What Mattering Is
To matter is to be bound to something real.
With John Vervaeke, Kitarō Nishida
Not a feeling you add to the world, and not a fact the world hands you, but a connection that runs both ways.
Five steps, from the psychology of a meaningful life down to the ground of reality. Tap any ▶ to hear the moment.
What keeps you going when things fail
Vervaeke separates two questions. The meaning of life is a claim about the cosmos. Meaning in life is smaller and more urgent: what keeps you going when you fail, when other people let you down, when you let yourself down.
Psychologists find it has at least four parts. Our culture likes to reduce it to the first.
When Costin & Vignoles (2020) added mattering, it mattered more to meaning in life than purpose did. Martela & Steger then showed significance and mattering are two sides of one thing.
Three questions you can ask yourself
Following the philosopher Susan Wolf, he locates meaning in being connected to something larger than yourself, and turns that into three questions:
- i
What do you want to exist even if you don't?
Something that isn't about you. - ii
How real is it?
Not a fantasy you've built to feel better. - iii
How much of a difference do you make to it?
The arrow runs back from you to it.
Answer all three and you have meaning in life. Lose one and it shrinks. Lose all three and, in his words, "you are in trouble": research on belonging finds the damage psychologically, physiologically and socially.
He gathers all this connecting, fitting and caring into one word on purpose: religio, binding. He wants you to hear the religious echo.
A tornado organizes itself. A cell cares.
Living things are autopoietic, self-making (he credits Evan Thompson for the idea). You are too, and not only in your body. Mattering runs up through every level of a human life:
Food matters to you. Your body is always taking care of itself.
Your mind grows out of the information it takes in, so it cares which information. Read Montague calls that the basic difference between you and a computer.
Being primates, we ask the reverse question too: how am I relevant to you? How can I help you become a person?
The same self-making continues in what we build together.
Finding what matters is neither a rule nor a whim
Here is the centre of his 30-year research program. At every moment there are more ways to combine the information around you than there are particles in the universe. Somehow you zero in on what matters. How?
His example: a single sentence, and the many things it could imply.
"It's going to be windy tomorrow."
The same shape holds for everything we usually credit with intelligence. Each already relies on relevance, so none can be its source:
A pencil is also a weapon, a letter "I", a writing tool, something made after the 1960s. To represent it at all, you've already picked which aspect counts.
"Be kind." Kind to a colleague the way you're kind to your partner? To your partner the way you're kind to your son? Rules for applying rules regress forever.
Miss less and you mistake more; mistake less and you miss more. Which error is worse depends on what matters here.
"These LLMs, they don't do relevance realization. They are parasites on our relevance realization."15:25
We curate their data, we rank the internet they read, we reward their answers. The judgment of what matters is ours, borrowed.
Relevance lives in the relation
Is relevance objective? Ask whether something is relevant and the answer is always "it depends." Is it just subjective, then? No, because you can be wrong: I thought she was angry, but it turns out she was afraid.
From here he goes all the way down. Aristotle built reality like a sentence, with things (subjects) carrying properties (predicates), and relations were left with nowhere to live. Following the philosopher James Filler and the Zen philosopher Kitarō Nishida, Vervaeke flips the order:
"The relata emerge from the relationality."29:17
The world isn't a set of things that later get connected. Connection comes first. So when you feel that something matters, you're meeting the same pattern that makes both you and the world intelligible.
Why it ends at the sacred
If relation is the ground of being, then the deepest thing you can bind yourself to has three marks. He borrows them from J.L. Schellenberg's "triple transcendent":
That, for Vervaeke, is the sacred, and it is also the full answer to the first question. To matter is to be bound, through care, to what is most real.
