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  "path": "/2026/02/22/mattering-instinct-goldstein/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-22T16:56:58.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.themarginalian.org",
  "tags": [
    "culture",
    "psychology",
    "books",
    "philosophy",
    "Rebecca Goldstein",
    "read article"
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  "textContent": "Here we are, watched over by the stone faces of mountains creased with the laugh-lines of time as we walk over the bones of our dead, over the fossils of all the other animals who paid with their lives for the birth of our eyes and lungs and opposable thumbs on a planet domed with two trillion galaxies each housing numberless stars orbited by numberless possible worlds. The great paradox of consciousness, or perhaps its very function, is its fiery longing to make this life, this flash of borrowed stardust, matter amid the incomprehensible immensity of space and time; to… read article",
  "title": "The Mattering Instinct"
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