all create “mattering projects”—lives worth living—in a world that offers us more and more choice across virtually all areas of activity. Drawing deeply on the philosophical roots of individualism and liberalism, Goldstein offers a moral psychology of freedom, a way to think about individual dignity, pluralism, and self-authorship without devolving into either nihilism or top-down moralism.

0:00—What is the mattering instinct?

4:30—Age, class, and the crisis of meaning

8:46—How do history and technology affect mattering?

10:59—Secularism and mattering

15:00—The four archetypes

27:14—Pursuit of flourishing

32:43—Psychology of freedom

35:43—Frank Meeink

42:50—Lou Xiaoying

51:29—Existential angst