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How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us
by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
A paradigm-shifting work that explores humanity's most fundamental desire.
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.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (3/19/2026)
I'm looking for another book to read – I just quit two books after getting in roughly 15% (about 50 pages for both). They were Polar War: Submarines, Spies, and the Struggle for Power in a Melting Arctic by Kenneth R. Rosen and The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides...
-Lisa_B3
"Incisive...Goldstein takes on some of life's biggest questions with a loose-limbed exploration of such wide-ranging topics as thermodynamic entropy and Victorian fly-fishing lures made from exotic feathers...It's a fascinating take on a profound yet little-understood aspect of the psyche." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A boldly out-there meditation on why humans want to make a difference in the world." ―Kirkus Reviews
"What drives human beings to do both great good and terrible evil? Rebecca Goldstein brilliantly argues that the answer is strangely simple yet incredibly powerful: it is our need to matter in the world. To understand others―and yourself―read this book." ―Arthur C. Brooks, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Build the Life You Want and From Strength to Strength
"The Mattering Instinct is an extraordinary and urgent book. Rebecca Goldstein helps us to see that so much of our lives, and so much of human history, is driven by the need to matter. As technology weakens our social ties and frees us from needing other people, the crisis of mattering will explode. Giving everyone a generous universal basic income will not help. This book, and its delineation of multiple paths to mattering, will." ―Jonathan Haidt, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Anxious Generation and The Righteous Mind
This information about The Mattering Instinct was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Stephen Pinker
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein grew up in White Plains, New York, and graduated summa cum laude from Barnard College, receiving the Montague Prize for Excellence in Philosophy and immediately went on to graduate work at Princeton University, receiving her Ph.D. in Philosophy. While in graduate school, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Whiting Foundation Fellowship.
After earning her Ph.D. she returned to her alma mater, where she taught courses in Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Psychology, the rationalists, the empiricists, and the ancient Greeks. It was some time during her tenure at Barnard that, quite to her own surprise, she used a summer vacation to write her first novel, The Mind-Body Problem. The Mind-Body Problem was published ...
... Full Biography
Link to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's Website
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