The Mattering Instinct: Why We Long to Matter | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein – EP 727

coming up next on passion struck we are so different by temperament belief systems value systems

culture or talents our passions and that individuality all goes into how we respond to

this shared motivation that we have deep motivation that shapes our lives and we none of us

want to waste our life we want to respond in the right way to this instinct and we

all make the distinction that there are right ways and wrong ways and we want to

in appeasing this longing and answering the question do I really matter that motivates all this

welcome to passion struck i'm your host john miles this is the show where we explore the art

of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters each week i sit down with

change makers creators scientists and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover

the tools that help us lead with meaning heal what hurts and pursue the fullest expression

with who we're capable of becoming whether you're designing your future developing as a leader

or seeking deeper alignment in your life this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act

with intention because the secret to a life of deep purpose connection and impact is choosing to live

like you matter

hey friends and welcome back to episode 727 a passion struck over the past several episodes

we've been opening a new inquiry here on the show the you matter series an exploration of how

human beings experience significance in a world increasingly organized around performance metrics

and proof we began last week with renowned psychologist Barry Schwartz examining how modern

choice culture erodes agency and authorship we continued on Thursday with psychologist Daniel

Ellen Burke exploring how inherited scripts of strength and emotional restraint shaped who is

allowed to feel speak and be seen today we go deeper beneath choice beneath roles beneath culture

itself to the instinct that makes all of those questions unavoidable why does a human life need to

matter at all my guest is Rebecca Newberger Goldstein MacArthur fellow philosopher and novelist whose

work has spent decades probing how human beings search for meaning value and justification

within a finite life her new book The Mattering Instinct argues that the longing to matter

is a defining feature of human consciousness rooted in our capacity for self-reflection

and our need to justify the attention we give to our own existence in today's conversation we

explore why human beings feel compelled to ask whether their lives are worthy of the time

energy and care they demand why connectedness and mattering are not the same thing and how that

distinction reshapes how we understand dignity and self-worth how different people pursue

mattering through distinct projects that Rebecca calls mattering projects and how those mattering

projects shape both individual lives and entire cultures we go into why entropy functions as a

real constraint on meaning helping us evaluate whether a life sustains order care and human flourishing

we discuss how the desire to matter can lead to both extraordinary creation and profound harm

and lastly why understanding this instinct may be essential to living together with greater clarity

this conversation sits at the philosophical heart of the UMATTER series and it arrives as we move

toward the February 24th launch of my upcoming children's book UMATTER Luma a story designed to

plant the truth of intrinsic worth early before the world teaches children to confuse mattering

with visibility performance or competition Rebecca's work offers a deeper framework for understanding

where that question comes from and what it asks us across a lifetime let's continue the UMATTER

series with philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thank you for choosing passion struck and

choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating a life that matters now let that

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I am absolutely honored today to have Rebecca Goldstein join me Rebecca is the author of a brand

new book titled The Mattering Instinct which I absolutely have just devoured given my passion

for this topic but I think we're kindred spirits and I can't wait to have this discussion

Rebecca it's so great to see you here today that's wonderful to be here thank you so much John

Rebecca I want to start out by talking about something before we get into your book around

2019 I understand you were part of a group of individuals that I refer to as the dream team some

of them I know fairly well some of them I've yet to meet but it included Marty Seligman

David Jaden, Barry Schwartz who's becoming a recent friend and a few others I understand that you

all met to have a really deep philosophical discussion around mattering I was hoping you might be

able to take us into that room with that amazing dream team what was occurring well thank you actually

thank you for bringing that up because it was really important to me and they are I like the way

describe them that they are a dream team all of them top notch psychologists no I'm not a

psychologist but I'm a philosopher that's my academic field and it was Marty Seligman but let me

go back a little I've been thinking about mattering a very long time it snuck up on me well I was

playing hooky from philosophy and during a summer vacation wrote an awful call of a mind body

problem I was a young untenured professor of philosophy and my husband at the time

and shelled in Goldstein had said you're going to ruin your career before it's struggling to exist

and because I was doing very technical kind of philosophy of science philosophy physics philosophy

math I was in what they call an analytic philosopher none of this existentialism stuff no that was

meaningless imprecise and but this novel came to me and in order to understand my character

I came on this notion of mattering that it's everybody needs to feel that they matter in the way

that most matters to them and the diversity creeps into that second half of the sentence that there

there is just abundance of ways in which we try to prove to ourselves that we matter and and I

thought well this is interesting this helps me understand my character and my character presented

the idea I know I did but of the mattering math but the interesting thing was I would never have

thought of these things on my own because I were too imprecise I couldn't quantify it I could put

it into symbolic logic I could the kind of training that I had just gone through made me think of

these as imprecise and therefore not useful but because I was inhabiting this fictional character

I could present these ideas so that was weird but these ideas began to grow in me and I started to

pay a lot of attention to them pay a lot of attention to other people and what was the most

matter to them improving to themselves their own mattering and a theory began to develop but I

never had any intention of writing about it or first of all the theory got too big and I'm

suspicious of big theories analytical answers are so suspicious of the grand theories especially my

own but little pieces of it leaked out into almost everything else I wrote and the last book I had

written was called Plato at the Googleplex why philosophy won't go away and Marty Seligman he was

able to see there are few paragraphs or two pages I give to what I call the mattering instinct I

can call it that then but I talk about it as a way of trying to explain one of the great mysteries

and the history of ideas and that is why in a certain period of time call it the axial age

all religions that are still extant emerged as well as philosophies well as Western philosophy

and I hazard hypothesis that life became stable enough so that the mattering instinct could

emerge Marty Seligman alone of all my everybody read that book grabbed onto that and he organized a

workshop around this idea of mattering for me to present this idea and it was so encouraging

to have these psychologists not philosophers psychologists pain psychologists who I knew were

top notch all of them connected with positive psychology pain this kind of attention to it and we

were supposed to write I was supposed to write a paper for it and I started the paper and the paper

just got getting more and more complicated and I saw I just had to write a book so Marty Seligman

of everybody is responsible for me writing this book and I couldn't get the paper out so the first

time I've ever been assigned a paper I couldn't complete because all the ideas connected in a very strict

deductive way almost and I had to try to get it all out in a in the most readable accessible

fashion I could and being a novelist that helped because I'm going to telling stories as well

I can tell a story this being stories about real people not made up stories I tried to demonstrate

the various ideas through stories of people but anyway it was a very intense three days everybody

started out or not everybody not Marty but everybody was a little skeptical and by the end

they seemed most of them convinced I'm not sure about Roy the Elmmeister but everybody I'll see

but that was good too because he was pushing so you need that yeah thank you for pointing that out

because it was really just personally very important to me and and yeah it was responsible for my

sitting down and writing the book Rebecca for anyone who wants to look at the output of that

meeting I'm going to drop a link to the paper that was produced by that dream team that applies

mattering to work environments specifically in work cultures I just want to touch on Marty Seligman

for a second because when I interviewed Gabriella Kellerman she was there too yes she and Marty

wrote a book a few years ago and I was hoping that Marty would be part of that interview for his book

but he politely declined I even tried to get Angela Duckworth who's a close mentee of Marty's

to see if he would reconsider but unfortunately he wouldn't what she told me which gives me so much

hope and gives this so much merit is that Marty is dedicating the remainder of his life to study

mattering which I think tells you the weight that he has given to this topic I hope somewhere

along the line he might reconsider and have that discussion I had hoped I hope so I'll add my voice

and his students have been getting in touch with me hopefully some real empirical research will come

out of this there are many empirical hypotheses that I suggest that could be tested I'm not in

that business I'm not an empirical psychologist I'm not even a psychologist but Marty had said

he wrote the first sentence of the paper that I never completed which was that some of our the

most important ideas in psychology can be traced back to philosophy that it's the philosophers who

come up with these ideas and I just the generosity of Marty Seligman is it's really something for all

of us to celebrate it's he is so many academics you find we rather competitive and I mean he know

he is so beyond that he is dedicated to ideas themselves ideas for the betterment of all of us so

it's positive psychology and a most positive psychologist I love hearing that Rebecca I want to

now go to the book you open up the mattering instinct and you go through what we just discussed

how you've been studying this for so long but you call the mattering instinct the most peculiar

and the most human thing about us what makes this longing not just a motive but something

that fundamentally distinguishes human love and the most poignant thing about us too I think the

poignancy of our life is captured by this longing that we have to matter and I really want to

ground it on solid science going back to physics the most solid of all the sciences and there

the most robust of physics the one that physicists tell us can never be negated and that's the

second love of thermodynamics that entropy which is disorder it's nature's score card for

disorder and disorder of a system means the system is you can't get any useful work out of it

so entropy is kind of a downer story and all life is in resistance to entropy to ground everything

starting with that Rebecca I have to intervene right there for a listener who might not be familiar

with entropy can you just explain this because people might not be making the connection between

entropy and mattering all systems close systems that don't have access to external sources

that can be turned into energy they just they dissipate they become more and more

disordered and useful work can't be gotten out of them so that do the extent but entropy which

means disorder is growing the system is running less and less efficiently until suddenly it can't

not suddenly gradually at the end it can't run at all it's a living system it means it dies

and all physical systems are running according to this law and it's the laws of probability

show you why disorder is much more probable than order and so that's the drift that's the direction

of all physical systems including us great news we're going to die we're going to die just like

everything else and all biological systems us included are taking in energy in food sunlides

or in chemicals in order to resist entropy all of the laws of biology are actually

deliverable from this fundamental fact about physics it's not even an instinct the fact that

every physical every biological system matters to itself it's the organizing principle of all

of the instincts derivedable from entropy but we alone of all biological systems of which we know

the least of all biological systems on this earth we have the capacity because of these

amazingly complicated big brains that we've evolved to be able to step outside of ourselves see

how much we matter to ourselves how much attention we pay to ourselves incessantly pay attention

to ourselves that doesn't mean we're selfish it doesn't mean we're self-centered it means our brains

are running as they evolve to run to defeat to push against as long as possible against entropy

we can step outside ourselves and see ourselves mattering and ask why why of all the things in the

universe do I pay so much attention to this one thing that if the measure of how much I think

something matters is how much attention I give it it seems to follow that I think I matter more

than anything else in the universe and short of lunacy I know that's wrong that's the sanity in

all of us and that sanity because of this capacity to step outside of ourselves of yours gives

rise to this longing to matter to in some way try to prove to ourselves that the amount of attention

we give to ourselves is somewhat commensurate with how much we deserve that we're we do deserve this

it's not just arbitrary that I just don't I just happen to be who I am is everything else just

happens to be what it is no there is something about me that can prove to myself that just a little

more a little more commensurate a Nobel Prize economist I mean failure is when I was discussing this

with him because I just got this with every body he said he was a economist he said but he said

I'm thinking how much mattering do we need he said a smattering of mattering you know just enough

but some people need a lot more than a smattering of mattering and we differ a lot and how much we

need and how we go about doing it and that's what makes us different from all other organisms and that

what makes us values seeking creatures we're looking for norms to justify ourselves and that brings us

into the realm of values and that ultimately I think is what is produced the greatest achievements

of our species and also the greatest atrocities that is it's deeply human

before we continue I want to pause for a moment one of the insights running quietly through

this conversation is that the longing to matter does not begin in adulthood it begins early

before we can articulate it before we can defend it that realization sits at the heart of my

upcoming children's book you matter Luma launching February 24th you matter Luma is a story designed

to help children understand intrinsic worth before the world teaches them to measure themselves

by achievement approval or comparison if the ideas in this series resonate with you especially

if you care about how the next generation comes to understand their value you can now preorder

you matter Luma to Barnes & Noble amazon bookshop.org or go to the website you matterluma.com

your help supports bring this message of mattering to the lives that will carry it forward

now a quick break for our sponsors thank you for supporting those who support the show

you're listening to Passion Struck on the Passion Struck Network now back to my conversation

with Rebecca Rebecca so two things one in my first book Passion Struck I open it up with

discussing grit by Angela Duckworth I actually had a conversation with her on this and I told her

Angela I think you're missing a very important ingredient grit alone is just grit and actually in

the book I used entropy as the missing ingredient because when you apply entropy to grit it shows

that you have to be intentional about where that entropy is being directed if not that grit can go

to either something that is going to take your life to a greater place or it's going to take it in

the opposite direction exactly so I personally loved how you used it in the book and understand

what you were saying however I want to go back to what we were just talking about how mattering is

something that really distinguishes us from all the other species on the planet because I think

it gets back to that moment we began asking ourselves whether our lives deserve the attention that

we give them and I think that's where we cross into a distinctly human problem why does self-reflection

turn life into such an existential question at that point rather than merely a biological one

because it brings us into that realm of justification that we the whole to I define

mattering whether we're talking about what matters or who matters as deserving of attention

deserving is actually both those words deserving and attention are really interesting

attention yeah that's something to be empirically explored by all the neuroscientists and cognitive

scientists it's a scientific question attention deserving that's what philosophers call a normative

concept it has to do with ought rather than is and the fact that we are asking this question of

ourselves am I just serving of my attention brings us into this realm of justification that we are

trying to justify ourselves to ourselves and we have to live with ourselves 24-7

and be very aware of how much attention we are paying to ourselves there's the default network

mode when you're not being paying attention to external stimuli when you're fantasizing and

daydreaming and what psychologists have told us what are you thinking about then yourself you're

fantasizing about yourself or you're remembering about yourself that we and we have to do that this

is what our brains are wired to do attention evolved as an adaptation to help us survive and to flourish and

of course you know we're always paying attention to ourselves when we're paying attention to the

environment or paying attention to how that environment is affecting ourselves so we have to put

ourselves front first and foremost but when we step outside ourselves and it may not be very

conscious but it's there at some level we step outside ourselves and we see how much attention

we pay to ourselves as if we're the most important thing in the universe I think it sets up a kind

of unease and we want to address that unease and then brings us into the sphere of justification

of values something entirely different under the sun I think it's beautiful I think it is what we

mean when we talk about the intrinsic dignity of every human that we all claim to acknowledge that

there's a certain intrinsic dignity to every human it is because we take on this extra burden of

justifying the application of the laws of nature to ourselves are we really worthy of we have to

act this way this is what biology has determined for us but we can ask the just of a story question

it brings us into an entirely different realm and that's what it is to be human so we take on

this extra burden it makes you in life all life is hard you got to struggle against entropy it's

hard but human life is so much harder you have to convince yourself that you are deserving of the

struggle that's amazing and that is what we all hold within us that's something estimated

that's something even when we lose patience with things that our fellow human beings are doing

it's good to remember how hard it is to be human so I want to go back to my original point on

mattering and how I got involved with this and then we'll come back I was taking a deeply spiritual

course around 2005 2006 time frame where I deeply immersed myself in a 34 week study on the

Bible I would meet twice a week in a small group and we explored all aspects of this from a

philosophical standpoint because the pastor who was guiding it not only had a doctorate in theology

but he also had a doctorate in philosophical history it was really an eye-opening experience

throughout this process I started to get these unwirly columns that I was supposed to go out and

help the lonely the broken the burned out the battered the helpless of the world and I had no idea

at the time what I was supposed to do I was senior executive at Lowe's leading the IT group

and I had absolutely no idea why I was being asked to do this thing or how these conditions were

even interrelated but now as I've seen the loneliness epidemic and the staggering statistics that

we have in both adolescent and adult rising in depression and anxiety more people burned out and

disengaged helpless I started to see that all of these things can't be isolated they have to be

symptoms of something that is much larger and when I started to really analyze this and started

looking at this from a spiritual layer a scientific layer a philosophical layer it all took me to

matter and when you lose it these are the things that start happening across society when the most

important thing about a human starts to erode we start to erode I wanted to put that out there

so you understand how I came at this it's important for listeners because you draw an important

distinction in the book I think it's an important one that people don't contemplate and that is

the distinction between connectedness which a lot of influencers are talking about today and

mattering we often treat them as the same but philosophically they are very different and I'm hoping

you might help me with that explanation thank you thank you that is I have found in trying to

discuss these ideas that is the conflation that people seem to naturally make that makes it very hard

for me to talk about what I actually mean here to try to uncover it one is very obvious to us

that we need to matter to others so the same notion mattering is used in connectedness that we need

there need to be certain people in our lives who will pay us attention whether we deserve it or not

hopefully all of us had this experience as very young children in our families that is the point

of families to make everybody in the family but most especially children if there are children in

the family to feel that they matter that they're deserving of attention we are born exceedingly

helpless more helpless than all other animals and that's because again these big brains are in order

to get these heads out of the birth canal which is difficult enough take it from someone who gave birth

that in order to get these big brains out of the birth canal they have to come out very prematurely

only 30% developed in that first year of life the brains grow enormously that's why when you bring

an infant to the pediatrician they are measuring the circumference of their heads because those

heads have got to double in size or something I don't remember exactly what the number is but they

grow really fast and so we're born incredibly helpless it takes a very long time for our brains to

develop into our early 20s when the most important the prefrontal lobes the place of maturity of

responsibility of taking being accountable of thinking before you act all of that stuff your impulse

control finally comes into being locks into place so it's like there's very little time between

your brains finally coming into maturity and the first wrinkle you know it's you start so why

because these these these brains are the most complicated thing we've yet discovered in the

universe yeah anyway so it we have got to be born into families into caretakers who will pay us

attention even if we don't deserve it how much attention does a little baby deserve they're not

doing anything extraordinary six months they finally roll over and we're all applauding that

well helpless we are right because if we don't have these caretakers taking pain us exquisite

attention we die and that need for there to be others in our lives friends family lovers co-workers

community members whoever you have in your life that continues throughout our lives that they're

my friends are paying me attention even when I screw up when I don't have to prove to them how

worthy I am they are my friends that's what it is to have people in your life and that is a need we

all have this mattering to others and it has to do with our relationship to others hopefully it's

reciprocal hopefully we also pay them attention but not everybody does they just want the attention

and they don't give it back anyway mattering instinct is something else it's our relationship with

ourselves it comes from this existential moment it's almost like a bucket play in fact Samuel

Beckett writes about this moment over and over again this kind of strangeness when we step outside

of ourselves and interrogate ourselves as if almost were another person saying well who are you

why are you so devoted single mindedly to your own survival and flourishing why are you paying

yourself so much attention you're not so very important you're you're no more important than

anybody else and then you try to do something to close that gap and that's what I mean by the

mattering instinct and you may do it through your social relationships that's what I call socializers

but you may do it spiritually religiously the kind of studying that you were talked about you

may do it in terms of your you have certain standards of excellence that you need to realize in

order to to feel okay about yourself and maybe very grand Steve Jobs had said you have to make a

dent in the universe well not all of us are born to make a dent in the universe I mean raising

prize petunias and maybe raising flourishing children and there are different ways that we

standards that we may have intellectual artistic entrepreneurial athletic military

ethical that we need to realize in order to feel yeah I'm okay I can tolerate my own existence

it may be competitive when these are the four different what I call the continents of the

mattering map and it just about everybody I've spoken to over the past 40 years since I've been

interested in this subject I wouldn't say just about just yeah everybody falls into one of these

four grand categories but then there are so many ways that these are realized so many things and

that's just so fascinating this kind of diversity in us thank you for sharing that Rebecca I want to

go into those quadrants here in just a little bit but I want to summarize what you were just saying

connectiveness concerns how we matter to others and this is how most people perceive mattering

however you and I would argue that mattering really concerns how we matter to ourselves

and this turn inward carries so much moral and psychological weight when you think of it that way

and I started to think about this because at the same time I was given that calling this group I

inherited it lows out of something like 300,000 employees was the most disengaged group in the

entire company and when I got to the root of the issue it wasn't about how they were relating to

others everyone else thought there were a bunch of buffoons and told me I should get rid of the entire

group what I realized was it was a greater breakdown because almost to a person when I would speak to

them none of the people in the group understood how they matter to themselves or how the role they were

doing mattered in the bigger scheme of lows like how does my job as a computer operator or someone in

the data center are working in a call center impact a customer experience and when they don't

understand that and this is what I think so few companies really understand they're never going

to be able to do the things you want them to and that's why I recently wrote a CEO weekly article

about this that the group of people that were not spending enough time with in these organizations

is frontline managers when I was in the military these are the corporals or sergeants or the

petty officers in the civilian world they're the frontline supervisors if these people don't

have a return on energy if they don't believe they matter then everything else in your company

is going to break down this is what I realized so when I rebuilt this group I had to start from

there how do you start making those employees those frontline supervisors feel like they matter

because then it carries the ripple effect forward and then they develop the relationship with

their subordinates and teach them that they matter too and that's how mattering the mattering

instant starts expanding that's what I found I think that is extremely interesting but I do

just want to point out that for a lot of people they really don't arrive they're mattering

from their work they work in order to make a living who support themselves and perhaps their

family and so many people I've spoken to are of that kind but that they're they're real mattering

that what do you mean this existential project that makes them feel that they have a reason to live

and that gives us them the impetus to get on with the future because it's hard to live the human

life they just can't stress that enough that they're driving it from something else so of course

it's very good to make people feel as if they matter in the workplace it's a moral imperative to

try to make people feel they matter wherever they are and to make them aware of how much they

matter in that situation you're overdrivers the cashier in the grocery store everybody to treat

them as if they matter and to make them and and point out the special things that they do that make

them matter is it's just it feeds the soul it really feeds the soul but I do want to just say

for some people for some of there's this movement that's rather big among philosophers

effective altruism and I said take any job that's going to pay the most money so you can give

the most charity work for Wall Street work for whatever even if it's not meaningful work for you

what will give it meaning is that you're doing it in order to be an altruist to make as much money

as you can in order to give it away so these are people who definitely do not are not going to

drive any their mattering from the work itself but from what they're going to do with this money.

I recently had a discussion with Joshua Green and it was basically on those same lines however

there's this interview I did a while back with this gentleman named Dr. Abraham George he came

over to the United States from India and became a prominent businessperson in New York he built all

this wealth and then actually went back to India because he saw how big a gap there was for so

many people he ended up creating this institution called Shanti Bhavan and put his altruism to work

since that time he has taken over 15,000 children who were in the lowest caste systems and these

children are now New York Times bestselling authors they've attended Ivy League schools

they're professors he has changed the complete dimension for tens of thousands of people

and I think it shows how the ripple effect that you were just talking about can change lives

on a global basis. It is Freud had said that the two cornerstones of humanists are love

and work and I think the fact that he said work where I would say

it shows us a lot about Freud no surprise he derived to sense of mattering from his scientific work

which was revolutionary and but not everybody derives their sense of mattering from their work

and to me this has been the most interesting thing to use this framework to try to understand

other people and it's to get to the core of other people what is it that's driving them

how are they trying to appease this longing. I think an interesting take on this is if you look at

Victor Frankl and how he defined the ways we achieve meaning he did identify work is one of them

but he also identified relationships that we find ourselves in so you can be a caretaker to a loved

one who's going through a terrible sickness and you can find meaning in that or you can find

meaning in the love that you have for a child or a loved one or a partner but he also finds that

you can have meaning where I would extend it to mattering and suffering it's not just about work

and I think that's what makes it unique is mattering is completely dependent on each of us as

individuals yeah so our real individuality comes out and free will is a big issue for philosophers

and I was saying if it exists anywhere it exists on this plane the plane of trying to respond

to this shared mattering instinct and which brings us into this realm of values and we choose

different values and some are choosing I tell stories of people who have choose what I would call

wrong values and I try to give the criterion for distinguishing between better and worse ways

of responding to this if I wake up tomorrow morning and decide I have to invade Poland

no my sense of mattering demands it well then my sense of mattering may demand that but I must be

stopped because this is a destructive way of responding to the mattering instinct and we do see

very destructive ways of responding to it and I would say some of the worst atrocities we've seen

throughout history and if we open today's newspaper we will see very damaging ways of responding to

this but it's deeply unique so no wonder it can lead to atrocities and no wonder it can lead to

beautiful acts of altruism and achievement and scientific discovering artistic creativity and all

of that let's take a break here before we go into the four quadrants I definitely want to go into

them but I want to explore one of these stories maybe I'll let you pick one in the book you talk about

Spinoza you talk about William James you talk about Freud who you brought up earlier but is there a

particular story that you feel might resonate the best for the listeners yeah I pre-got these stories

in to illustrate different aspects of this mattering longing but perhaps William James because

I think the story of William James the great philosopher and psychologist in fact

and Harvard down the street from where I am now the psychology building was called William James Hall

Harvard is very proud of him I think he illustrates it especially when you could put him in

a combination with his sister Ellis James but so William was born into an amazing family his younger

brother by 18 months was Henry James the novelist William James is the oldest of five children and then

there were two other boys after Henry and then a sister Alice James and William James a father was

kind of he didn't have to work for a living he had inherited money but he was an independent scholar

Swedenborgian mystic and William James was extraordinarily talented intellectually artistically

scientifically philosophically a very close-knit family the connectedness was there super there when

William decided he wanted to be an artist they all took off and moved from Boston to Newport

Rhode Island so that he gets the study with a famous artist there the whole family decamped and he

certainly in terms of connectedness it was all in place and he suffered he said he was not going

he wasn't a good enough artist and there's nothing more contemptible than being a mediocre artist he

had these already this is a heroic striver right said that he has these standards of excellence that

must be met in order for him to live in peace with himself so he then he goes to medical school and

he's not inspired by medical school he goes through it he becomes a doctor he never practices

he goes into a deep depression almost like had a tonic depression where he would just lie in bed

and contemplate suicide for months and months on end right and he does not commit suicide because

he wouldn't do that to his family but that is how tenuous his hold on life was his engagement with life

and it's such an amazing he doesn't he writes about it in one of his great books the varieties

of religious experience he says it he tributes it to a French doctor but he told his son and also

his translator his French translator that it was himself that he was describing here it was a

first person account of what it is like to be in a deep clinical depression and then he pulls himself

out of it he decides his first act of free will be to believe in free will and he will act as if

his life is worth living and he latches on to what I call a mattering project he becomes a

philosopher and all of that energy was that was all over the place and is focused on this one area

which then merges into psychology and he is a man of extraordinary energy everybody writes about him

he was physical energy and mental energy and social energy he is but constantly battling a kind of

melancholic what they called the 19th century a melancholic depressive temperament when he

accomplished a tremendous amount his principles of psychology still read it's magnificent and

he's a psychologist who who writes like a novelist and his brother Henry James is a novelist

who writes like a psychologist to extraordinary talents he was a heroic striver he needed that

project to to carry that so that he could accomplish these great things in order for him to be

able to live with himself his sister on the other hand Alice was a Victorian woman but there was

no outlet for her when she she kept a diary and it was finally published in the 1970s it was

feminist project to bring out this diary of this Victorian woman and she did suffer her entire life

from depression constantly was fighting off suicide she became a permanent invalid couldn't

leave her bed and did get a lot of attention from her family in this way but was was life was

not a joyful endeavor for her and when she actually got breast cancer at the age of I think 41 or 42

she greeted it with glee now she could retire now she had a diagnosable disease and she could

just retreat and wait for death it's almost like a controlled experiment two people raised in the

same household the same close-knit connected household and the same kind of temperament neurotic

yes both of them had weird neurotic but one was given a way to find himself to a manoring

project that could allow him to live with himself and feel like he was realizing what he was

meant to do and the other was it and you see the results you know how it was so for me this family

this amazing family especially these two siblings really demonstrates something about the distinction

between connectedness and the mattering instinct I wanted to share a couple more things about this

because this is one of the things I loved about your book is how much detail you put into these

stories so what you just left out that I think is important is that out of these five kids

William James father chose the two oldest to be his heir apparent and the ones that he wanted to

glorify the James family name that he wasn't able to do in his lifetime so he did extraordinary

things for William and Henry including the fact that he moved the whole family just so that William

could try to pursue his artistic ventures and then what followed is he moved him back and when

William James went to Harvard Harvard back then isn't what we think about today Harvard was stumbling

not nearly as well respected when William arrived there and I think he in many ways put them on

the map but another distinction that you really make is that the father allowed the two younger

boys to go to war when they were just 16 and 17 years old which caused both of them to end up

leading unfulfilling lives because of those experience that they had in battle and in many many

ways then the daughter Alice who was brilliant as brilliant as the two older boys was never given

the same mattering foundation as the two older boys were which I think impacted her own self

mattering in huge ways and it was only in the twilight of her life when she found her partner

who made her feel like she mattered that I think she truly became alive so I think those are other

really important parts that you bring about in the book yeah well actually the most fulfilling part

of her life when she just did not have the ideation the suicide ideation was a brief period when

she was able to teach other women there was a some kind of group that allowed women to teach other

women and and then she felt fulfilled and then what she was and she did it's true that did

her Katherine Lauren partner towards the end of her life was it was a very fulfilling

relationship but she needed when you have that much talent you need a way of expressing it

of trying to develop these ideas or develop your beautiful sentences she had the writing gift

and she had that heightened consciousness of consciousness that all of the James siblings had

but yeah they're extraordinary family but I have a novel called The Dark Sister in which William James

is a character right there but the way that William you know that the way he was

able to pull himself out was just I'm going to commit to life and that means committing

to a certain project it turned out to be a highly intellectual project not artistic but he was a

heroic striver and I think there's some there is some evidence comes from the psychology of

personality that we have a a structure to our temperament so that some of us are more interested

in close relationships some of us in achievement some of us in power this so there's this theory the

Marie McClellan theory of personality that groups us into these three different types and there's

some correlation with my quadrants my continents the four continents of the mattering map

transcenders what I call transcenders those who seek it in some matteriness and religious or

spiritual way is not included in this but transcenders I think come in three different forms

and affiliate or those who are driven by need for affiliation those who are driven by achievement

and those who are driven by the need for power so the religious impulse can express itself

in many different ways this is where I really wanted to go great so in the book in the mattering

map you bring out transcenders which you just mentioned socializers heroic strivers which you

mentioned William James was and competitors and the reason you do this as I interpret it is you're

trying to show how widely different human responses to the same instinct diverge and another thing

that I thought was really important is that mattering instinct is not circular what I thought

is the fact that we long to matter doesn't automatically justify how we pursue mattering was an

important distinction that you made so with that setup can you take us through the four quadrants

thanks for mentioning it's not circular that would be very damning if it was and I gave that a lot

of thought that it not be circular so transcenders heroic strivers socializers and competitors and I

can say they can all go right and they can all go wrong then I talk about how I try to distinguish

between right and wrong responses but transcenders this is a very this is a kind of yeah religious

spiritual response to mattering it requires the person the transcender to have a belief that there

is some transcendent trans empirical beyond space and time being to whom one matters that the trend

whether you call the transcendent being god or something more spiritual and vague but yet that the

universe is permeated by the goals the intentions of this being and this being intentionally

created oneself that you exist by reason of this transcendent being god or whatever you call it

and that and that that means that this being thinks that felt that you have a purpose to play

in the narrative of eternity this is the grandest narrative that could possibly exist and that

this results in a great sense of mattering using you cosmically matter that which created

heaven and earth and the moral order created you I was born as an into a transcendor feel of family

that's my background I was born into a very religious family I was raised very religiously

and I was very religious I'm a serious nature so when I was religious I took it very seriously

in my tradition for example men are required to pray three times a day every day women are not

I did right I took that on myself and and the sense of mattering I've experienced it is very

strong I felt then I did something wrong and I violated one of the many laws that go into the

the demon it a Jewish Orthodox life Orthodoxy is what I was brought up in I felt that I was

displeasing god himself that god was paying attention that and that was terrifying but I never doubt

how much I matter I matter to god I very actually all my actions matter to god that is a very

strong sense of mattering and and people as we well know transcendors will give up their lives

that's what religious martyrs do what they feel that that is required by what grounds they're

mattering which is one of the points I make in the book that our our need to matter is stronger our

will to matter stronger than the will to life itself you will you can sacrifice your life if

you think that your mattering demands that so those are transcendors and they're really interesting

to make especially given my background Joan of Arc is a great example of someone who gave up her

life because she pursued her mattering yes exactly and she says as the fire is lit hold the cross

so that I can see it okay I'm going to start crying because it's very long hold the cross up

so I can see it through the flames this is very moving you know that this is many members of our

species have this is the way they ground the right and I think one of the reasons that we feel

this crisis of mattering is that most of us are no longer religious in that way we may go to church

synagogue mosque but we don't ground our very mattering on on these religious beliefs and other

things have moved in to take its place fame power money these sorts of things shallower and that also

I should say that not everybody can achieve not everybody can be famous not everybody can be a

billionaire not everybody can be powerful but when the days of religion or spirituality really

grounding the sense of mattering everybody could have a part in that and so that is so that has

some things to do with why mattering is a lot of other things have to do with it as well but one

of the factors that goes into why there is a crisis of mattering not that I'm in favor of or all

be right it's interesting I'll get this literature sometimes saying showing that believers religious

believers have the greater sense of meaningfulness in their life of mattering this life this is not

surprising to think that you have a role to play in the narrative of eternity nothing else can compete

with that you I'll get this literature and it's put in the guise of so therefore be religious as

if that's not how religion works it's not it always reminds me it's like joining the health

club you'll be healthier well become a religious believer I feel like you matter more it's not how

religious belief works I know because I was once a believer so there are heroic strivers

and heroic strivers also very interesting these are people who have some it's not mattering to

God it's not mattering to others in a heroic striver true heroic striver it really is a matter of

there's standards of excellence that you have to fulfill or at least feel like you're getting

closer to making progress toward in order for your life to feel meaningful in order for you to

have a purpose and for it to make sense and I do pay a lot of attention to a heroic strivers in

the book and maybe that shows something about me but these are a kind of person I understand very

well but I'm particularly interested in those who were really not trying to impress others

that were to really show that this is about realizing a standard of excellence for yourself

and so that you can respect yourself respect redeem yourself and your own eyes and one of the for

me most touching stories comes from my personal life I have a very good friend she's a writer and

Megan Marshall she's a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer and she had a partner who had once

named Scott Harnie who had hopes of being a poet and studied at Harvard with Robert Lowell

and it wasn't going at all well he sent out his poems they were not published he tried to get

entered every contest he did not win and then he turned away from poetry and after unfortunately he

died young and he after Woods Megan found his stash of poetry on which he had been constantly

working he never sent it out again the rejections were poisoning it for him right but he worked

just as hard and he and his poems are magnificent and you see all of the effort and that was his

mannering project he was going making progress towards this and it was not to win other

peoples applause or anything like that it was just to feel like he was doing something with this

life that it was not a waste he was in dialogue not with his contemporaries but with the great

poets of the past and so this really to me this story really demonstrated what it is to be a heroic

striver it's the applause they may come they may not they couldn't come for him because nobody else

not even his partner knew what he was up to after his death his book was published too great a client

that reminds me of this story I recently had Mark Nipa on the show and he was telling me that

people now are very aware of his book spiritual awakening because it sold like 30 million copies

but it wasn't his first book it was one of many books at that point he had written and up until

Oprah discovered it through her yoga teacher he told me it had sold maybe a thousand or 1200 copies

and it was really her who amplified it so he's another one who you think purpose was more in the

master of what he was trying to put into his words than it was ever the global attention and recognition

that he derived from it that's how I took my meeting with him yeah so should we go on to the next one

I could talk more about her role yes no let's go to the next one socializers most people who I

speak to and I tell you if you sit next to me on a long trip on a bus or a train or a plane

sooner or later I'm going to be asking you questions about what you see up in the morning what you know

what could go wrong in your life that would make you feel like you're living your life all wrong

these kinds of existentially probing questions and everybody eventually has a story to tell me

about it but most people as soon as I start talking about mattering they just automatically supply

the term mattering to others now part of that is because of this connectedness that is a need for

all of us without deep connections people in our lives to whom we matter what do we feel lonely

that's what loneliness is when you don't have people who are just going to pay you attention who

think that you matter but mattering when it's mattering the result of not feeling like you matter

as we see from William James's story is depression it's and in fact the suicide help line in the US

is www.umatter.gov and you matter.gov and I have spent a lot of time talking to depressed people I

since heroic strivers by the way are very prone to depression of this sort it's hard to be living

a living thing it's even harder to be human it's extremely hard to be a heroic stripper right to

have these standards of excellence that you have to feel like you're making progress towards

otherwise you feel disgusted with yourself that's what depression is it's self-discussed you don't

want to be in the presence of yourself any longer it's like a psychological autoimmune disease

you're fighting against yourself so how did I get back on heroic strivers yeah there you go

but if we're talking about socializers for socializers it's the mattering to others that really

satisfies the mattering instinct and it might be mattering to others who are in your life so that

the need for connectedness and for mattering are really collapsed into one so a mother who's living

for her children or romantic partners who are living for each other or that really that's what

the mattering is grounded on or it could be mattering to others with whom you who are really not

in your life who may be a bunch of strangers that's what the desire for fame is and the desire for

fame I found especially among young people is very strong that many young people I've spoken to

they want to be influencers they want to be paid a lot of attention I a lot of people most of

whom are strangers that's what fame is and it makes sense if you're trying to convince yourself

that you're deserving of all your of of your own attention the fact that so many others are paying

so much attention it's good evidence that you're deserving it makes you feel like you matter

it seems to quench that existential need so it's understandable I've spoken to a lot of famous

people and some of them find that fame is the piss they don't like it and it's very obscure

I'll tell one story about that that to me captured it again it was something I personally

witnessed I was at a party and there was a very famous writer there it was an academic party but

this was a writer in residence extremely famous the name would be known by everybody and a fellow

philosopher came up and was in the little conversation cluster and his philosopher he's clueless

and he asked her name and she told it and then he said oh and what do you do she said this

conversation is over turned on her heel and walked away and that really to me epitomized

what an insecure grounding thing is if you can tolerate one clueless philosopher not knowing

what you do and that that would hurt you that shows the kind of insecurity of going after your

mattering by way of fame it's nice to have a lot of people paying attention to you and there's

one straight it's a movie star I forgot his name he's a famous movie star I can't remember his name

but anyway he wanted it he was a little sick of always being swamped when he went out and

everybody wanted to take selfies with him so he put on a prosthetic nose and glasses and changed his

hair and he went to a mall in LA and he said yeah this really sucks nobody was coming over to me

and I wanted to tell me how much they love me and how can I curse on this

well no well he just said nobody nobody had weighed online to get a freaking cup of coffee

this sucks I want to be famous that's true when people treat the famous very nicely and for some

people it works and for some people it doesn't but it is a kind of insecurity the public is

fickle they're paying a lot of attention to you today but as it dips if that's what your

mattering is found it on you can find yourself in a very bad place so yeah and then the calls this

also has to do with mattering a lot to the cult leader and there's a bit called trickle down

mattering there are socializers coming there many different flavors as well and then there

are competitors that that's the last and those are the one kind of person that when I would talk

about mattering they would become uneasy and a little defensive because sensitively questioning

it is revealed that they think of mattering as zero sum they are in competition with others

as to their mattering to the extent that others matter they matter less

what's it piece of the pie and here too I know there are two very different kinds of

competitors some of which are individually competitive and it may be in one sphere for example

one scientist who I know who won a Nobel Prize and is another friend of his a mutual friend

said to me that ex was happy for all of 15 minutes when he got that call from Stockholm and then

he remembered that other people had also gotten Nobel prizes end of happiness he was a very

strong competitor but he did very wonderful work he contributed to science so even he's contributed

something you can do wonderful things if you are driven by competition then there are those who

are group competitors they feel like they belong to a group that most matters and and there

are in zero sum competition with other groups especially if they feel that these other groups

matter less but yet are being regarded as mattering more it's taking away their mattering

and one person that I go into great detail telling his story because his story is amazing

is a former neo nazi skinhead who grew up rough and bad in his family his mother was a addict his

stepfather was a brute and frank dropped out of school by the age of 13 he came into contact with

some neo nazis is it him look in the mirror you matter you are a white male heterosexual american

you matter more than anybody else in the world because of this group identity and these other

people whom they call bum mud people of color they are taking away your mattering

and the jews are behind it the great replacement theory so he became a fervent and a full-time

neo nazi activist he did terrible things he'll be the first one to tell you he came out of it

he saw the fallacy the idiocy he would say of his ideology but he grabbed hold of this way of

trying to answer his own need to matter with all of his life force and devoted everything

to it and terrible things as he would tell you and has spent the rest of his life doing penance

for that this is one of the most amazing stories of somebody who changed his location on the

mattering map he lives for something else now he lives for you I call him a heroic an ethical

heroic striber anyway those are the four types Rebecca thank you for taking us through that

I wanted to hone in a couple things that I think are important one is that you argue that the

mattering instinct is responsible for both humanities greatest achievements and its greatest

atrocities and you brought up through your last example the atrocities that it can cause but the

divergence here is really binary in many ways you could look at mother Teresa and then you could

contrast that with Hitler to show how both of their mattering instincts drove completely different

outcomes why is this so important for a listener to understand in today's world that we're living in

I think look we are so different by temperament belief systems value systems

culture or talents our passions and that all the individuality all goes into how we respond to

this shared motivation that we have deep motivation that shapes our lives we know

none of us want to waste our life we want to respond in the right way to this instinct and we

all recognize we make the distinction that there are right ways and wrong ways and we want to

end up piezing this longing and answering the question do I really matter that motivates all this

we wanted to it in the right way and it we never there's never the voice of a god oh some people

think there is the voice of God but most it's not the voice of God saying yes we're back up this is

the way this is the way to do it there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty we have to live with

and and it's better to recognize the uncertainty than not because if we don't and then where

you start thinking like everybody ought to be living the way I'm I'm living and they're living it

all wrong and they maybe will even go so far as to say and they don't matter they don't matter even

they're enumins they're they just are not worthy of any respect or dignity we want to get it

right and so what I try to do is to offer give in all of this diversity and it's always going to be

there and it's a beautiful thing one of my favorite quotations is from the Islamic mystic

Sufi mystic rumy you know that there are a hundred ways to kneel down and kiss the ground that

there are just so many ways that we can appease this longing in creative in beautiful ways and

there but there are ways that are ugly and are and how do we distinguish because from the inside

the ugly ways be in the right way so how do we distinguish and again I want to I don't want to

I can't in times past we would have put this down to our beliefs about God the word of God of

course we differed about the word of God and what he wanted from us and we differed in often

bloody ways how about that is there's some way of adjudicating of the difference between the right

and the wrong way that doesn't require us to put our faith in something that we can prove and

that we can all agree on secularists religious people the spiritual the non-spiritual the republicans

the democrats all of us and again I go back to that supreme law of physics that motivates this in

a convoluted way this longing to matter but I think that they can give us to this distinction

entropy is destructiveness it's death it's decay life is putting everything we have against this

thing so you know it so that we can live so that we can flourish as all living things do I think

it's better to be on the side of life than on the side of entropy on the side of disorder

destructiveness and death and ever a mattering project is such so that it's serving us so that

we are living with a sense of flourishing with living true to our potential living fully living

engaged that's good but we have to look beyond ourselves as well are we is our mattering project

such as to in general be on the side of life's struggle against entropy it's we're living in such a

way as to increase suffering increase confusion increase ugliness increase ill health as opposed to

health this is not a good mattering project even working for you even if it's working for you

it's increasing entropy disorder and suffering on a very local level when I talk about for example

a love bomber who I tell the story about one of my acquaintances had an experience with this love

bomber left a whole trail of very sad women behind him increasing disorder increasing suffering

or you could be on a grand scale a Hitler a Paul pot a king leopold a Belgium a Putin and maybe some

of our own leaders but who are increasing chaos disorder suffering and that's not a good way to

live and I think this sort of captures what we intuitively know about morality and about values

that be on the side of life that can be the meaning of life you are on the side of life itself

that's not arbitrary and I end the book by talking about an obscure woman I'm just happy to learn

about her a Chinese woman incredibly impoverished I was an orphan at three years old survived by

scavenging garbage and bringing it to recycling stations and this was during the period in China of

one baby policy and she found a lot of babies who were thrown out she found them in dumpster she

found them in public toilets she found them on the side of the road they were female if you could

only have one baby you wanted it to be male you wanted it to be a male and so she brought them home

this woman who could barely keep body and soul together and she brought up over 30 little girls

and she brought home more babies that she could find homes for she could find homes for them

she did and those she couldn't she raised with the bearous means possible she was dead by the time

I learned about her but I had the great privilege to be able to speak to one of her daughters

who threw her in a interpreter and she when I asked her and she was a found baby she was found

I think in a public toilet when I asked her did you ever want to find your birth mother and she

started crying I had the best mother of anybody could possibly have and everybody every child who

passed through her hands had the best mother that anybody could possibly have and this is such a

story of what it is to lead a good life she was entirely on the side of life of flourishing here

or generations now as usual has her own children generations who are alive because of her you know

what you know what more yeah that story reminds me of Schindler's list and there's this moment

where he's sitting in a movie theater and they ask all the people around him please stand up

if you were someone who Schindler saved and he looks around him and the whole room is filled with

survivors and that's how you realize the ripple effect of your actions on generations

yes yes and again I've quoted Rumi and from my own tradition the Jewish tradition ancient rabbi

rabbi Hillel who had said if I'm not for myself then who will be for me but if I'm only for myself

then what am I and if not now when and I think this both Rumi and rabbi Hillel had captured

neither of them by appealing to an Almighty God but what it is to really live a life that matters

what matters to yourself so you can live with yourself but matters in some more objective sense of

being on the side of life against disorder entropy all the things worth living for a knowledge

as opposed to ignorance clarity as opposed to confusion health as opposed to ill health

kindness as opposed to cruelty beauty as opposed to ugliness all of these require our resisting

entropy they all require order these are good things these are all good things love as opposed to hatred

these are the things we know intuitively are right so I want to close on this

Rebecca one of the mattering instance its most human implications is that

mattering makes us vulnerable to being wounded by the world how should that change how should we

judge one another yeah it's hard to be human really it's hard to be human it's just crazy I still

makes us vulnerable to say it again to being wounded wound up by the world so that how does that change

that woundedness how does that change how we judge one another that it might be that our mattering

project makes us dependent on on others even if we're heroic strivers we tell the story of

Scott Joplin of the great ragtime composer but he wanted to do something so much grander he

composed operas couldn't get them produced gave everything to this and they're marvelous there's a

tree we know about tree munitions which was one of the operas and but he was a black man in Jim Crow

times nobody was going to produce his opera ragtime jazz that was acceptable but so sometimes

there is a sort of clash between what we need to do to feel that we matter and what the world

wants from us and they don't want that from us and we need them to want this from us or sometimes

a romantic longing this is the person who's love you need in order to quench your thirst to matter

and maybe they like you for a little while but then they leave you or maybe they never it makes us

depending on what our mattering project is you can make us dependent on getting the right response

from the world and that makes us that can wound us deeply and we have to think about how to

respond to that we sometimes we have to change how we seek our mattering AI now faces us it may

be stealing our mattering away from us able to do our creative tasks better than we can so all

creatives will be facing an existential dilemma can they really matter when AI can do it better

so there are all sorts of things that can go wrong here which is I think there are practical ways

that we can try to meet this depending how it plays out in our lives in the lives of others

but one thing we really ought to be giving freely is our kind of mercy toward one another

in realizing this burden that everybody faces wherever there is human life there is the quivering

longing to matter that makes us vulnerable to being wounded by the world and we should have

mercy on one another Rebecca my last question to you and I'm interested to hear your

reply is what does it mean for you to live a passion struck life yeah well my passion I think

is obvious I love knowledge I'm going to tell you the truth I want to know everything I just want

to know everything and I want to be able to fit that all together in some meaningful way that

will be helpful to add something to enough for myself and who will be for me but if I'm only

for myself and what am I I live by that and but for me personally it's understanding things

trying to understand things on a large scale how it all fits together yeah that is that that's

my passion my passion is also to love others and that's is very hard sometimes we are all extremely

flawed and this framework that's allowed me to I think try to understand others it's not to

forgive everything about others we do terrible things to each other by getting I think this wrong

this mattering instinct wrong but I would say love and knowledge these these are my passions

Rebecca it was such an honor to have you today thank you so much for joining me on passion struck

congratulations on this amazing work mattering instinct that you have brought into the world

well thank you so much for understanding what it's about thank you very much

that brings us to the close of today's conversation with Rebecca Goldstein if this episode

lingered with you it's because it's named something fundamental the human need to justify our lives

not just to others but to ourselves here are three reflections you might carry forward first

mattering is an inward moral relationship belonging tells us where we stand with others

mattering asks whether our lives are worthy of the attention they require second the instinct to

matter is powerful and dangerous it fuels care creativity and endurance and it can also distort

into competition exclusion and harm when misdirected third entropy places a boundary

some ways of living sustain the conditions for life others quietly accelerate decay the

difference matters Rebecca minds us that the longing to matter is not something we outgrow it is

something we learn to live more wisely more mercifully and more honestly if this conversation

expanded your thinking consider sharing it with someone who wrestles with questions of meaning

value or worth or leave a five star review an apple podcast or Spotify it's one of the most

meaningful ways to support the show to continue the work visit the ignitedlife.net

for guided reflections from the you matter series watch the full conversations on youtube

john or miles or passion struck clips explore intention driven apparel at start mattering.com

on Thursday we continue the inquiry we started today with Daniel Coil in his new book

flourishing where we examine how environments culture and collective practices shape

who grows who quietly withers modern experience i think to feel like you're just a cog in a machine to

feel like you're not mattering i find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent normalize

that kind of thing where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational

beings and simply machines but what it looks like is isolation what it looks like is loneliness what

it looks like is anxiety and depression i think in the end when you know we are social animals we are

animals made of meaning without meaningful connection without mattering to use the language without

mattering we're hollowed out where it is a core need of us to be in community and growing

until then remember you matter not because of what you prove but because of who you already are

your heart counts your full self belongs and the people who need your real presence most are waiting

for exactly that i'm john miles and you've been passion struck