The Mattering Instinct is an important and truly impressive book that gives us new ways to think about human worth and dignity. Whether you're leading a team, raising a family, or simply trying to live with purpose, this book shows why aspiring to have a positive impact isn't just morally right--it's the key to lasting fulfillment.--Sheryl Sandberg, founder of Lean In

Rebecca Goldstein--who uniquely combines the gifts of a novelist and a philosopher--writes with rare insight, warmth, and humanity. The Mattering Instinct is a luminous and often personal meditation on the universal human need to matter. It's a brilliant and beautiful book.--Paul Bloom, author of Psych: The Story of the Human Mind

Rebecca Goldstein's books always get to the heart of the matter. This one, provocative and timely, gets to the heart of mattering itself. The Mattering Instinct is a powerful and original book.--Sherry Turkle, best-selling author of Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries

How refreshing, in our time of heated antipathies and narrowed hopes, to discover a book that celebrates the "meaning-seeking" imperative that underlies "the wondrousness of what it is to be human." Rebecca Goldstein's eloquent and tightly reasoned The Mattering Instinct will change the way you go through daily life: attuning you to the choices you and others make, offering aid in times of doubt. With its plea for "seeing one another more mercifully," The Mattering Instinct returns to us "the joy of our own strange lives."--Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart

One of the many pleasures of this brilliant book is the unassuming intimacy the author establishes not only with the reader but with the laws of biology and physics: the elemental urge of every living thing to matter, and the entropic force threatening to unmake every bond. As The Mattering Instinct movingly demonstrates, those forces live inside all of us and make us who we are, even as they clash like enemy armies. There is nothing Manichaean about this battle, which in Goldstein's subtle narrative is bound up with the moral force woven into our lives -- a mystery you will have to read this extraordinary book to discover.--Jonathan Rosen, author of The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions

The Mattering Instinct is an extraordinary and urgent book. Rebecca Goldstein helps us to see that so much of our lives, and so much of human history, is driven by the need to matter. As technology weakens our social ties and frees us from needing other people, the crisis of mattering will explode. Giving everyone a generous universal basic income will not help. This book, and its delineation of multiple paths to mattering, will.--Jonathan Haidt, #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Anxious Generation and The Righteous Mind

The Mattering Instinct changes everything. Whether your focus is on personal life, professional life, social and cultural life, political life, moral life, or spiritual life, this book really matters!--Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice

The Mattering Instinct is a masterpiece. I wept, I laughed out loud, I came face-to-face with the wellsprings of my life, but mostly I marveled at Rebecca Goldstein's genius. This book should ignite a revolution.--Martin Seligman, best-selling author of Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

Incisive.... [Goldstein] catalogs the rich variety of ways people try to carve out purpose: 'socializers' try to matter through relationships; 'heroic strivers' through achievement; and 'transcenders' through communion with whatever spiritual principle orders the cosmos.... Convincingly situating the instinct to matter as increasingly vital in a world that can feel impersonal and starved of meaning, Goldstein takes on some of life's biggest questions with a loose-limbed exploration of such wide-ranging topics as thermodynamic entropy and Victorian fly-fishing lures made from exotic feathers (which still matter to modern-day connoisseurs of the art). It's a fascinating take on a profound yet little-understood aspect of the psyche.--Publishers Weekly, starred review

The Mattering Instinct is a testament to the idea that humans find purpose when, as the poet Rumi wrote, we "let the beauty we love be what we do." In a world fractured by competing claims on what's important, Goldstein offers a vision that is both intellectually resonant and humane, reminding us that the struggle to justify our existence is the very thing that makes our existence matter.--John Kaag "The Atlantic"