The Importance of Being Important

I was listening to Russ Roberts interviewing Rebecca Newberger Goldstein about her book, The Mattering Instinct, on EconTalk recently. While the putative subject of her book is people's desire to matter, or to be significant in some way or another, it felt very much to me like yet another book on meaning, and the interview touched on some of the same themes.

One thing that tends to come up in these conversations, and it did so here, is the idea that seeking mattering, meaning or whatever one decides to call it, is a human universal. Ms. Newberger Goldstein has, after all, entitled her book The Mattering Instinct. But I'm of the opinion that it's an artifact of culture; to desire significance or to search for meaning in life is something that people learn. Mainly because I'm not sure that everyone takes part in this. Or, perhaps it's better to say that I'm not convinced that everyone who feels themselves not to matter, or believes that there is no meaning to be had in life, is suffering from some or another malady or malaise.

That aside, however, I think that Ms. Newberger Goldstein's thesis, that as sapient living beings, a lot of our attention is directed to ourselves, and this can prompt people to seek out ways in which they are deserving of that attention, to be an interesting one. It hadn't occurred to me to think of it that way. For me, the naturalness of it all it cuts against the idea that people necessarily feel the need to justify it to themselves, however. It's not much different than the fact that most people never feel the need to justify the rather unique place that humanity holds when compared to other life on Earth... for them, it just is. Sure, there are some people who feel that some level of justification is needed, but I suspect that it's far from being a universal thing. If maintaining homeostasis in complex organisms is a lot of work, then a significant amount of attention being paid to that work is only to be expected. While it's not surprising that some people would find that to be uncomfortably self-centered, for others, it's simply the price of admission, and not something that demands further consideration.

Philosophy and psychology strike me as having a lot of overlap, for any number of reasons, but so far, I don't think that I've encountered very many people who are practitioners of both disciplines. I went to school for the latter, but that was a very long time ago, I'm confident that the state of the art has progressed a good distance in the intervening decades. Perhaps it's time to seek out a book on the intersection of the two, and see what people have to say.