Another Week Ends

1. It is a rare thing for the internet stars to align, but it’s actually happened this week. The articles of a weekender column have serendipitously coalesced around a single theme. So buckle up and enjoy the ride. St. Augustine identified sin as fundamentally a problem of disposition. One is “incurvatus in se” or inwardly looking, a self-obsessive gaze that does not look outward toward God. To look inward for meaning is a form of pride, but it’s also not without its problems. Because we become what we behold, staring at oneself is like turning a mirror to see itself, creating an infinitive feedback loop of nothingness that glitches our hardware.

We weren’t meant to gaze at ourselves. We weren’t meant to be so self-aware. Or so says Catherine Shannon this week in her brilliant article “All This Staring at Our Faces Is Messing With Our Heads.” The quintessential invention of modern world is the front-facing cameras, and they are inescapable.

It’s curious, especially given how little we looked at ourselves in the past, and how rare and imperfect mirrors were for thousands of years, that traditional wisdom teaches us to be wary of the act of regarding the self. The three major American faiths — the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam — all warn against the dangers of mirrors, vanity, pride and excessive concern with the self. […]

The message is clear: Self-obsession is spiritually dangerous, and we need to keep our guard up. In all three faiths, the mirror is a poor, incomplete way of seeing. It is covered, dark and smudged. It does not reveal God, truth or even ourselves as we are. It is only through private contemplation, face-to-face encounters and an inner spiritual transformation that we come to know truth. […]

Today, we treat our own image — both in the mirror and online — as something psychologically protective: a way of stabilizing our identity, managing our reputations and securing a coherent sense of self.

But all of this suggests the opposite possibility: The more we try to stabilize ourselves through repetition, doubling, self-observation and — I’ll say it — posting to the grid, the more uncanny and fragile we become. A preoccupation with the stable self produces instability. These days, we don’t approach our doubles with caution; we invite them, and go so far as to curate them.

It’s like an inverted version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In the novel by Oscar Wilde, Dorian keeps his beautiful public image, while his portrait bears his inner corruption and ugliness. Under modern image culture, we attempt the reverse operation: We present a perfect digital double at the cost to our real selves, who are left to absorb the discomfort and tension between the two. If you post the good picture, it hardly matters that you feel sad inside.

An inverted picture of Dorian Gray!

In a world of mirrors, we naturally obsess over our own self-image, which leads to constant curation aimed at avoiding or appeasing judgment. So how do we escape the insanity? Here, Shannon commends something far better than neo-Ludditism:

When we look solely at ourselves, we fail to encounter anything that resists us; there are no contradictions, no interruptions. We need the honest gaze: the gaze of others and the gaze toward others. To see ourselves clearly, we don’t use mirrors. We use relationships.

2. As if to elaborate further on a point Shannon makes in passing, Kathryn Jezer-Morton checks in on the social media apps and notes that after twenty-plus years, there remains just one taboo: thou shalt not appear to be struggling. In the year 2025, this observation isn’t exactly novel, but the persistence of the taboo tells you how durable it is. So much so that at this point, we take it for granted that we should project to the world a different identity than the one we see in the mirror.

When people do find themselves in trouble — illness, job loss, heartbreak, death — instead of admitting to suffering, they instead talk about journeys through hardship that ultimately make them better. GoFundMe appeals have emerged as some of the only places where tragedy and suffering are openly discussed, but it’s notable that most GoFundMe pages are created on behalf of someone else, which ultimately protects the dignity of the person in need. When we’re speaking for ourselves, we express ourselves with a communication style intended to reassure our friends (or are they our shareholders?) that the best is always yet to come. […]

Social media’s most embedded de facto rule is that you can’t ever feel like you’re out of options. You can’t be out of money, or on the wrong side of a decision you now regret making. This rule makes it very difficult to describe painful changes and transformations in our lives without simultaneously insisting on our own resilience. This is why we tend to admit to suffering only once the suffering is over — when the chemo has ended and the scans are clear or when the first wave of grief has subsided and we’re ready to pay tribute — and we’ve come out the other side. We announce divorces and illnesses in the style of corporate comms, reassuring our audiences that everything will be okay, that the ship is being righted as we speak.

Within a country with some of the most dramatic income inequality in the world, what does it say that people who are struggling are compelled to pretend they aren’t? To me, it suggests a set of cultural scripts that are totally at odds with how people really think and feel, which produces media that appears hollow and is ultimately alienating. Anyone who has ever been truly broke knows how totalizing a cognitive experience it can be. Every step of every day is a math problem that refuses to add up. The brain adapts by constantly calculating and recalculating the same figures in an attempt to find a loophole. This is the ambient hum in the background of millions of lives, but there are no art forms, no narratives and sagas, that ennoble what this feels like. It’s an experience muted by a collective shame, born of the conventions of social media.

It’s no wonder why the turns toward personal branding and then self-improvement have happened so seamlessly. We create digital avatars to placate the personal and social judgments but then spend the rest of our energy trying to bridge the gap between the dissonant online and real selves. Perhaps by self-optimizing one can unite our inverted Dorian Gray lives? By doing the work and being your best self, focusing entirely on your faults to correct them, one can finally live as good a life as everyone else seems to think you have? What could go wrong?

3. So what happens when you subject yourself to intense self-scrutiny? There’s a prominent idea in physics (called Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle) that says the act of measuring something changes what you are measuring. As told by Clay Routledge in his recent article “Stop Pathologizing Ordinary Life,” something similar happens psychologically. The act of measuring your mental health, turning your gaze inward for self-assessment, can itself change your mental health.

Americans are more focused on mental health today than at any other point in our history. Public health campaigns urge us to check in on our feelings and talk openly about our struggles. Schools have adopted mental health curriculums. Employers offer mental health days. There are thousands of mental health and wellness apps.

Yet our mental health appears to be getting worse. Over the past several decades, the percentage of Americans who report being in poor mental health has been rising. Over half of U.S. doctors surveyed in 2023 reported a decline in their patients’ mental health. That same year, more than three-quarters of companies reported rising mental health concerns among their work forces.

Could our preoccupation with mental health be part of the problem?

In some ways, encouraging people to think and talk more about their mental health is a good thing. There is now less stigma around mental illness, and more people who can benefit from professional help are getting it. But there is also reason to believe that efforts to bring attention to mental health struggles are inadvertently making us more vulnerable to psychological distress.

Start with our expanding conception of mental illness. The more fixated we are on mental health, the more sensitive we become to anything that might qualify as a symptom and the more we use clinical language to describe normal emotional experiences like grief, burnout and loneliness. This broadening of what we think counts as a disorder — known as concept creep — encourages us to pathologize ordinary life and see ourselves as mentally unhealthy.

Routledge’s solution to this downward spiral is perhaps a familiar one: getting out of your own head and looking outward.

The more meaningful that people find their lives, the more resilient they are when facing stress and the lower their risk of depression, anxiety, substance abuse and suicide.

Finding meaning is often characterized as a contemplative exercise, something arrived at through deep deliberation. But while our ability to turn inward and ponder existential questions makes humans unique in our quest for meaning, finding meaning tends to involve outward-oriented action. That’s because we feel the most meaningful when we are doing things that provide social significance — a sense that we matter, that we play an important role in other people’s lives.

4. This next article by Aaron Horwath, “Why Is Everyone in Tech So Sad?” I think has its finger on the precise malaise that afflicts so many people today.

Say you turn your optimizing goals outward toward the world. You actually do what Routledge says and find meaning in something beyond yourself in your career. You are a card-carrying believer in “workism,” but now your career and world have been turned upside down. Now, “AI is being forced on organizations in ways that call the value of the entire enterprise of Workism itself into question”:

Among my Knowledge Worker peers, I am hearing this more and more often: people who want to pick up pottery, painting, crochet or other old-timey analog hobbies. In coffee shops and in the low-lit corners of bars, professionals are sharing dreams of “disappearing” or “living on a farm somewhere” or “going off the grid.” These aren’t fantastical daydreams; they are visions of escape shared in a tone that betrays an underlying existential angst, a fundamental doubt about work and careerism inspired by a seemingly increasingly common experience: waking up one morning at an existential precipice, struck with a sudden sense that knowledge work is, and perhaps always has been, pointless. Perhaps you too have felt such a feeling, a rising tide of overwhelming, indescribable melancholy, slowly threatening to envelop you in your Ikea office chair.

Horwath then proceeds to outline all the various ways that LLMs expose the lie of Workism for tech workers. The technology Workism has produced has now taken away your job, trivialized what you do by doing it instantaneously, or it has otherwise made your work more miserable by requiring excessive productivity. On the other side of this disillusionment, Horwath sees something worthwhile:

And once freed from the false satisfaction of believing we are changing the world with our day jobs, perhaps we will be inspired to fill that hole with something real — true altruism, not its artificial Workism substitute — by actually trying to impact real people, in our communities, in real ways.

Now, I’m not entirely sure that losing one’s income is as uncomplicated as Horwath is making it out to be (isn’t this the plot to Office Space?), but I appreciate the effort to find some counterintuitive good news in the AI apocalypse.

5. In laughs this week, there’s McSweeney’s “A Packing List for the Woman I Will Become on My Summer Vacation to Cape Cod” and Little Old Lady Comedy’s “A Field Guide to Getting Ghosted”

Top marks, however, go to the New Yorker’s “What My Life Would Be Like if All Those Spam Texts Were Legitimate“:

I’d make three thousand dollars an hour working a remote job whose only requirements are disclosing my Social Security number, access to my Ring camera, and a somewhat stable internet connection.
I’d rescue dozens of my own children, who are being held hostage, by paying their ransom exclusively with iTunes gift cards.

I’d have a private meeting in a highly secure location with Sam Bankman-Fried to discuss exciting investment opportunities.

I’d have quality health insurance.

I’d have dozens of packages shipped to me from USPSS, USP, and FidEx that only require my signature to obtain.

I’d have the world’s safest streaming services because I would constantly click on links to change my passwords.

I’d be making a hundred-and-seventy-three-per-cent return on all of my investments while also not having to pay taxes on them because the returns are above the taxation threshold!

I’d have a coveted seat on the board of Theranos 2.0.

And calling all Seinfeld fans! Check out this phenomenal data visualizer put together by Andy Kirk and his team. I think this is the favorite thing I’ve seen this week …

6. To close, here’s a fascinating except of a new book by theologian Miroslav Volf and poet Christian Wiman. Framed as a continual email exchange between the two, here Wiman asks Volf a question, “How would you define faith at this point in your life? Not before God but before humans — in an email, say?”

For Wiman, faith seems both “necessary and impossible,” and he feels caught by the quandary. In response, Volf recognizes, I think, problem of subjectivism and faith. Or to say that one “has” faith as a possession implies that one can identify it by looking inward.

What sometimes assails me, a giant that I cannot but let be, is not so much the instability of “faith” as it is the experience of its content just vanishing, which may be what you mean by big words slipping “free from meaning.” In the space where God was present to me, there is — nothing.

My life continues in its inertias, but at the edge of my experiences, I sense a cosmic motherlessness: I am in my little boat on the open seas with no land in sight. When the seas are calm, things seem bereft of meaning; when the seas rage, terror is on all sides. I am channelling Nietzsche here, a section from his The Joyful Science just before the famous passage about the madman and the death of God (Nietzsche borrowed the metaphor from Schopenhauer and, like much he borrowed, used it in his own way). Nietzsche’s way of seeing the world is my temptation, as I am sure I’ve told you.

As I have aged, I have come to believe that my faith matters much less than I thought it did when I was younger. I am saved by God’s faithfulness, not primarily by my faith. My faith is a fruit of God’s faithfulness, not the condition of God’s arrival into my soul — and into my speech. I have always had as much faith as was needed to say, if there is God, then nothing can separate me from God’s love — not the instability inside the abstraction that faith might be, not even utter lack of faith. I don’t trust in my faith. Nor my love.

Even at my best, I am incapable of the “whole-souled attention” that God actually commands. (What a wonderful rendering of the first commandment!) When my faith becomes empty, I wait for God to return into my faith, to dock my little boat on the shore. Faith is not a way to hold God close. Faith is trust that God will see me, hear me, know me … and come. […]

When I “hear” God say, “I am who I am”, I gloss it with “and I will remain that always, also for you.” I then become one of the children of Israel. I feel myself taken out of my own narrowness, out of the dominion of some little Pharaoh, and transported into the wideness of God’s self-commitment to me — and to the whole world. I always think of “God,” a word whose meaning shifts more than the restless flame from which God spoke to Moses, as a promise. Sometimes I also experience it as such.

— Miroslav

Dear Miroslav,

I find it very consoling to think of my faith not mattering so much, of it being mostly a form of patience. I’m always quoting to my students Karl Barth’s statement that faith is not an achievement, but I live with a kind of restless and appetitive drive that often seems to belie that. The thing is, I can’t help but see this hunger as a “gift” from God. All of my writing has come out of it, every word, even in works that seem to have nothing to do with God. I am after something, and that something is also after me.

Strays: 

• The New Parent Trap
• The Surprising Benefits of Small Talk
• Bonhoeffer’s Message to America
• Attention Is a Form of Love