Belonging Matters. But Mattering Matters, Too |
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness was not meant to describe comfort, affirmation, or emotional safety. It named a moral aspiration: the conditions under which human life can flourish. Yet, in an age increasingly organized around identity and belonging, we have lost sight of a more demanding requirement of flourishing: mattering.
In The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Harvard philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein argues that human flourishing rests on two distinct “cornerstones of our humanness": connectedness and the longing to matter. Connectedness—what we often call belonging—is “the feeling that there are particular others who are prepared to pay us special attention, whether we deserve it or not.” It is unconditional, relational, and necessary. But it is not sufficient.
Mattering is different. It is the drive to justify one’s existence. “We long to demonstrate that the reason we subjectively feel that we matter is that we objectively do.” Where belonging answers the question, Who will have me? mattering asks, Is my life worth living?
“We don’t want to live if we become convinced that we don’t, can’t, will never truly matter,” Goldstein notes. “The paradigmatic words of the suicidally depressed are. ‘I don’t matter.’" It’s no accident, she says, “that the URL for the U.S. Hotline for Suicide Prevention is........