Do you find yourself asking: Does my life have a purpose? Or, put another way, how can I justify my existence? Join this SDG based on Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, The Mattering Instinct, to help understand these questions and to see the need to answer them not as a personal quirk or a philosophical indulgence, but as a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human.
People’s capacity to “step back and survey themselves,” as the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote, reveals a stark dissonance between our biological drive to survive and the fact that every life ends in death anyway. This realization gives rise to what Goldstein calls “the mother of all mattering questions—Do I matter?”
At the end of this SDG your adult conversation may just include why you agree or disagree with the statement: 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.”
Week one: Is Mattering a legitimate concept? How does gender influence the discussion about Mattering? Why does Mattering matter?
Does Mattering Explain Everything? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrHu3KcEpk
Why We Need to Know our Lives matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxpONecbsZQ
Rebecca Bonhag and Paul Froese, Sources of Mattering for Women and Men, Sociological Perspectives, AUGUST 2022, Vol. 65, No. 4 (AUGUST 2022), pp. 748-767
Isaac Prilleltensky, Mattering at the Intersection of Psychology, Philosophy and Politics, American Journal of Community Psychology, 2019, pages 1 - 19.
Kathleen Vail and Angela Maiers, A crisis of mattering, The Phi Delta Kappan, February 2024, Vol. 105, No. 5 (February 2024), pp. 42-45
Book Introduction; PDFs to be provided by coordinator
Week Two: The Most Pecular and Most Human thing about us; Transformation from Within. Chapters 1 and 2
Week Three Becoming Human Chapter 3
Week Four: Life, LIberty and the Pursuit of Wudaimonia. Chapter 4
Week Five: The Cartography of the Mattering Map, Part One- The social and the Heroic Chapter 5
Week Six The Cartography of the Mattering Map, Part Two - the Transcendent and the Competitive
Week Seven: Getting Mattering Wrong and Getting Mattering Right. Chapters 7 and 8
SIdibeh, Ibrahim, Wounds in the Flesh, Cracks in the Structure: Realized Trauma and Mattering, Muhlenberg College, 2025
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Mattering Instinct, Norton 2026, 295 pages