Philosopher Rebecca Goldstein Explores Why People Struggle to Find Meaning in Modern Life

Rebecca Goldstein, a MacArthur award-winning philosopher and novelist, has published a new book titled 'The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us' that investigates humanity's fundamental need to matter. The book addresses what happens when inherited authorities—church, state, family, and tribe—lose their power to dictate meaning, forcing individuals to construct their own sense of purpose. Goldstein identifies four strategies people employ: transcendence, competition, social belonging, and heroic striving. She draws on Friedrich Hayek's 'knowledge problem' to explain how people create 'mattering projects'—lives worth living—in a world offering unprecedented choice. The work grounds itself in philosophical traditions of individualism and liberalism while offering what Goldstein describes as a moral psychology of freedom that avoids both nihilism and authoritarian moralism. The book includes case studies of people who found meaning through rescuing abandoned children in China, leading leper colonies, and reforming former neo-Nazis.