Belonging Matters. And 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: youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org.”

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 (and my mentor in graduate school), 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 like 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.

“Subjective meaningfulness is but a feeling,” Goldstein says, one that “can accommodate the worst of which we’re capable.” Even hatred and killing can become a mattering project — a fact that helps explain the appeal of extremist groups, cults and violent protest movements. They offer feelings of belonging and promise significance without the burden of truth.

Contemporary extremist networks and even recent college encampments, function in a similar way, supplying belonging, identity and a sense of righteousness, while encouraging a belief in wild conspiracy theories. These movements don’t merely reject liberal democratic norms. They reject the idea that flourishing is constrained by reality.

Research indicates that when individual identity collapses into group identity, people become willing to engage in extreme, self-destructive and even violent behavior endorsed by the group. Studies of radicalization find that a sense of belonging draws people in and a distorted sense of mattering keeps them there.

“The quest for personal significance,” say researchers at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, “constitutes a major motivational force that may push individuals toward violent extremism.” And eventually, they can come to believe that engaging in violence — even terrorism — is, as psychologist and terrorism specialist John Horgan says, “not inherently immoral.”

What is lost in these movements is not just the reverence for life, but liberty in its democratic sense: the freedom to judge, to doubt, to revise one’s commitments in light of evidence, to dissent without fear. Flourishing requires that freedom.

Goldstein insists that mattering must answer to standards outside the self and outside the group. We are, she writes, “staunch realists” about mattering. In a pluralistic liberal democracy, we know, however uncomfortably, when meaning has been purchased at the expense of truth.

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. As I teach in the Habits of a Free Mind program, the mantra for the habit of compassion is “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.

They also require reality-based justification if they are to sustain a culture of civil liberties. They teach children (and remind adults) about the importance of both individual contribution and objective truth. And they underscore the understanding that democratic norms are not obstacles, but guardrails.

Flourishing, Goldstein posits, requires both belonging and mattering — grounded in truth, sustained by liberty and oriented toward constructing a life worth living.

A social psychologist with a clinical background, Dr. Paresky serves as Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute, Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at New York University, Senior Fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute, and Associate at Harvard University. She writes the Habits of a Free Mind newsletter on Substack. Follow her on Twitter at @PamelaParesky