On Mattering

It’s funny how when you’re searching for something, at first you can’t find it, but give it a few weeks and suddenly your entire newsfeed, all your Amazon results, podcast suggestions, Instagram stories, and newsletters merge into a firehose of relevant content that creates layers upon layers of perspectives, ideas, and complexity to the initial search query you began with.

Maybe you’re like me, and the question pops into your head every so often of ‘am I doing something that really matters to me?’ Or maybe the question appears as, ‘does what I am working on need to exist?’ Or if you’ve been deep into your meditation or contemplative practice, you may be asking, ‘is this my heart talking, or is it just my ego?’

Sometime around leaving Capitol Hill, I started to wonder if policymaking, and if Government alone was really enough to solve many of the problems people came to Congress seeking help for. Would codifying a regulatory change really alter the broken childcare marketplace? Would creating another tax credit encourage more people to save their pre-tax income for medical emergencies? Would setting up another job-training program, or appropriating funds to ‘plus up’ an existing program, really prepare people for the wave of job losses from AI or whatever technology comes next? My mattering, even upon leaving Government, never veered far from the societal implications of what was being built.

While startups and tech may be our best vehicles for fixing what government can’t, just because they can doesn’t mean they will. It comes down to whether they are run by people who give a f*ck about any of these problems. Or are they mostly run and funded by people chasing mattering projects that don’t actually matter to these fundamental issues that stand in the way of the American dream’s sustainability? Where mattering is measured not by being reelected to fight another 2, 4, or 6 year-term but instead entirely by adoption, profit, and rocketship growth? Devil be damned to whatever the product or technology is … much less whatever impact it may have on society?

My initial queries about mattering didn’t use the actual word mattering. But I started noticing a pattern. My historical and current queries seemed to circle around the topic of what is meaning, what is a meaningful life, what is moral ambition, and my persistent favorite, ‘who am I?’. And while each of those queries brings a host of thought-provoking books, articles, and podcasts - none quite hit the nail on the head.

So I kept searching. I tried on a few different hats. First, there was the Head of Government Relations. That alone certainly didn’t feel like mattering. So I took off the Government hat to see if going operational, and into build mode was where it was at. First, there was the Head of Marketing, then a Senior Director in Corporate Strategy, and there was even flirting with a Product consultancy. None quite lit me up. Parts were interesting, parts felt like they mattered. But put me in a conference focused on any one of those and my mattering reserves began to run dangerously empty.

Back to my observation of how a question you have for no one in particular can suddenly redirect a torrent of content in your direction. I recently heard an episode of EconTalk — Russ Roberts interviewing philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein about her book The Mattering Instinct in early January 2026 — and what jumped out at me was that mattering isn’t just about feeling valued by others. It’s about having a project — something you’re building toward that proves to yourself your life means something.

Goldstein argues that owning and living in accordance with your form of mattering is a pillar of living a fulfilled life. But the way these pillars look is different for each of us. Some people are transcenders — their life matters when they’re connected to something larger. Others are socializers — they need to be needed. There are heroic strivers — those who feel like they matter only when they hit an internal standard they’ve set for themselves. And then there are competitors — those who matter only when they’re winning. Your mattering is your why, your purpose, your dharma. Wanting to matter isn’t good or bad — it just is.

While digesting this, another mattering-related podcast appeared — Jennifer Wallace, author of Mattering, releasing her book just weeks after Goldstein. Where Goldstein offers a philosophical framework — useful for understanding the types of mattering we pursue — Wallace takes the societal view: that loneliness is an epidemic, that people need to feel valued not just for what they achieve but for who they are. This landed closer to something I’ve been thinking about for a while — the role tech has played in fracturing connection.

But Wallace’s solutions lean toward government. And that’s where I part ways. It’s not policy that shapes most people’s daily experience of whether life is working. It’s markets — the jobs they hold, the healthcare they can access, the housing they can afford, the education that was supposed to lead somewhere, the care their dependents need. These are the structures that enable people to pursue mattering at all.

And here’s what struck me most: when those structural conditions are broken, people don’t just lose economic opportunity. They lose the ability to have a mattering project at all.

While I am sure more mattering theories exist, and hell, I may even be served them in the next few days on social, what I find compelling about mattering is that it is both what drives us - it is us - and it is also a feeling that we impart on others that makes them feel part of or outside of society. And if America’s creed is access to, pursuit of, and ultimately fulfillment of the dream - then doesn’t it make sense to work on that which matters to the preservation and attainment of that dream?

Why people come to politics, policy, Capitol Hill, and government-adjacent jobs at all varies. Some are fulfilling the family legacy - the family business, so to speak - some are media hounds who want to shape the news; some are policy wonks who want nothing more than to write that one signature piece of legislation that will change the world. Others are power hungry - the Hollywood for nerds. And then there are the competitors - they just want to win. Win at all costs. None of these is better than the other. And arguably, none are more effective than another. They are the collective parts of a whole. However, my wiring was to come to DC to impact the technology sector in a way bigger than working in marketing or product on a singular technology. And after eleven years, when I felt I had accomplished it, I set my sights on taking that experience, combining it with business experience, and really pursuing my version of mattering.

So what is mattering to me? Mattering to me is using the special gifts, talents, and experiences I’ve accumulated to preserve access to the American dream. When I read the news, I see all five pillars of middle-class life — healthcare, housing, childcare, elder care, education — as drowning in the suffocating inertia of the status quo. Each of these pillars, the very foundations of middle-class life in the United States, has outpaced wage growth by 2-4x over forty years. It’s not that the American Dream has died; it’s become mathematically unreachable. But I am an optimist, and I believe technology - specifically data and AI - can do more to reduce the information and access asymmetry.

On the surface, these pillars appear to be positioned to self-heal. In fact, many would argue that these pillars are best left to solve themselves, work themselves out. I vividly recall one prominent female labor economist visiting my Congressional office at my request to discuss her latest research on how federal policies were robbing the young to pay for the old - certainly a bipartisan concern - but when pressed on what we were doing to enable women to stay in the workforce during their prime childbearing years, she became uncomfortable and resigned to an answer of ‘child care costs and access just work themselves out.’ How is that an answer to a product that costs more than in-state college tuition in 38 states? Similarly, in healthcare, it’s well understood that the system’s funding is a finite pool: to pay doctors more, someone will get paid less; to cap costs for providers, fewer providers will exist, and fewer people will be treated. Make insurance more affordable, and fewer insurance companies will find the population pool less attractive to cover. Not only will fewer coverage options exist, but fewer providers too, since fewer will be able to provide care at that rate. And mapping skills training to financial returns? How many of these bootcamps have come and gone? Or how many of these universities that have tied degrees to wages earned post graduation have seen their models flourish? On paper, there is no win.

The safe, pragmatically successful career ladder that supports our existing system calls for people to choose a career path when they’re not even old enough to buy themselves a drink, hope that the career path and their mode of education will get them a foot in the door to start climbing the first rung, and then maybe by the time they get to the second or third rung their version of mattering will reconcile with the debt (monetary and sunk time) they’ve incurred in choosing this particular ladder. This entire system entails people believing that success is being promoted by someone you’ve impressed, getting published so you impress more people, and collecting accolades that everyone (in your industry) will recognize for abiding by and reinforcing the rules and structures of a preexisting system that may or may not work in the first place. What motivation is there for a healthcare specialist who wants to be viewed by all accounts as ‘successful’ to point out holes and major inefficiencies in the very system that feeds them and their families? Much better to make incremental adjustments or changes at the margin to continue on their climb up the ladder. Or, going to my experience with the brilliant labor economist who was unwilling to engage on the brokenness of our dependent care markets - what incentive is there for a successful business owner of several home care marketplaces to devise a way to create greater efficiencies in matchmaking between provider and patient by using technology if it means lowering prices or automating away their back office jobs? Better to stay put and let whoever gets into the business after they have gotten their maximum profit deal with that sort of change. The danger of relying on the very people whose version of success is defined by broken markets is the misappropriation of incentives to create significant or potentially transformative change.

That’s where outsiders come in. The glory in these industries goes to the obvious wins — the lifetime achievement award, the $1bn return, the Builder of the Year, the doctor who hears “you saved my life.” There’s no prestige in the unglamorous rethinking: teaching patients that health insurance is for catastrophic care, not daily wellness. Tying degree outcomes to student debt burdens. Building starter homes instead of luxury condos.

The Fed monitors systemic risk in financial markets — that’s how we saw 2008 coming. Healthcare delivery? No one. Education connecting to the jobs that exist? No one. Elder care? We monitor abuse. Childcare? People just figure it out on their own. That’s it.

That’s the unglamorous, award-less work that needs doing. And it’s why outsiders matter.

The outsiders have no familial lineage to uphold, no institution’s name to protect, no industry to fear offending. That’s why they can try truly new ways of doing things. Not because they’re smarter — but because their mattering project is the fix itself. They’re not trying to matter by being important in healthcare, education, childcare, or eldercare, or housing. They’re trying to matter by making it work. They’re the founders who listen first — who tamp down their assumptions and talk to actual customers, patients, students, caregivers, and homebuyers to hear what they’re actually struggling with, not what secondhand sources suggest they might be. It’s the same mistake that loses elections and misses product-market fit: building for what you think people want instead of what they tell you. And they have the technical competence to build something that meets people where they are. They build, test, deploy, and learn.

That’s the work.