The following discussion deals with the mind’s attribution of value — and thus, importance — to the reality it perceives. I divide this value into three tiers, referred to as ‘caring,’ ‘matterness,’ and ‘significance.’ The definitions presented in the following are meant to serve the discussion; they do not represent breakthroughs in semantics. Moreover, I learned that the word matterness is not even a real English word (which, obviously, does not deter me from using it liberally). I use it for lack of a better term to refer to the quality of mattering — so, for example, a thing that’s considered to matter a lot has a lot of matterness.
Caring, matterness, and significance are three conceptually distinct value tiers our minds automatically link to everything perceived as part of reality (e.g., sensations, objects, events). These attributions shape subjective reality and influence the choices made when operating in it — they are consequential. Yet, they typically happen unconsciously, which is problematic. Without conscious awareness, the distinctions between these three radically different attributes are blurred. As a result, one’s level of caring about a thing automatically translates into their sense of how much that thing matters and how significant it is, which is not necessarily the case. Hence, this conflation tends to distort the perception of reality and thus threatens the efficacy of one’s functioning in general and the pursuit of happiness specifically.
The problem can be avoided by bringing the assignment of caring, matterness, and significance to conscious awareness. Accomplishing this is simple, but requires a clear understanding of the meaning of these three concepts, which the following aims to establish.
Caring
Caring is the intensity of the emotional response — the “volume setting.” The stronger one’s emotional reaction to a thing, the more one cares about it. In turn, the more one cares about a thing, the higher its subjective value — the more important it is perceived to be.
[Sidebar: Caring is the intensity of the emotional response regardless of the specific emotion in play. Intensely loving someone and intensely hating someone are, in principle, associated with the same level of caring.]
It is difficult to overstate the importance of caring in the pursuit of happiness (nonetheless, I’ll keep trying). Caring — synonymous with passion — is a prerequisite for pursuing happiness effectively; it is the fuel that energizes the process (as discussed in the Happiness and the Depression chapters). However, since caring is a component of the emotional response, and thus entirely subjective, it is an unreliable gauge of the value, or importance, of things. Nonetheless, the common default is: “if I care about it, it must be important”; moreover, the more intensely we care, the more importance we attribute to the thing we care about. We typically equate caring with matterness automatically, which often invites problems.
The link between caring and importance seems so naturally evident that questioning its validity often seems odd. It is simply a fact that not everything one cares about necessarily matters. Yet, pointing it out is easily misconstrued as criticism, even as an insult.
Recognizing that one’s level of caring about something may or may not reflect its importance accurately is an asset. It invites a rational reassessment of the value attributed to things and, when needed, an adjustment. More often than not, this re-examination contributes to the quality of the choices one makes.
The psychological challenge is to embrace and internalize the fact that not everything one cares about necessarily matters — a point worth repeating given how stubbornly the mind resists it. This does not undermine or devalue caring. On the contrary, it enables caring responsibly: separating caring from matterness offers protection from erring in both directions — overvaluing things one cares about intensely and undervaluing things one doesn’t care about.
In addition, internalizing this fact subtly protects mature humility. It is childishly grandiose to believe that “if I care about something, it must be important” — or conversely, that “if I don’t care about it, it couldn’t be important.” Humility, in turn, supports the pursuit of happiness.
Consider, as an example, sports fans. Avid sports fans, by definition, care intensely about their team — their team’s performance elicits a strong emotional response (especially when it comes to playoff and championship games). Mature, well-adjusted fans separate their caring about the outcome from the real-life importance they attribute to it. When their team loses, they feel disappointed and sad, sometimes intensely; but they don’t lose sight of the fact that it is just a game — that the outcome doesn’t impact their life beyond their feelings, which they know will change before too long. On the other hand, immature, psychologically maladjusted sports fans struggle to distinguish their level of caring from the importance of a game’s outcome. As a result, they tend to be affected more deeply by both negative and positive outcomes.
Extreme examples are sports hooligans — fans who act out their emotions to the point where, when their team loses, their hurt feelings justify violent behavior; when their team wins, their feelings of elation serve as permission to celebrate with disregard for the effects of their actions.
The sports hooligan’s inability to keep in mind that caring about a game’s outcome is not synonymous with its actual importance is obviously to their detriment. The failure to separate what one cares about from what matters transforms intense caring from an asset in the pursuit of happiness into a liability. This principle holds true in all walks of life, not just in sports.
Matterness
Given that separating caring from matterness is crucial, defining matterness is also crucial. Yet having a definition for matterness is shockingly rare. Test for yourself: Can you define it? Even short of a definition, do you have an accurate, broadly applicable, concise explanation for what we mean when we say that something does or does not matter?
Psychology (in the context of relationships) defines mattering as the sense of being valued, important, and significant. Not quite the definition I am looking for, but still relevant, in that it points to the link between matterness and value and importance.
The following definition is better suited to our purpose: Matterness is an attribute associated with a thing (e.g., an object, event, idea) expressing its assessed potential to cause a measurable and enduring change in a defined system.
In other words, asking “how much does it matter?” is synonymous with asking “what difference does it make?”
Unlike caring, matterness is not merely a product of the emotional system. Its assessment involves observational and cognitive skills, culminating in a conclusion (which may or may not be accurate) about one’s external reality. These are its key properties:
Matterness is based on the recognition of a potential — specifically, the potential of a thing to cause change. For a thing to matter, the change it is thought to cause must cross a threshold of magnitude and duration; this is what the definition means by “measurable and enduring.” A change too small to detect or too brief to last doesn’t qualify. Since matterness is about change, it is gauged by comparing the before and after states of some facet of reality. The greater the difference, the more the thing responsible for the change matters. Matterness is context-dependent. The defined system — the “slice of reality” being examined — is the context in which matterness can be considered. It makes sense only within a system that can be defined in space and time. Matterness is meaningless in a vacuum.
To illustrate the central issues covered so far, let’s examine the caring and matterness associated with the event of my dying (which I chose for its illustrative value; no dramatic effect is intended).
Naturally, I have strong feelings about dying and a clear preference to stay alive. Hence, I can say that I care a lot about continuing to live. How about other people in my life? Doubtlessly, my wife and children also have strong emotional responses to the thought of my demise, which is to say that they too care a lot about it. My close friends are likely to have a considerable emotional response to my death, but it is unlikely to be as strong as my wife’s and children’s — my friends would care, but not quite as much. Distant acquaintances who hear about my passing will probably not experience much of an emotional response; that is, they will probably not care much (and well they shouldn’t).
Next, let’s examine how much my dying will matter. Applying the definition, the question is: What is the potential that my passing will make a measurable and enduring difference? But to answer this, the context — the defined system — must first be established.
If the system is defined as the world’s economy over the following ten years, in all likelihood, my death does not matter. The exclusion of my active participation in the world’s economy (a largely unavoidable consequence of dying) is extremely unlikely to cause a detectable change ten years after the event.
However, the assessment is very different in a system defined as my home for the first week following my last day. In all likelihood, the proceedings in my house would be very different from business-as-usual. In that system, my death would matter a great deal.
Altering the system’s definition to my home over the ten years following my passing greatly reduces the matterness of it — I believe things would return to normal within a few months; they may not completely return to the pre-event state, but with time, things will get very close. Hence, in that system, my passing may matter somewhat, but not nearly as much as in the narrower, one-week system.
Separating Caring from Matterness
The separation of caring and matterness is critically important yet largely ignored. Equating the two may work in the survival arena, but it is incompatible with pursuing happiness effectively. Nonetheless, it is a mistake routinely committed by individuals and groups of any size — from small mobs to political parties, whole religions, nations, and races; at any level, it is an error that invites poor choices with costly consequences.
Think, for a minute, about any of the poor choices you have made in the past — choices you presently regret (every adult has ample examples, so nothing personal). If you examine the circumstances preceding these choices, you are likely to discover that many, if not most, involved the attribution of great importance to something exclusively on the basis of how much you cared about it.
The same phenomenon operates at the collective level. Human history is rife with examples. Many of humanity’s shameful, regrettable choices were made on the basis of a grossly inflated attribution of importance to something, driven exclusively by the intensity of the collective emotional response. An early example is the story of the Israelites’ reaction to Moses’ delayed return from his audition on Mt. Sinai. They cared about his absence so intensely (they feared being left without a leader) that they collectively attributed the value of God to a golden calf — one they themselves produced. The same dynamic is as relevant today as it has ever been (which is well-recognized by politicians who use it blatantly and shamelessly to manipulate their followers).
[Sidebar: Clarity of the distinction between caring and matterness — internalizing that one’s level of caring about a thing does not automatically reflect how much that thing matters — is a mark of psychological maturity. Psychologically mature individuals are not injured or provoked into retaliatory action when their caring, and the value they attribute to things, are not shared by others. Conversely, psychological immaturity is often manifested as hypersensitivity to the rejection of caring-driven personal values. Sports hooligans, to recycle our earlier example, are deeply hurt by what they interpret as disrespect for the team they care about. They react to it as an injury that justifies a violent response.]
Over the first few years of my psychotherapy practice, it gradually dawned on me that the loss of the distinction between caring and matterness could be a near-universal problem. Sooner or later, the question would come up: Could my patient’s reliance on caring as the gauge of matterness be a contributing factor to their presenting problem? And, more importantly, would recognizing the distinction be helpful?
Initially, when I raised the question, almost every patient was surprised by the idea that what they cared about may not actually matter. Some found it unsettling, and some were even outright offended (usually, a manifestation of an intense need for validation). Typically, after exploring and understanding the issue, most were intrigued by it, sensing its practical relevance.
Invariably, at some point in the discussion, my patient would say something along the following lines: “I can see that it is possible to care about things that don’t matter; but, other than through my caring, how else can I figure out how much something matters?”
But actually, assessing the importance of things rationally is not particularly challenging. The main task is to take a deliberate pause and ask oneself — “How important is this thing?”, “What difference does it make?” or “How much does it matter?”
Generating reliable answers to these questions may not always be easy, but the asking is. Not asking guarantees not having the answers — and short of a deliberate effort to assess the matterness of things rationally, one is left with caring as the default determinant of this critically important attribute of reality.
In my experience, the only thing that prevents an ordinary person from assessing matterness rationally is the habit of not doing so.
Habits are strengthened by repetition. In this case, repetition is fueled by a reluctance to render the thing one cares about as not important, i.e., by the threat of devaluing one’s own caring when it is exposed as lacking comparable matterness. This is based in a misunderstanding: The ability to gauge the matterness of a thing does not serve to reduce the value associated with caring. It serves to uncouple the two, which actually is liberating. This uncoupling legitimizes caring about things that don’t matter and normalizes not caring, i.e., not having a strong emotional response, about things that are recognized (and therefore handled) as important.
Deliberately pausing one’s thought process to conduct a brief, rational assessment of the matterness, or importance, the brain automatically attributes to things (by equating caring with matterness) is the critical first step toward overcoming the habit, but it is not the whole procedure. Once the question is asked, the follow-up practice involves rating one’s level of caring (on a scale of emotional intensity) alongside an independent assessment of the matterness of the thing in question — using the definition (i.e., its potential to cause a measurable and enduring change in a defined system). Bringing the two ratings into conscious awareness — and noticing the discrepancy between them — is, in my experience, remarkably effective.
(Step-by-step procedures for developing this skill are presented in the First Order of Business chapter in the Practice section, specifically in the exercises on separating caring from matterness and on separating emotional intensity from event severity.)
Significance
Caring reveals the value of a thing — subjectively, determined by the brain’s emotional system. Matterness approximates the value of a thing, also subjectively, but determined by the brain’s cognitive system (i.e., arrived at through logical evaluation and rational assessment). Significance captures the actual objective value of a thing — its true potential to change Reality (not just a defined system within it, but the Universe itself).
This makes significance fundamentally different from the other two tiers. Caring is felt. Matterness is assessed. Significance can be neither — it is, by definition, unknowable. Our vantage point as subjective beings embedded within Reality makes it impossible to assess the objective value of anything from the outside, because there is no outside (at least not for us). Accordingly, there is no point in trying to determine how much significance a thing has. The question “how significant is this?” is unanswerable.
But a related question is worth asking — arguably, one of the most important questions a human being can ask: Is anything significant? Does anything have significance?
This is not a scientific question. Science, by its nature, operates within defined systems; it has no tools for measuring the objective value of a thing to the Universe. Nor is it a philosophical question in the traditional sense — philosophy can argue both sides indefinitely without resolution. It is, at its core, a spiritual question, or at least a spiritual-level question. And, since there is no empirical basis for preferring one answer over the other, it comes down to exercising freedom of choice: either some things have significance, or nothing does.
The answer, therefore, is a matter of free will (or possibly faith). In my view, the normal adult mind operates with an answer to this question, albeit typically without having consciously asked it and without realizing that the answer exists in the background, potentially influencing the unfolding of one’s mental process.
The question “Does anything have significance?” has two possible answers, and I think both are valid. The first is “no” — nothing has significance. This is, broadly, the nihilistic position, and it is not without appeal. If nothing is significant, one is liberated from a considerable burden. There is no objective right and wrong, no cosmic stakes, no weight to carry beyond what one’s own caring and assessment of matterness impose. Far be it from me to get in the way of anyone who genuinely holds this position and finds that it works for them. (For a discussion of why nihilism appears less compatible with an effective pursuit of happiness, see the Meaning chapter.)
The second answer is “yes” — some things have significance. This position is compatible with most spiritual and religious worldviews. From my point of view, it appears more compatible with an effective pursuit of happiness.
[Sidebar: Consider the following analogy to anchor the three tiers. Saying “I care about X” is like saying “X is heavy” — a purely subjective report, a reflection of one’s own experience, with no necessary implications for anyone else’s. Saying “X matters” is like saying “X weighs five kilograms” — more precise, apparently objective, but meaningful only within a defined context: five kilograms means something different on the moon than at the bottom of the Dead Sea. Matterness, like measured weight, requires a system to be interpretable. Significance, by contrast, is analogous to mass — the intrinsic property that determines weight regardless of the gravitational context in which it is measured. Mass is fixed; it doesn’t change with the system. Significance, if it exists, would similarly be fixed — real, independent of any vantage point, and indifferent to how any given observer experiences it. The crucial difference is that mass can be determined; significance cannot. We have no instrument for measuring it, no vantage point outside Reality from which to assess it. What we are left with is the choice of whether to believe it exists at all — and, if we do, the practical obligation to treat everything as a potential candidate for it.
Significance may be extremely rare. However, since it is immeasurable and there is no method for determining which things are significant and which are not, any given thing is as likely a candidate as any other. Accepting that even a single thing in the universe could be significant means that everything in the universe may be significant. Consequently, everything is potentially significant and therefore deserves being treated respectfully — that, to my understanding, is the mindfulness stance.]
Choosing “yes,” however, comes with weighty, potentially hidden, consequences: If any thing could be significant, then every thing could be significant — and since there is no way to determine which things are and which are not, one is left with the impossible obligation to treat everything as though it might be. This generates a burden that cannot be shaken: a burden of personal responsibility, of aspiration to excellence in one’s choices and actions, and of taking seriously the potential impact of what one chooses to do or not do.
Making peace with this unremitting burden requires some psychological strategizing, since the obligation to treat everything as potentially significant is, in practice, impossible to meet. One cannot maintain awareness of the potential significance of every breath, every blink, every choice. The demand is real, but it cannot be fulfilled — and yet, it cannot be dismissed. This, in my opinion, is an impasse that exists at the core of the human condition.
Mindfulness offers a way to negotiate this impasse effectively: Attachment to meeting the demand — that is, (excluding the fully enlightened), insisting on somehow achieving full awareness of the significance of everything — is a recipe for anxiety, guilt, and a chronic sense of inadequacy. It is the proverbial attachment as a cause of suffering.
Detachment from the demand solves the problem neatly, but at a steep cost: it is, in effect, a return to the “no” — to nihilism, which, as noted, appears less compatible with an effective pursuit of happiness.
The third option — commitment — offers the viable path. Commitment, unlike attachment, is not bound to an outcome. One can commit to excellence, to doing the best one can, to taking the potential significance of things seriously without being enslaved by the impossibility of tracking it all. (For a detailed discussion of the distinction between attachment and commitment, see the Attachment and Commitment chapter in the Theory section. Strategies of generating commitment to doing one’s best are explored in the What Levels the Field and Doing the Best You Can Do chapters.)
REFERENCES
Rosenberg, M., & McCullough, B. C. (1981). Mattering: Inferred significance and mental health among adolescents. Research in Community and Mental Health, 2, 163–182.