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

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.