The Mattering Instinct Quotes

“It is almost certain that what Jefferson had in mind was not the episodic emotion of happiness, but rather what the ancient Greeks had called eudaimonia.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Baba Amte’s next project was to establish a school for the blind at Anandwan, building a dormitory so that children could come from far away. A school for the deaf soon followed. And then, after he and Sadhana found a little girl abandoned on the roadside, they created an orphanage. At some point a home for the abandoned elderly was also erected on the grounds. And not one among the participants in Anandwan was spared the obligations of contributing their labor to the community. The elderly could teach others. They could plant and tend the gardens that beautified the grounds. Nobody, said Baba Amte, should be deprived of beauty. A visitor mentioned that the roses of Anandwan have an unusual fragrance. “Of course, they do,” responded Baba Amte. “They have been irrigated by the tears of the blind, the deaf, and the orphaned children who tend them.”20”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“The actor Kevin Bacon confessed to Vanity Fair that he had long fantasized about what it would be like to walk anonymously through the world without being besieged by people begging to take a selfie with him, because “I’m not complaining, but I have a face that’s pretty recognized.” He outfitted himself with fake teeth, a prosthetic nose, and glasses, and went to an LA shopping mall teeming with tourists. His disguise worked, but his delight in anonymity quickly fizzled. “People were kind of pushing past me, not being nice. Nobody said, ‘I love you.’ I had to wait in line to, I don’t know, buy a fucking coffee or whatever. I was like, this sucks. I want to go back to being famous.”14”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“And lastly, Aristotle, who deserves a special place, since he was not only a heroic striver, but also gave us perhaps the best statement of what it is to be one: “We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal by straining every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.” McClelland also captures the heroic striver in defining the need for achievement: “What should be involved in the achievement motive is doing something better for its own sake, for the intense satisfaction of doing something better.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“In her memoir, In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson, Sue Erikson Bloland relates that her father, the eminent psychoanalyst—he coined the phrase “identity crisis”—had been consumed with the need for fame: “Fame did not simply come to him because he was an extraordinarily brilliant thinker and writer, which he certainly was. But from early childhood on I was aware that his drive to achieve recognition was monumental.” Erikson’s book, Childhood and Society, catapulted him into celebrity. He had dared, with his emphasis on issues of self-identity and ego formation, to take on the hegemony of Freud.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“What the mattering instinct is about is trying to prove to ourselves that we are deserving of all the attention that we can’t help paying ourselves. And what better proof can there be for concluding that we are deserving of our own attention than the attention others pay to us—which in the case of the famous is a great deal.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“The last group of non-intimacy socializers I want to consider are fame seekers. They too want to matter to others—to multitudes of others, the vast majority of them strangers. As the satirical writer H. L. Mencken put it, “A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn’t know.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“A charismatic leader who creates a movement that supplies both trickle-down mattering and connectedness induces what is needed for a sense of flourishing.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“To seek the satisfaction of the mattering instinct in our connections with others with whom we are intimately bonded—our family, lovers, friends, colleagues, community members—seems to many people the most salubrious path to satisfying the mattering instinct,”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Some mattering regions teem with billions, as, for example, those demarcated by major religions; others are mid-sized, such as the one inhabited by those pursuing fame for fame’s sake; and some are tiny—the Monacos, Maltas, and Seychelles of the mattering map—such as the regions inhabited by Victorian salmon fly-tyers, sommeliers, pickup artists, body builders, trainspotters, Civil War reenactors, and analytic philosophers.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Individualist mattering competitors, a type to be examined in the next chapter, are likely to feel connected, if at all, only to members of their own family and their acolytes—in other words, people they can view as extensions of themselves—rather than those with whom they share their mattering region, whom they regard as mattering rivals. But more often, our co-regionists, being the people who share our vision of what life is meant to be about, are among those we regard as in our lives to whom we wish especially to matter. To quote a cliché particularly apt to a chapter that began with Rist’s feather heist, birds of a feather flock together. Our mentors, if we have them, as well as our mentees, if we have them, might well be among the flock.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“And if a brief definition of ideal or moral action were required, none could be given which better fit the appearances than this: It is action in the line of the greatest resistance.”25 The sick-souled have been granted the greatest of opportunities, since their persistence in existence requires action in the line of the greatest resistance.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Say you are hiking in the woods and come upon a grizzly bear. The sight causes you to tremble. You might think that you tremble because you are afraid, but James inverts the causality. “My thesis, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion.”24 In other words, according to James, you do not tremble because you are afraid but rather are afraid because you perceive yourself to be trembling. Willfully cancel the trembling, and you annihilate the fear.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Free will is, of course, a contentious issue. Is everything about us determined by prior causes, even the acts of the mind that we experience as decisions, or can decisions break into the chain of causality and produce an undetermined effect? It was the latter alternative that James was willing himself into believing, and with it, he was willing himself into believing in the power of his own willing self.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“This emphasis on the will reaches back to the sustained crisis of James’s youth. In a diary entry dated April 30, 1870, as a first indication of his recovering from his depressive breakdown, he had resolutely written, “My first act of free will will be to believe in free will.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“But, of course, Wittgenstein, in his last utterance, was harkening back to the distinction Aristotle had drawn millennia before in his first attempt at a science of eudaimonia. You can have a life that is more struggle and suffering than happiness and yet is, in terms of satisfaction, a wonderful life: the very life one would have chosen. Those closest to Wittgenstein saw only the day-to-day unhappiness and never saw what Wittgenstein himself acknowledged about himself. For example, in one of his private manuscripts, in 1931, he wrote, Die Freude an meinem Gedanken ist die Freude an meinem eigenen seltsamen Leben: “The joy of my thoughts is the joy of my own strange life.”15”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Parenthood, ensured by natural selection to be a powerfully sustained form of connectedness, presents perhaps the most widely shared experience in which happiness and life satisfaction can diverge, though romantic relationships, which also involve intense connectedness, can also part the two.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Intolerance blooms in the soil of our faulty logic.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Our flourishing will now require our convincing ourselves that we have a reason to flourish, and we are prepared to devote a great deal of our energy to what it takes to convince us. This is the inflection point where the narrative of our lives goes beyond a Darwinian narrative, becoming uniquely our own. If free will exists anywhere, then here is where it is to be found: in this sphere of oughts to which the mattering instinct carries us, transforming us into the normative creatures we are, who think and act and shape our lives within the sphere of justifications. We are in strictly human territory now.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“The odd opinions and extravagant actions that men are led into by enthusiasm,” wrote Locke, “provide a sufficient warning against it; but many men ignore the warning, and once they have started to think they are receiving immediate revelation—illumination without search, and certainty without proof or examination—it is hard to cure them of this.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Our self-mattering and our longing to matter seem irreconcilable. How, given the laws of nature that made us, is there room in our psyche for the longing to take form? Self-mattering is wired into our brains. We feel ourselves, insistently and persistently, deserving of our own attention—so very much attention!—not as an outcome of the decisions of our will but rather the outcome of our being ourselves. How then can we come to feel compelled to dedicate so much of our available energy to striving to prove to ourselves that we are deserving of our own attention—when to feel that we are deserving of our own attention is to be ourselves?”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Consisting of roughly 86 billion neurons, connected by roughly a hundred trillion synapses, the human brain is the most complicated object on this planet designed to resist entropy.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“All life, all flourishing, depends on capturing energy (from sunlight or food) and applying it in local anti-entropic resistance. And the more complicated the system, then the more ways for it to be disordered, and hence the more resistance required. Again, our brains are the most complicated objects yet discovered in the universe and, not coincidentally, require a lot of energy.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“Every living thing is organically driven by a mandate that ensures it matters to itself—which is to say that it prioritizes its own surviving and thriving. In lifeforms as massive as blue whales and as scanty as a sliver of grass struggling up through a crack in the sidewalk, biology encodes the message of self-mattering.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us

“The logic that seems implicit in the mattering instinct gives rise to the urge to universalize: my reason to live ought to be your reason to live.”
― Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us