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.'"
Goldstein, from a philosophical perspective, understands flourishing as bigger than happiness. Flourishing is a resistance to entropy — the psychological and moral forces that pull lives toward disorder and dissolution.
The late social psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of flow theory, contrasted psychic entropy — the distractions, anxieties, and drift toward mental disorganization and disorder — with the "optimal experience" of the "flow state," which involves intense concentration, focus, and effort.
Csikszentmihalyi found that the highest quality of life is achieved when a person stretches himself to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile over time. Belonging can support such projects, but it cannot replace them.
This distinction is even found in childhood. A recent paper from Harvard's Center on the Developing Child emphasizes that children, too, need more than to feel that they belong. They need to feel that they matter — that their presence has value and their contributions make a difference.
Children as young as 18 months show a motivation to help others. And when adults acknowledge those efforts, children develop resilience, empathy, and well-being. Connectedness tells a child, You belong with us. Mattering tells them, What you do counts.
Belonging is a fundamental human need. But on its own, it does not teach judgment. It does not teach responsibility. And it does not teach the link between action and self-worth that flourishing requires. When that developmental pathway is disrupted, when people grow up receiving affirmation without standards, the longing to matter can be directed toward destructive ends.
A society that maximizes belonging while severing it from standards produces conformity, not freedom. A society that encourages mattering divorced from truth produces fanaticism, not dignity. Life and liberty depend on holding the two together.
The hopeful implication is that individual agency still matters. You cannot choose to discard the needs to belong and to matter. But you can choose how you pursue them. A particular group might make you feel seen, but does it invite you to see more clearly? It might expect compassion toward its members, but does it extend the same toward those who don't belong? It might provide a sense of being "on the right side of history," but does it treat truth as a necessary constraint?
Belonging protects us from loneliness. Mattering, rightly pursued, protects us from self-deception. In my work, I teach a mantra for the habit of compassion: "You belong here." The mantra for the habit of calling is "You matter." Communities that provide not just belonging but mattering require both compassion and a sense of calling.
Flourishing, Goldstein posits, requires both belonging and mattering — grounded in truth, sustained by liberty, and oriented toward constructing a life worth living.