Here we are, watched over by the stone faces of mountains creased with the laugh-lines of time as we walk over the bones of our dead, over the fossils of all the other animals who paid with their lives for the birth of our eyes and lungs and opposable thumbs on a planet domed with two trillion galaxies each housing numberless stars orbited by numberless possible worlds.The great paradox of consciousness, or perhaps its very function, is its fiery longing to make this life, this flash of borrowed stardust, matter amid the incomprehensible immensity of space and time; to find between our insignificance and our self-importance something truer than both.That longing, argues philosopher and novelist Rebecca Goldstein in The Mattering Instinct (public library), is more than a whim of feeling, more than a wave in the mind — it is part of our creaturely inheritance, part of the price of consciousness, the source of our deepest consanguinity and our most ferocious conflicts. It is the fulcrum of the difficult durational endeavors we undertake to light up our lives with a sense of purpose. It is the sum total of “the values we use in justifying ourselves to ourselves.” It is what makes life alive.Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)Goldstein writes:Every living thing is organically driven by a mandate that ensures it matters to itself — which is to say that it prioritizes its own surviving and thriving. In lifeforms as massive as blue whales and as scanty as a sliver of grass struggling up through a crack in the sidewalk, biology encodes the message of self-mattering. But when it comes to humans, mattering takes on a different order of complexity. In us, the organic mandate of self-mattering engenders one of the most persistent forces in human motivation, which has us striving not only to survive and thrive but also striving after an existence that we deem to be meaningful in our own eyes. For us, and us alone, the organic mandate of self-mattering does not suffice. We need to convince ourselves that our own self-mattering is warranted, that we can provide a reason for it that extends beyond our being, trivially, ourselves — just as all things are, trivially, themselves. We long to demonstrate that the reason we subjectively feel that we matter is that we objectively do.How human, then, to tremble with self-doubt in the absence of an objective validator of our mattering — an external seal of approval that what we do, and therefore who we are, is worthwhile. With an eye to W.S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman” — which I consider the single best piece of advice on self-doubt ever put to words, the ultimate antidote to the itch for approval — Goldstein writes:To live out every day in the presence of such doubts is to live with unease, your whole life at the mercy of your art. But then poets are a breed apart, praying to the Muse to grant them the genius to weave words into wonder. The rest of us are thankfully different. Only we’re not. It’s not the specific way that we respond to the mattering instinct that breeds the unease. It’s the mattering instinct itself. Even if we pursue our lives far from the rarified air breathed by poets, the unease of the poet is the unease of us all.Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days.Half a century after Ernest Becker identified the denial of death — that is, the moral outrage at our mortality — as the root of our existential longing, Goldstein observes that our mattering instinct dwells somewhere between our materiality and our morality, that it arises from the conversation between the two:Our deepest struggles — to persist, to thrive, to make a difference, to do right, to create beauty, to make sense of ourselves and our world — emerge from the physical forces that made us. These are the forces that coaxed intricate, sentient, and purposeful organisms out of the disorder and dissolution entailed in the direction of time itself, as described by the most fundamental law of physics.[…]You yourself, so fragile and tenuous, are implicated in the answer to the most profound of all metaphysical questions: Why is there something rather than nothing?Mattering, she intimates, is the substance of somethingness animating these lives bookended by nothingness, at least for the consciousness experiencing them. We may go about it in different ways — she divides people into four archetypes of approach: socializers (who seek to matter to others), transcenders (who seek to matter “to the spiritual presence that exists beyond, or that permeates throughout, the spatio-temporal realm”), competitors (who seek to matter relativistically, more than others), and heroic strivers (who seek to measure up to the standards of excellence they set for themselves) — but it springs from a single source embedded in our animacy. What emerges from the pages of The Mattering Instinct is the insistence that while mattering is ultimately a profoundly private process of discovery that cannot be validated or invalidated by any designated arbiter — not god, not fame, not the person you love — it is also something we can magnify for each other by the example of how we live our lives. Mattering is the mirror we hold up to ourselves that reflects the universe. donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.newsletterThe Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.