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9781324096856

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""What drives human beings to do both great good and terrible evil? Rebecca Goldstein brilliantly argues that the answer is strangely simple yet incredibly powerful: it is our need to matter in the world. To understand others—and yourself—read this book."" -- Arthur C. Brooks, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Build the Life You Want and From Strength to Strength ""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 ""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 ""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 ""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 ""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

""What drives human beings to do both great good and terrible evil? Rebecca Goldstein brilliantly argues that the answer is strangely simple yet incredibly powerful: it is our need to matter in the world. To understand others—and yourself—read this book."" -- Arthur C. Brooks, #1 New York Times best-selling author of Build the Life You Want and From Strength to Strength ""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 ""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 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 ""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 ""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 ""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

Author Information

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an award-winning philosopher, writer, and public intellectual. She is the author of ten books of acclaimed fiction and non-fiction, including 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University and has taught at Yale, Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, and Harvard. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, her work has been supported by the MacArthur “Genius” grant and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Whiting Institute, Radcliffe Institute, and the National Science Foundation. In 2015, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

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