Understanding the Mattering Instinct with Philosopher Rebecca Goldstein EP 449

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Speaker 1: Hi. I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

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Speaker 2: And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

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Speaker 1: Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life.

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Speaker 3: Welcome the best of both worlds. This is Laura.

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Speaker 1: This episode is airing in mid March of twenty twenty six. Sarah is going to be interviewing Rebecca Nuburger Goldstein, who is a philosopher and the author of the book The Mattering Instinct. So, Sarah, what drew you to this topic.

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Speaker 2: I've read a lot of psychology but not a lot of philosophy, but it just sounded really interesting to me. I mean, you hear people say what matters, but then like, what is that really? And this book really kind of delves into well, what does that even mean?

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Speaker 3: And it was a.

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Speaker 2: Little bit more jargony and technical philosophy that I'm used to, but it was also very readable and really interesting, and I realized that I honestly hadn't read a lot of philosophy, so it was kind of fun to just like delve into a different field.

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Speaker 1: Not since then in the art of motorcycle maintenance. I loved Sen's fun book.

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Speaker 2: You know, it's polarizing though, Like I think I was in tenth or eleventh grade and half the class was like this is terrible, and I remember being like an.

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Speaker 1: Outlier, yeah, and liking it, really liking it interesting. Okay, so not a whole lot of philosophy happening in your life.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, And I was thinking back to like Emerson Thau, I mean that was that was the philosophy.

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Speaker 1: That was a philosopher that a long time ago in Miss Goldstein with the mattering instinct.

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Speaker 3: Now, so we're on that. Yeah, So what what what have you been reading lately?

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Speaker 1: Then?

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Speaker 2: Not usually philosophy, Yeah, I mean I usually have some kind of nonfiction thing going, but it tends to be more in like personal development or memoir kind of space. I just recently read Marriage at c That was kind of interesting, a.

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Speaker 4: Story about a couple that gets shipwrecked.

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Speaker 2: And survived for one hundred and eighteen days on a little tiny raft in the middle of the ocean. But you are usually reading I don't know about philosophy, but some interesting non fiction. Esoteric is how Sarah referred to it. Yes, yeah, yeah, I've been reading a lot of nonfiction. It's either coffee table books, read white and faded.

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Speaker 1: Recently, that's put another popular Instagram account that has like all white linen photos whatever.

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Speaker 3: It's very pretty.

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Speaker 1: But then I also read about like the ancient Earth, or animal evolution or human evolution. I recently read a book it was called Close Encounters the Human Kind, which is about a from a Korean American paleontologist whose name escapes me at the moment, but it was written for a very pop audience kind of thing, but about ancient human kind.

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Speaker 3: I was like, oh, this is like perfect for me. It's like a.

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Speaker 1: Book written right up my alley. So you know, I've been reading that.

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Speaker 3: But also Shakespeare. Do I get credit for that?

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Speaker 2: Of course you get credit. Well, that's one of your's your projects.

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Speaker 1: That's my project. I've been rereading his greatest hits. Greatest hits defined as the ones I want to reread, and I made it through as you like it. That's a fun comedy though, so that woul so very hard. I'm currently most of the way through Hamlet, yeah, a little darker, of course, and then I think next month will be Midsummer Night's Dream.

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Speaker 3: I started an alternating comedy, Tragedy. I think that's my favorite.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good one. It's the one I've seen most often performed. I really like it. So yeah, well all right, well let's hear Oh, oh, have you been abandoning books?

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Speaker 4: Sarah?

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Speaker 3: This was your goal? Are you doing it?

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Speaker 2: It was my goal and I'm not going to name the specific book, but I got so I haven't had the impulse to abandon except for I got like fifty pages from the end of a book and I was kind of like, I've had enough of this.

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Speaker 3: I should have abandoned it.

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Speaker 2: But then I was like tiny party me was like, what if there's some really interesting thing at the end.

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Speaker 1: And she saved it for the last fifty pages?

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Speaker 4: You know what, should have abandoned it?

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Speaker 3: Just holding out on you.

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Speaker 2: My goal is, truly I want to be able to report, and I'm not going to report with the specific books, but I want to tell you all that I've abandoned at least two books this year, So I'm going to keep.

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Speaker 4: My eye out for abandonable books.

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Speaker 1: Abandon a book, not that you start them thinking you are hoping to abandon them.

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Speaker 2: But if it's not winning you over, I have to imagine that. Like I typically read around fifty books a year, with fifty picks, there's going to be at least two that just are not for me at the moment.

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Speaker 4: So I just got to make sure that could happen.

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Speaker 1: All right, Well sounds good, Well, all right, well let's hear what Sarah and Rebecca Goldstein.

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Speaker 5: Have to say.

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Speaker 2: Well, I am so excited to be chatting today with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, who is a philosopher and author of The Mattering Instinct, which we're going to talk about today. And this book just came across by radar and I I thought she would make a fascinating guest, so I'm so excited to chat with her today.

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Speaker 4: Rebecca, want to go ahead and introduce herself to our audience.

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Speaker 5: Hi, you said it my name? And what I do? I am? That strange thing a philosopher.

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Speaker 2: I guess that means you didn't necessarily set out to do that when you first got started in your career.

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Speaker 5: I started in the sciences. I was strictly physics math, and then I had questions about physics and math, and through the guidance of some of my professors, I was made to understand that my problems, the questions were philosophical, they were philosophical questions, and so I ended up going to graduate school in philosophy, specializing in philosophy of science. The wonderful thing about philosophy is there's a philosophy of everything. You know of philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of philosophy, you know, philosophy of knowledge, philosophy of mine. I mean, every area of a human concern you can think of, there's a corresponding philosophy of it. And so I've been able to roam as free as I want. And with this book, I've roamed very far away from my beginnings.

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Speaker 2: You did and you didn't, because there are plenty of hard scientists that are featured in the book itself. But I'm gonna actually we'll go back to that, because I would love to know of all the various areas of philosophy you could have decided to focus on what drew you to this idea of mattering, And I guess give our listeners like an introduction to what that even means to you in the first place.

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Speaker 5: Yeah, So to matter, as I analyze, it, means to be deserving of attention. You know, when we say that something doesn't matter, we say, don't waste your time, don't waste your energy. It's not deserving. And to a philosopher, this word deserving is very interesting because it's what we philosophers call normative, and it has to do not just what is the case, but what ought to be the case deserving. This has to do with in some sense ethics, you know, it has to do with justification. When you say you're wasting your life on things that don't matter, you say, there's no justification for spending all your time worrying about these things. So it really gets to very much the heart of the questions, this notion of mattering. What is deserving of our attention? And are we ourselves deserving of attention? Are we deserving of our own attention which we are programmed to give ourselves. Leading a human life is very complicated, and we have to give a lot of attention to ourselves and the environment and how the environment is affecting us. We have the emotions built in to help us with this. So it's so much about us follows from the fact that we consider ourselves to be deserve serving of our own attention. We have to. It's pounded into our identity. But we can step outside and say, but really, am I so deserving? I'm just one little thing in all the universe? What makes me think I'm so deserving of my own attention? And that pushes us into a different sphere, this sphere, this normalous sphere, the sphere of justification, of trying to somehow justify yourself in your own eyes. And I think that's very much what we mean by a meaningful life. We talk about people having a meaningful life. What we mean is something like, yeah, you have found a way to feel deserving of all of the attention that you have to give yourself. And perhaps you have some project and what to call a mattering project, and if it's working for you, that's a meaningful life. You have a purpose. But we try to meet this mattering instinct in so many different ways.

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Speaker 2: And you talk about us about yes, the book is about all of those different ways and some of the I would say almost pros and cons or just the exploration of each of them, and before we get into them, because we're I'm gonna have you actually go into each of the sort of four big categories that you talk about in the book. But you also had a whole section on how humans like this has to be something unique to humans so that we maybe don't see in animals, or that this is something that makes us human. Can you expand on that a little bit?

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Speaker 5: Yes, I think that what we are creatures of matter who long to matter. You can only do that in English, by the way, but thank goodness for English, because it's such a short way of getting to what I think is the core of us. We are physical systems, and I can go back. I mean, I'm still enamored of science, and so I've wanted to derive this feature of us from the laws, ultimately the laws of matter that shaped us, going all the way back to my beloved physics, the law of entropy, which basically says that all things are going towards destruction, including us, including the universe. But still that doesn't mean that we don't matter. We certainly matter to ourselves. All animals we get this from, you know, the natural selection. All animals are first and foremost committed to their own surviving and thriving at least long enough to pass on their genes, which is the whole mechanism for how natural selection works. They don't stop and think, but why why why should I be so devoted to me? What's so special about me? But we can do that, we alone do it. It's these great, big brains that we have evolved for other purposes entirely that give us the capacity to step outside of ourselves, in the capacity we have for self reflection and to guard ourselves as another object in the world that we can interrogate, that we can try to discover things about. Right, That's what psychology is all about, That's what going to therapy is all about. To discover things about this very object that one is. And one of the things that we discover is that we each take ourselves very seriously. We have to get on with our life. But there comes the step, and I think it comes to all of us on some level. Some of us it comes over and over again. Some of us we confronted in early adolescents or early adulthood, and we come to a conclusion about it and get on with our lives. But what comes the step where we ask this self reflective question that demands of us some kind of justification. This is the way I'm going to prove to myself that I am truly deserving of all the attention that I have to give myself. I'm a great animal lover. I've spent a lot of time in Africa. I've spent a lot of time with the chimpanzees, and there's so much that's human about the chimpanzees. When I watch a mother chim staring, and my whole apartment is plastered with pictures of the chimpanzee mothers staring, that eye contacted with their infants. I mean, it's just and I see us in this. But as complicated as the chimpanzees are, none of them sort of step outside, Well, what's this all about? What's this life all about? What is it that I'm supposed to do with this short time here? What is the purpose? What provides the coherence to this life of mine? And that's something that just comes out of this very big brain we have. I tell a long story about how it gets there. But that's the short story of this cutting to the chase. We are creatures who engage in justification, and most importantly, justification about ourselves, about how we are pursuing our life.

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Speaker 4: Totally beautiful.

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Speaker 2: And there's there's some scenes in your book that you describe with I think chimpanzees, like sitting there huddled in awe at a sunset. But then you still argue that they're not doing it because they're asking about the meaning of life. They're just pure, like unadulterated awe, which is a little bit different.

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Speaker 4: But it was a beautiful scene anyway. I might have cried, Yeah, no, when I think about it was you.

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Speaker 5: And I'm not somebody who talks in terms of the supernatural at all. My focus is very much scientific. But that was almost to me a miraculous experience that I was hiking in a cape of Good Hope, and I thought I was completely alone, high up on a mountain looking out at the sea, where there was this rainbow rising up out of the sea. It was miraculous, you know, I mean, it wasn't, but it was so beautiful and I was all struck. And then I noticed a little bit beneath me there were It wasn't monkeys, it was.

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Speaker 4: That boom oh yes, yes, yes, thank you.

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Speaker 5: That are the most frockouss crazy creatures, you know, chattering, chattering, And there was a whole family sitting there staring out at the same side. I was staring at totally silent, and I thought, oh my, as if this experience is not great enough, I am sharing it with another species. We are both sharing on It was. Yeah, it was one of the highlights of my life. Yes, so cool.

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Speaker 2: We're going to take a quick break and then we're going to get into kind of four areas of types of I guess mattering projects that people tend to take on.

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Speaker 4: And then I have lots of questions, so we'll be right back, all right.

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Speaker 2: So in your book, which by the way, comes with a useful mattering map that you can refer to to kind of understand the kind of big areas of mattering that you talk about, but you kind of focus on four the hedonics drivers, the socializers, the transcenders, and the competitors. Can you share a little bit about this framework you came up with for our listeners to understand what all of these are.

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Speaker 5: I started to talk to people about it, and it's the most interesting conversations I've found that you can have with people about how they think about their life in the large picture, you know, what it's about, what would cause an existential crisis, make them feel like, oh, I'm doing it all wrong. You know, I've been totally mistaken. I've constructed my life on false pharmases. And I have found also doing a tremendous amount reading about it. It was just my little hobby on the side and biographies and that kind of but also magazines also advice columnists fascinating for getting a picture of human mention. And I started to think, I mean, people have so many different mattering projects. I once met a man I was waiting for actually was my future husband, in the lobby of a Manhattan hotel, and this guy comes and sits next to me and he's trying to pick me up. Pretty obviously. I started to talk to him about mattering. What makes him get up in the morning and get on with his life. He was a genuine, honest to god pick up artists. That was his mannering project. I was just part of his project, you know. And he had his statistics, he had books, he had his heroes, and so over the years you talk to people and you see, oh my god, the variety of the diversity of ways that people try to answer this longing that we all have to justify ourselves in our own eyes. But I was looking for patterns, you know, in the scientific way. You want to see patterns. And here's that's what I came up with talking to tons and tons of people, and I'm reading not as much as I could about it. There are, first of all, those that I call the transcenders, and they understand this question in transcending terms, in metaphysical terms, in religious or spiritual terms, that there is a transcended being, whether they call it God or not, who created the laws of nature without and the moral otter within, and created each one of us. And that is our purpose to live out the purpose that God has for us. And of course, depending on their view of God, you might have a very different view about that plan. And religious people often clash off and violently about what that plan might be. But that's how they see it. And I'm not such. I was born to be such a believer. My family is very religious, but I'm not. And you know, when I tell people when they ask me about that, and I answer, honestly, they're just flabberc acid. What gets you out of bed in the morning, You know that that is really what so answers their longing to justify their way of life in their own eyes. So those are transcenders and it's a very powerful way of going about trying.

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Speaker 4: To yes, like they can't even anything else.

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Speaker 5: You matter, You have a role to play in the narrative of eternity. I mean, doesn't get bigger than that. Then there are heroic let me go to socializes, because I think most people that I've spoken to are socializers. When I ask them do you matter? They understand it to me? Do you matter to other people? And it may be people who are in their lives, you know, their family, their friends, their neighbors, their community workers, their colleagues, whoever, the people who are in their lives who are paying them attention, whether they deserve it or not. And depending on their relationship with these people, that's how they justify their life. And those advice columns that I love to read are all about that kind of thing, you know, the problems that arise with people in your life. So it doesn't necessarily go well, none of these ways necessarily go well, it's hard to be human. That's the overall message that I have as if we all didn't know that. But some of these socializers, it's not. They want to matter to people who aren't necessarily in their lives. That's what the craving for fame, which is a very strong craving in many people, especially millennials I've found, really want to be famous, and their statistics, there are polls that show this to be the case, and they will give up their intimate relationships with their family, with their loved ones to be famous, which is to matter to a bunch of strangers. That's what it means to be famous. One cynic that I read, I can't remember who it was said to be famous means that you matter to a lot of people that you are very happy don't matter to you. So it's asymmetrical kind of but yes, it's a strong But if you're trying to convince yourself that you're deserving of your own attention, which I think the mattering instinct is all about the fact that hordes of other people are paying you attention, seems good evidence, you know, Okay, So there's the socializers, and most people who are are socializers with their people in there, with their family yea, their children there, yeah, and then they're there heroic strivers. Heroic strivers don't care about mannering to others, not to God, not to other people. They have some standards of excellence they have fixed in their minds, and it could be intellectual, artistic, athletic, entrepreneurial, ethical, and military, I mean all sorts of standards, and they need to feel that if they're not realizing them, they're coming closer, they're approaching it.

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Speaker 3: Most of the.

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Speaker 5: People I know spending my life in academia are heroics drivers, and it might be important to get acceptance from other people just to be able to pursue these goals. You know, if you're you can't get into graduate school, you can't pursue the goal, or can't get into medical school whatever. But I know somebody who put his entire early life in being an Olympic swimmer. He was a varsity swimmer at Stamford. He was an excellent swimmer, and then he didn't have the exact right measurements, you know, for proportions of his shoulders to his legs or whatever. It couldn't be an Olympic swimmer, and so you know he closed off. This is a bad thing that can happen with heroics, drivers, competitors, these are people. So when I asked going back to heroic service, when I asked them, do you matter that? They hear it as have I achieved something? Have I achieved what I have set out to achieve? And it doesn't have to be grand. It has to be grand for them. So for example, a marathon runner who devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy, it was her mannering project. She just wanted to finish and not be the last one. I mean, that was what she was going to justify herself to herself. Okay, competitors here, the question is they get very discomfited when I ask them, what makes you feel like you matter? Because to them, mannering means mattering more than others. It's a competition. It's zero sum to the extent that others matter, it's taking something away from their own mattering. It's a very adversarial situation. Sometimes my favorite story is a scientist. I know a biologist, an excellent biologist. He won a Nobel Prize, and somebody else who also knows him quite well said to me, well, I'll just call him x. X was happy for all of fifteen minutes in his life when he got that call from Stockholm, and then he realized after fifteen minutes that other people have also gotten that call from Stockholm, and they're what his happiness. He's a real competitor, you know. So competitors can do great things. They can also drive us crazy, and that some competitors are in competition with other individuals. There are competitors that belong to a group and they see their group as being in competition with another group that doesn't matter as much, and they're trying to right this wrong of mattering can become their mattering project. And one of the people I profile a fascinating person. Of everybody I think I've spoken to over all the years, he fascinating me the most. He was a ex neo Nazi skinhead who was committed to making sure that these people who were taking mattering away from from his white Christian people were not going to succeed. And he did terrible things like that, and he hated people of color. He hated Jews. They believed Jews were putting people of color up to this, and so we had this whole theory and he came out of it, but he understood exactly what I was talking about. When I was talking about the longing to matter, that was exactly he felt a deficit in that, and he felt that other people were taking his mattering away from him. So we can express itself in so many ways. I say that it can be responsible for the very best in us and the very worst achievements and atrocities, love and hatred.

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Speaker 2: Well, that story was such a fascinating one. The relationship that you built with him and learning about what brought him to the place that he was in the first place was incredibly powerful. We're going to take a quick break, and then I have so many questions about how these might interact, as well as maybe a little bit about AI. So we're gonna take a little bit of a right turn, so we'll be right back. All right, We are back, And my question I have so interesting that you use the example of a marathon runner in that prior when you were talking about he down ex drivers, and I guess, well, the reason it's interesting for me is because I'm a former marathon runner who then who was really really into it and then had a major health problem that meant I suddenly could not run anymore for the rest of my life. I felt the pain of a mattering project getting stolen away from me. However, I think the one thing that helps I believe I had multiple battering projects. I mean I have to believe that, because otherwise I think I would have lost my way and it'd be over right.

00:25:54
Speaker 4: But instead it was like, Okay, well, thank god.

00:25:56
Speaker 2: I also have my wonderful family, and I have my writing, and I have this out of my friends and traveling and all the other things. So can you be more than one thing? Is this more about like what's dominant? But you can still have multiple mattering projects?

00:26:09
Speaker 5: Oh yeah. And I think aside from mattering, we have this other need that comes to us by way of being gregarious creatures evolved from precarious species. We are. You know that we do need to have most of us close relationships, at least one close relationship. I do know some mathematicians who seemed to their relationship is with the numbers and that's it. But I mean, for most of us, what I have found, and I'm actually experiencing this right now with somebody, a very close friend, who has gone through a terrible shift in their life, with everything that mattered to them is gone, is taken away. This has brought him and his love one closer together. The intimacy is vibrant, more vibrant than ever. And he said to me, if that had gone, and I had, he's the mattering project going, well, I don't think I could have gotten past that if that intimate relationship had gone, I would not. But the reverse is not true. This is a very bad thing that's happened to this person, and he must rebuild his life, and it's bad, but it's become the source of strength in this intimacy. And that need of ours that I think is universal, excluding some mathematicious, but generally universal, has nothing to do with trying to prove ourselves. I mean, to have people in your life means they are going to regard you as deserving of their attention and hopefully their care, no matter what. So his wife might have loved him for the big things he was doing in the world, but the love can survive. I mean for creatures like us, these creatures who are in the business of justifying ourselves to ourselves. It's also just such a relief, It's such a safe spot to have that these people who to whom you matter, and hopefully they matter with you as well. It's best when it's reciprocal. It's not always reciprocal, but it's best when it is. So that thing having your family that you mentioned after losing what was in fact and mattering project is I think, outside of this whole mattering thing, it's always there, It's always in need, and it can carry us through some very difficult periods in our life. It is a matter I think of preponderating. These are empirical hypotheses, and there are some psychologists, particularly those who do positive psychology, becoming extremely interested in my theory, and they are going to test my various empirical hypotheses. I'm a philosopher, and even when I was in physics, I was a theoretical physicist. I'm not an experimentalist in any shape or form. And so I have what all I can report is what I have none scientifically found through these many conversations, is that broics drivers tend to be heroic strivers. If one mannering project fails, they will find something else. Some other standard of excellence. And it's interesting that you mentioned you have your family, yes, but you have your writing. What else did you mention my podcast or yes? I mean you there's an excellence, there's a trying to and a creativity something that can be perfected, the writing, the podcasting. You know that you feel that you're striving towards making progress. And that's one of the people that I profile. And again he's someone who's well known. His name is gun Kurtz. He's also a very close friend. And he had set out his whole life was music. He got into music very young. He was very talent. He went into classical guitar, but he won fellowships to big conservatories and one contest and you know, he's a really talented guy and his whole life was music. He couldn't make it though as a professional. It's very hard to make it as a classical guitarist. So you're not hired by orchestras, you know, and there are no concerti written for the classical guitar, so you either make it as a soloist or you're playing for weddings and mar mitzvahs, you know. And then he didn't want that and he had a real existential crisis, and for years and years he was really in the dumps and felt like a failure. His whole life was music and he couldn't listen to music. It pained him. It was like being spurned by the love of your life. You know that it had worked, and then they spurned you, and you count haven't You don't even want to hear about them, you know, you just yeah. But over the years re educated himself. He went he got his doctorate. He's still a heroic striver in comparative literature. He became a writer. He's a successful writer, and now he can even go back to practicing music. And it's like when you become friends with that lover who broke your heart, you know, and after the heartbreak is over, you can go back and be friends. Well, he's become friends again with music, but it's not his life. And he said that he can tolerate failure in his writing life, because of course, to be a heroic striver is you have a lot of failure in your life. You know, the higher you aim, the more you court failure. He can tolerate failure in his writing life much better than he and still go on much better than he could in his musical life, so there can be these big changes, and I'm also interested. And again I hand this over to my friends the psychologist to test how aging X one's mannering project and does it affect the genders differently, because when he hears about a lot of men who were incredibly ambitious as they coming up in the world, and then as they get older, it's like, Oh, I had a family, That's what I wanted to vote myself to. Now I've had heard a lot of stories of that kind from talking to people, so yeah, well.

00:32:25
Speaker 2: I will be so excited to see where the empirical research ends up going, so I will absolutely stay tuned for that. My last question is one I don't I mean, I feel like you must have gotten this one before, but we'll see. As I was reading your book, it struck me that I think a lot of my discomfort with all things ay I centers around mattering.

00:32:44
Speaker 4: So I'm not the biggest fan of it.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: I mean, I understand it's there, I understand it's not going anywhere. I understand it can do some great things, and I also hate it. I think I mostly hate it because it makes me feel like if it can do things better then we can do Then what's the point of anything? And goodbye art and music and meaning? So yes, where do you see Aila?

00:33:05
Speaker 5: What do I say to that? Yes, this is I think our deep discomfort. And you know, that's why I really want to put this mattering thing out there. It's a framework that clarifies a lot of issues, including our discomfort with AI and what we should do about it. You know, cann we have some input into where it goes, you know, And I said, there are two very important aspects of our flourishing. One that comes to us by way of our being gregorious creatures. We need this connectedness, some kind of intimacy with other humans. That's what we evolve to be intimate with. And we need to have a way of justifying all the attention that we pay to ourselves, a way of saying, yes, my life is meaningful, at least in my own eyes, you know, it's meaningful. And both of these I think are the cornerstones of a flourishing human life, and I think AI threatens both of them. Like there are people who would rather have intimate relationship with a bot that will make them feel oh so important, oh so loved, oh so gratified in every way, and even you can connect it up with a robot and you can. You don't have physical intimacy with it. You and it's so much easier to have this intimacy in some sense with this AI agent that you've told it exactly how you want to be treated. And I have listened to recordings. I haven't met anybody yet who has such a relationship, but I've listened to recordings with people who have such and that's I don't think that's great. I really don't even one who married you had marriage ceremony. Anyway. I think we develop up in dealing with other humans and their needs and seeing the reality of them. That's what intimacy is about. The hardest thing is to recognize the reality of others is just as real as us.

00:35:15
Speaker 3: It's how we grow.

00:35:15
Speaker 5: It's how we grow psychologically, so how we grow emotionally, so how we grow morally. Right, this bothers me, But there's the other aspect that you have spoken about. Look, if an AI can do philosophy much better than I can, or write novels better than or compose music, well, it's taken away one of our most meaningful and creative sources of mattering. So I worry about this one of the things that can't take away from us. And here's what is that. You know, one way to be a heroic striver is to be an ethical heroics driver. And there are two people I profile in the book who are ethical heroic strivers. They just are trying to make a flourish And that is something that no matter what, even if nobody wants to write music or paint pictures, or write novels, or do physics research or prove mathematical theorems, because AI is doing it so much better. First of all, I just we want to do it for ourselves. It's ourselves we're trying to justify. So it's just that is not going to serve us well, that is not going to service well, if you can find cures for diseases, yes, yes, everything. What we should be thinking about is the flourishing of humanity, and don't take away precious creative sources of certain talented people feeling that they flourish. There's also great joy. I know when I listen to a piece of music moves me and seems a work of genius. Part of my awe is a human? Did this a fellow human? Health?

00:37:00
Speaker 1: Oh?

00:37:00
Speaker 5: Could they do this? I can barely follow this music? Your molleor I could barely follow it. It came out of a human's mind. The same with novels. When you reach Shakespeare, there's a Yiddish word that means to take great pride, not in yourself, but in another's accomplishment, and usually parents or grandparents use it about their children or their grandchildren. I'm felling because of this child's achievements. But I think that we can fell just of the achievements of humanity. And they're being a Shakespeare and there being a Mozart, when there being a Michael Jordan who can fly all of these and this is a source of joy in us. It's a generous and expansive source of joy, the opposite of envy and the opposite of competitive wish they'd be encouraged to have that feeling.

00:37:53
Speaker 4: And not be very shaful with it and protect it.

00:37:56
Speaker 5: Not that will take that away from us. The joy of creating, the joy of participating in others creativity. These are expansive emotions that contribute to our flourishing. So that's what should be uppermost here, what will contribute to you and flourishing?

00:38:13
Speaker 4: Oh I love that question as a framework. Well, our time is up.

00:38:18
Speaker 2: This has been so interesting, and your book, by the way, is doing very well for good reason, because it's fascinating. Give listeners the full title and where it where else they can find you, if anywhere else?

00:38:30
Speaker 5: Yes, So it's called the mattering instinct. How our deepest longing drives us and divides us. We didn't even get into the divisions, but you can see how we would you stake your life on something you think this is the right way. Everybody ought to do it, the way I'm doing it. But it's on Amazon, it's on hopefully it's in bookstores and I'm sure it's everywhere. Yeah, So I know it's on Amazon.

00:38:55
Speaker 4: And if you like it this we leave a nice review.

00:38:57
Speaker 5: Yeah. And I also have a substack that I've just started because I had to leave out so much in the book because mattering and death, mattering and agent and mattering and sexism, you know, all of these things. So I thought I would start a sub stack and it's called the mattering Map. Minutes under my map.

00:39:18
Speaker 4: The mattering map. Yes, perfect, Well, thank you so much. For coming on. This has been so interesting.

00:39:24
Speaker 5: Well, thank you so much for having me and for your interesting questions.

00:39:28
Speaker 1: Well we are back Sarah interviewing Rebecca Newbigger Goldstein on the Mattering Instinct. So, Sarah, speaking of mattering projects and what you guys talked about in this interview. It has been about a year almost exactly since your heart incident and all that came out of that. How are you navigating your post running life, because that was kind of your big project.

00:39:52
Speaker 4: It was one of my big problems.

00:39:53
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm actually really grateful that it was not like my only mattering project. Well partly because I don't know, there's so many other wonderful aspects of life, but also because it would have been a lot to lose all at once. But it was a mattering project, and I definitely thought about it a lot as I read this book and kind of made think about the loss a little bit more. But all that said, I mean, things.

00:40:16
Speaker 4: Are pretty good.

00:40:17
Speaker 2: Like in some ways, there are days that I am sort of glad that I don't have the pressure of that I was putting on myself previously, and then there's other days when I'm so jealous when I hear my friends talk about training for races, or even my husband who is going to be running a marathon this April, and I absolutely I am like very happy for him in doing it. But it's bittersweet to watch someone else get to have that fun that I was having. But day by day I'm good. I'm enjoying pilates. I Hey, I moved up to level two at club. I met my one of my twenty twenty six goals. So it's fun to channel it into some other pursuits that are more friendly to what my heart has going on. And I mean, honestly, if I was going to lose one mattering project, that was probably like an okay one I let go off well, and.

00:41:03
Speaker 1: You found with that you like to be moving towards something like you don't want to just like go do occasional strength workouts or something.

00:41:11
Speaker 3: You like to move forward with things.

00:41:13
Speaker 2: I mean to move forward with all things. And it doesn't have to be in some like oh I'm winning in anything. It's just more like, oh, you know, I'm progressing and in whatever I'm doing, whether it's athletic or playing piano, and okay, I'm going to learn all the songs in this book or whatever. I think that's just part of my personality and I'm going with it.

00:41:32
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean the singing is definitely that for me. I love working toward difficult concert. The music kind of gets into your brain as you learn more and more of it. You don't see at the beginning how you're going to learn this music, and yet you do. You always do, and it becomes much a part of you by the time we're doing the performance.

00:41:51
Speaker 3: So yeah, I can see how that would be.

00:41:52
Speaker 4: Do you think your sonnets too?

00:41:53
Speaker 3: My sonnets? Maybe?

00:41:54
Speaker 1: I mean the sonnets is something I enjoy doing as well, and I have kept going forward with that lines a day for and you.

00:42:01
Speaker 2: Must feel like it's like developed, like your skills at creating them or sometimes.

00:42:04
Speaker 1: I mean it's the ones that I think are really like, I really like those are more random. I feel like something will seize me and I'll write this so on it and I'll be like, oh, yeah, I really like that one. I think the more okay ones like good okay, like I've sort of learned better how to do that. There's still terrible ones in there here and there, you know that.

00:42:24
Speaker 2: I but I can see how the singing would have the same kind of arc as running, especially because it's like a race, Like you're like I have this target date and I want to achieve this and that, and with you, it's like I need to master this complicated thing and then I have the performance, and then I get to celebrate, and then I get to start a new present one.

00:42:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, totally makes sense.

00:42:41
Speaker 1: Oh sorry anyone. Well, we've been talking the mattering instinct and I think our first philosophy professor interview on this. We bring you all sorts of things on Best of Both Worlds here, but we will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.

00:42:58
Speaker 4: Thanks for listening.

00:42:59
Speaker 2: You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.

00:43:06
Speaker 1: Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the Best of Both Worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.