The Mattering Instinct

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"[An] extraordinary and urgent book." —Jonathan Haidt "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 A paradigm-shifting work that explores humanity's most fundamental desire. MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex and The Mind-Body Problem, returns with a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and universal motivations: the longing to matter. Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, Goldstein argues that this need to matter—and the various "mattering projects" it