A New Understanding of Human Beings’ Most Basic Desire

Philosophers are generally expected to display wisdom and calm in the face of existential questions. I am just not one of those philosophers. I spent 30 years racing away from these thoughts by running and swimming obsessively, pretending that I had no physical limits. Certain evasions are bound to fail: At 40, I suffered a cardiac arrest after an ill-advised treadmill workout. The sheer physicality of the event—the stopped heart, the failing body, the onerous recovery—threw into sharp relief a question that had always lurked beneath the surface: Does my life have a purpose? Or, put another way, how can I justify my existence? This dilemma gnaws at us in times of crisis and whispers to us in quiet moments of self-reflection. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, The Mattering Instinct, helped me understand this feeling, to see it not as a personal quirk or a philosophical indulgence but as a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human.