On "mattering" in a philosophical sense

This is a good episode of Philosophy Bites with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. Summary via my LRF as I'm on the go:

Goldstein defines mattering as being deserving of attention, and her key move is that the attention we're most anxious to deserve is our own. That makes us normative, value-seeking creatures by nature, distinct from other animals. She dates the arrival of these existential questions to Jaspers' Axial Age (roughly 800–200 BCE), framing them as a luxury that depends on baseline survival being met.

The core of the episode is her taxonomy of four "mattering projects," which she stresses is an empirical generalisation open to falsification:

• Socializers, who matter through others (family and friends, or strangers via fame and influence; cults sit here too)

• Transcenders, who matter to a transcendent being, which she calls cosmic mattering and links to both great sacrifice and great violence

• Heroic strivers, who pursue a self-set standard of excellence (her own project: wanting to know as much as possible)

• Competitive matterers, who treat mattering as zero-sum, scaling from individual rivalry up to racism, nationalism, and group supremacy

She closes on a normative claim: the very fact that we long to matter is what shows we already do, so any mattering project built on proving others matter less is an error.

I liked her point that our need to matter overrules our will to stay alive.

Source: Philosophy Bites