What Do We All Long For...Maybe More Than Anything Else? To Matter

“The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.”— William James

A seventeen-year-old boy covered in swastika tattoos sat in prison wondering what had become of his life.

Frank Meeink had grown up in violence. His stepfather beat him. His home was chaotic. By the time he was a young teenager, he had absorbed one overwhelming message: You don't matter.

Then someone came along with a different message.

"You do matter. You're one of us."

The "us" happened to be a violent neo-Nazi skinhead group. They gave him a family, a purpose, and an identity. They also gave him someone to hate. Frank became one of the most violent skinheads in America.

Prison slowly began to change him. Black inmates whom he had been taught to despise treated him with kindness. He played basketball with them. They laughed together. One became a genuine friend. The stereotypes he had built his life around began to crumble.

But he still hated Jews.

When he was released from prison, no one would hire a young man with "SKINHEAD" tattooed across his knuckles and swastikas on his body. Then something remarkable happened.

A Jewish businessman named Keith Brookstein offered him a job.

Think about that for a moment.

The very kind of person Frank had spent years hating was the one who gave him a second chance.

That act of generosity finally shattered the last wall around his heart. Frank later had the tattoos removed and devoted his life to helping others leave hate groups.

It is a remarkable story, but philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thinks it teaches us something even deeper than the power of forgiveness. She believes it reveals one of the strongest forces in every human life.

We all want to matter.

Goldstein calls this the mattering instinct, which is the name of her latest book (full title is The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us). It is the longing to know that our lives count, that we are significant, that we are making some difference in the world. We may think our deepest desire is happiness, success, or security, but underneath those goals is another question that quietly follows us throughout life:

Does my life matter?

Does my life matter? That question quietly follows us throughout our lives

She argues that nearly everything we do is, in one way or another, an attempt to answer that question.

The tragedy is that there are healthy ways to matter and unhealthy ways to matter.

Frank found significance by belonging to a group that told him he mattered because other people mattered less. His identity depended on feeling superior. Goldstein says this is one of the most dangerous forms of mattering because it is a zero-sum game. If I can only matter by making you smaller, then conflict becomes inevitable.

Fortunately, there are far richer ways to answer the question of significance.

Goldstein describes four broad "islands" where people seek mattering.

The first is through relationships, socializing. We matter because we love and are loved. Parents understand this instinctively. Grandparents do too. Friends, neighbors, teachers, and volunteers often discover that their deepest satisfaction comes from helping another person flourish.

Deep satisfaction often comes from helping another person flourish. Social mattering.

The second island is achievement, heroic strivers. We matter by creating something worthwhile. It may be building a business, writing a book, repairing engines, composing music, growing a garden, or solving scientific problems. There is deep joy in knowing we have contributed something that did not exist before.

Heroic strivers, get a sense of mattering from creating or achieving something worthwhile.

The third island is transcendence. We matter because we participate in something larger than ourselves. For some this is faith in God. For others it is truth, beauty, justice, nature, or humanity itself. We discover that our lives gain meaning when they become part of a story bigger than our own.

Participating in something larger than ourselves gives a transcendence sense of mattering

The fourth island is competition. Here we matter because we are better than someone else. Competition itself is not unhealthy. Sports, business, and academics often bring out our best. But when superiority becomes our primary source of significance, we begin to need losers in order to feel like winners. We start measuring our worth by comparison rather than contribution.

Some get a sense of mattering in winning competitions

Goldstein is not suggesting that one island is entirely good and another entirely bad.

Most of us visit all four. We enjoy winning. We enjoy accomplishing things. We treasure our relationships. We seek meaning beyond ourselves.

The question is not whether we want to matter. The question is how.

That is why Frank Meeink's story is so powerful. No one argued him out of his beliefs. Instead, his understanding of what it meant to matter slowly changed. Friendship challenged his prejudices. Mercy dismantled his hatred. A Jewish employer did something extraordinary: he showed Frank that another person's dignity did not diminish his own.

Perhaps that is the lesson our divided world most needs.

We often imagine that there is only so much significance to go around. If your group wins, mine loses. If your ideas are accepted, mine disappear. If your success grows, mine shrinks.

Goldstein invites us to imagine a different possibility.

What if significance is not like pie, where your larger slice leaves less for me?

What if it is more like a candle?

Lighting another person's candle never makes our own burn less brightly, in fact, it often makes the whole room brighter.

As I finished Goldstein's book, I found myself asking, “How am I trying to matter?”

It may be one of the most important questions we ever ask ourselves because the answer shapes not only our own lives but the lives of everyone around us.

Three ideas are worth reflecting on for me and maybe you.

First, notice where you usually seek significance. Is it mostly through relationships, achievement, belonging to something larger than yourself, or through comparison with others? There is no single right answer, but it is worth asking whether your way of mattering also helps others matter.

Second, look for small opportunities to let people know they count.

I want to expand on this one because it is so important for us all on the journey together.

This morning, I overheard my husband John finishing a routine business call. He has never met this person in his life. The transaction was complete. He could have simply hung up. Instead, he said warmly, "I hope you have a really good day."

An idea I got from John for making others sense that they matter - a sincere, "I hope you have a really good day." Human to human ending to a business call.

There was a brief pause.

Then the woman answered, not mechanically but with genuine feeling, "I hope you do too."

It lasted perhaps five seconds. Nothing about either person's life dramatically changed. Except maybe mine. I thought, "Yeah, that's how you do it."

For a moment, two strangers recognized each other's humanity. One person said, in effect, "You matter." The other received it and returned the gift. Goldstein would probably smile at that little exchange. We rarely know how hungry another person may be for the simple assurance that they count.

When John and I have had a falling out or disagreement, the fastest way back to me I've found is when he says, "You matter to me."

Finally, we can remember that our significance does not depend on making someone else smaller. One of the most hopeful ideas in Goldstein's book is that mattering is not a limited resource. Like the flame of a candle, your light is not diminished when it helps ignite someone else's.

Perhaps that is the good life after all—not proving that we matter more, but living in such a way that more people discover that they matter too. And isn't that a great way to build our own mattering project, helping others know that they are seen, that they matter?

How might we journey together to the Good Life by understanding the need to matter and use it productively to construct our own lives and help others see that they matter too?

(If we already have a crisis around mattering, imagine what AI will do. Let's consider that now. The US hotline for suicide prevention is http://you matter.suicide-preventionlifeline.org. They get it! On another note, Dr. Martin Seligman, renowned psychologist and father of positive psychology, wrote this note to Rebecca, "There comes from time to time an idea from the discipline of philosophy so sensible that it lays bare the poverty of ideas in the discipline of psychology. Mattering is such an idea." Oh, yeah, and that initial blog quote by the brilliant William James, dubbed the American father of psychology...was suicidal in his youth. )