Daniel Pink#1 NYT bestselling author of 7 books

What Matters in the End

10 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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In this brief dialogue, two speakers reflect on the human condition as mortal beings seeking meaning and love. Speaker A notes that both economic and neuroscience research point to our mortality driving a quest for purpose. Speaker B expands, citing Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon where a grandmother’s funeral proclamation emphasizes that, beyond awards and attention, the essential desire is to know one was loved. The conversation concludes with Speaker A suggesting that loving others creates a cascading effect, implying that love spreads outward and is central to what ultimately matters.

Stuff that I've written looking at, like, economic research and neuroscience research, so much of it comes back to the fact that we are mortal creatures looking for a sense of meaning and a sense of love.
That's why we're here. And in the end, what really matters— and I've heard this over and over and read it, and I remember a wonderful Toni Morrison novel, Song of Solomon, where in that book, one of the characters' granddaughter dies, and the proclamation that the grandmother makes at her funeral is, and she I remember the first time I read that, I thought, that's really all that matters. All the awards, all the attention, all the things that people are striving to get and have, do and be. In the end, what you want is to know that you were loved.
I think also that you loved other people because it's like a cascade out there.
It boils down to who did you love and who loved you? Absolutely.