The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

"[An] extraordinary and urgent book." -Jonathan Haidt

"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

A paradigm-shifting work that explores humanity's most fundamental desire.

Apple Books * Most Anticipated Books of 2026

MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex and The Mind-Body Problem, returns with a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and universal motivations: the longing to matter.

Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, Goldstein argues that this need to matter-and the various "mattering projects" it inspires-is the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts: the very crux of the human experience.

Goldstein brings this profound idea to life through unforgettable stories of famous and not-so-famous people pursuing their unique mattering projects: the ragtime genius Scott Joplin, whose dedication to his ignored masterpiece, Treemonisha, ended in tragedy; the pioneering psychologist William James, who rose above the depression of his young adulthood to become perhaps the first great theorist of mattering; an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns from the trash; and a neo-Nazi skinhead who as a young man dealt racial violence to feel he mattered but ultimately renounced that hateful past after realizing that mattering isn't a zero-sum game. These portraits illuminate how our instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture, and conflict-and they point the way to a future where we all might see that there is, fundamentally, enough mattering to go around.

Deeply revealing and insightful, and decades in the making, The Mattering Instinct is a must read for those curious about why we seek to matter to ourselves and others-and how this insatiable longing that drives us apart may be the key to finally understanding each other.