Do you find yourself asking: Does my life have a purpose? Or, put another way, how can I justify my existence? Join this SDG based on Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, The Mattering Instinct, to help understand these questions and to see the need to answer them not as a personal quirk or a philosophical indulgence, but as a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human. People’s capacity to “step back and survey themselves,” as the philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote, reveals a stark dissonance between our biological drive to survive and the fact that every life ends in death anyway. This realization gives rise to what Goldstein calls “the mother of all mattering questions—Do I matter?” At the end of this SDG your adult conversation may just include why you agree or disagree with the statement: The Mattering Instinct is a testament to the idea that humans find purpose when, as the poet Rumi wrote, we “let the beauty we love be what we do.”

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