1. Leading off this week, there’s lots to parse through in David Brook’s latest on late-in-life job resets. Brooks explores the growing trend of university programming that helps transition retirees from high status, high stress work environments into retirement. On one level, the stories coming out of these programs are fantastic: teachers making students tear up and shred their resumes, successful tech moguls stretched out on the ground hyperventilating as their identity is torn down to be built back up. (Brooks rightly acknowledges, however, that the phenomenon is saturated with privilege and programming that many of us will never be able to afford.) Regardless, these wealthy professional retirees are psychological explorers of sorts, guinea pigs in a new social experiment that Brooks hopes will shift the cultural trajectory away from the great American idol of workism:
The lessons the super-elite learn there apply more broadly than just to them. People at all income levels derive some of their identity from how they contribute to the world and provide for those they love, and people at all income levels feel a crisis of identity, and get thrown back on existential questions, when those roles change or fade away. The working poor struggle with blows to their identity when age or infirmity demands that they cut back or change jobs, even if they have to keep laboring, and even though they don’t have the luxury of taking classes where they can engage in deep thought. While the people who attend these programs have built their lives around the pursuit of high-status careers in a way that makes them especially prone to experience profound crises when that success and status are in the rearview mirror, the lessons they learn here have wisdom for all of us.
I’m fascinated by these programs because, among other reasons, I’m hoping they can serve as an antidote to the cultural malady that the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson calls workism. This is the modern way of thinking that, he writes, “valorizes work, career, and achievement above all else.” Many Americans, he continues, have come to assume that work can provide everything that humans once got from their religion — meaning, community, self-actualization, a sense of high calling.
Modern life is oriented around the meritocracy, which implies certain values — that life is best seen as a climb toward the top, that achievement is the essence of a good life, that successful people are to be admired more than less successful people. But this overreliance on our work identities is unhinging us.
Since the dawn of the modern age, people have been complaining about the hollowness of the rat race, but nobody ever does anything about it. If these post-professional programs can help older people figure out what a fulfilling life looks like when work and career are no longer in the center, then maybe they’ll have some lessons for the rest of us. The emergence of a cohort of people who are still vital and energetic but who are living by a different set of values, creating a different conception of the good life, might help the broader culture achieve a values reset.
2. Elsewhere in the Atlantic this week, Caitlin Flanagan offers praise for a heroic vision of masculinity, observing that if toxic masculinity is a catch-all for men at their worst, then logically, there has to be some sort of adjective to put before masculinity that describes men at their best. Flanagan’s assertion is that heroic, healthy masculinity is using the strength, speed, and power stitched into the male body to protect rather than dominate. On the one hand, she says, it’s so common that it’s a value that passes without thought. There’s a reason why men make up the overwhelming majority of firefighters, police, and soldiers. Toxic masculinity, argues Flanagan, creeps into society when this version of heroic masculinity (or any form of prosocial masculinity, for that matter) isn’t lauded.
Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of otherwise reasonable young men who admire Andrew Tate, a vile and widely watched influencer facing charges of rape, human trafficking, and organized crime? (He denies the allegations.) That is because the only thing they have been taught about masculinity is that it is a dangerous and suspicious and possibly socially constructed fantasy that they must cast off in every way possible. They’re so confused that when they finally see a thug like Tate, reveling in talk of dominating and abusing women, they think he’s admirable. At least he isn’t telling them that they’re bad seeds.
If we don’t give these boys positive examples of strength as a virtue, they will look elsewhere.
The final complaint about men is the demand for tears. Why aren’t more men crying? Crying is important and men should cry!
Men do cry. Freely and openly. But women are often looking in the wrong places for it.
When a gunman attacked the Covenant School, an elementary school in Nashville, in March, only 14 minutes lapsed between the first 911 call and officers on the scene taking the shooter down. The Nashville chief of police, John Drake, spoke to the press often on that day and the days that followed. He spoke in the language of data and facts — but also in the language of human beings trying to understand this great evil.
About a week after the shooting, Drake spoke again. First he thanked everyone who had helped, including the cops who had entered the building first, and were also at the press conference. And then he talked about a memorial service he had attended with other members of the force:
“As I sat in a church Saturday, and I watched students from Covenant School take flowers down to the altar, literally I’m in tears. And the other first responders, police officers, firefighters are in tears. And I look at these kids, and they look at us and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ And they believe that their classmate is going to Heaven, that they’re in a better place and they’re not hurting. The ones that was hurting the most was us.”
Almost overcome, he said that the thing he always tells new recruits, men and women alike, is “No one ever said it would be easy, but they said it would be worth it.” And then he turned to the cops: “I’m totally proud of these men.”
What if we showed that speech to boys? What if we didn’t repeatedly tell them that we want to know their feelings and that we want them to be unashamed to cry, but instead showed them that everything is possible for a man — even a straight chief of police? If you think that boys, even ones raised in liberal places and by liberal parents, aren’t deeply interested in the testimony of this kind of man, then you haven’t been around boys very much.
One might phrase Flanagan’s dominion/protection dichotomy as the difference between self centeredness or self-sacrifice. How does Jesus use his power? To protect his beloved people, even at the cost of his own life. It’s worth consideration that Flanagan’s vision of a heroic masculinity elevates Christ and 9/11 firefighters alike, but it’s also worth asking whether we elevate the 9/11 firefighters because their archetypal representation of the God Man himself.
3. If the topic of “heroic” masculinity wasn’t enough to kick off the interplanetary war between Mars and Venus, let’s check back in on Barbie. Freddie deBoer jumps in on the pretty pink zeitgeist (admittedly three weeks late) to say that while Barbie may be a blockbuster feminist film, the real ideological winner is American individualism.
Once again … the cultural options available to us now are conservative individualism and social justice individualism. While left and right seem totally polarized, they share one thing: the worship of the self.
In emphasizing that Ken needs to look past romantic love and search for satisfaction within, Barbie is of course also staking a claim about her own identity and value. In doing so, she’s joining with a broad trend in kid-friendly entertainment: we no longer make movies where a heroine’s destiny is to fall in love. If you look at Disney movies in particular, the classic storyline of the protagonist getting her man in the end has been pretty definitively retired … And, you know, that’s all fine; there’s lots of different good stories out there. But I do think that the out-and-out abandonment of the notion that love is the noblest pursuit of human life says a lot about our cult of self-worship. Because once you’ve dropped the romantic ideal, that’s all our culture really has to offer. […]
This presents, I think, both social and personal problems. The social problem is that we don’t need to be even more relentlessly individualistic! … By portraying therapeutic individualism as the only alternative to patriarchy, Gerwig has underlined the degree to which individualist capitalism now undergirds both sides of the American ideological divide. […]
The individual problem is that telling people they are enough is a cruel thing to do, because they aren’t enough. None of us is enough. I don’t know you, personally, but I can still say with great confidence that you are not enough. If you go through life uncritically accepting the Instagram ideology that you can #manifest everything you deserve because you practice #self-care and are #valid, on a long enough time frame you’re going to end up alone and miserable and profoundly aware that the idea of total emotional self-sufficiency is a transparent lie. Human beings need other human beings. All of us. You might be inclined to lament that fact, and you’re entitled to if you want. But you don’t get to choose to be self-sufficient, any more than you can choose to not require oxygen or water.
4. Lex semper accusat — the fancy Latin phrase for “the law always accuses” — doesn’t just refer to the writings of Moses. It also applies to HGTV. So says Laura D’Entremont in Christianity Today, observing that shows like Home Town, Fixer Upper, and Property Brothers don’t just show us beautifully designed properties. Instead, they also show how our own homes don’t measure up, and D’Entremont wonders if that implicit condemnation is leading to a drop in Christian hospitality:
A recent article from Insider says shows on HGTV might be contributing to this very sense of insecurity — creating a world where people are fearful of being assessed by the aesthetic state of their home:
Homeowners are “seeing everything that’s wrong with their home and imagining when people come into their home [that] they’re also criticizing and scrutinizing and judging” their living spaces, said Annetta Grant, an assistant professor of markets, innovation, and design at Bucknell University.
The article set out to show how homeowners’ philosophies have changed over time.
“Traditionally, people thought of homes as a place of singularization that should be styled to the homeowner’s unique identity,” Kenneth Niemeyer wrote, referring to a study by Annetta Grant and Jay M. Handelman, also a marketing professor. “But homeowners are starting to shift their thinking to consider their home as a marketplace asset rather than a space that is unique to them.”
According to Insider and the Washington Post, homeowners might make design decisions based on what’s trendy — even if they don’t like the choices themselves — out of fear of what others may think of them or what they think future homebuyers may want to see.
Who hasn’t felt just a little apologetic when welcoming others into their home? To say nothing of the universal tradition of panic cleaning that takes place before guests arrive. It’s a fantastic metaphor for how God’s law works on us — when we see perfection, whether it’s written on stone tablets or in a boho farmhouse aesthetic, it inspires us to both appreciate its beauty and grieve at how much we fall short.
So what might grace look like in an HGTV world? Some years ago, I once had a friend over to visit, and apologized for not straightening up. I was nervously jabbering about how we had just gotten back in town from visiting family, and how busy life had been, when he interrupted me to say “Thank you for not cleaning up. It says to me that we’ve crossed a friendship threshold, and you’re not concerned with impressing me anymore. You’re comfortable with me seeing your life, warts and all. What a great compliment you’ve paid me!” It took me a moment to pick my jaw up off the floor and wrap my head around his shift in perspective, the joy of a relationship given instead of a relationship earned.
5. A brief moment to acknowledge the passing of TV legend Bob Barker, whose stewardship of the daytime TV classic The Price is Right made him a national star. What’s remarkable, though, as Alexis Soloski appraised in the New York Times, is the universal connection between the man, his television show, and sick days from school. What else was there to watch at 11am on a weekday in a pre-streaming world? May the palliative care ministry of Mr. Barker be remembered for the hour of mercy that it was for so many.
6. Now on to the laughs. The Hard Times offers “How To Stop Seeking Validation From Your Family and Start Seeking It From Your Friends.” Over at McSweeneys, “I Didn’t Follow the Recipe, and I’m Appalled It Turned Out So Awful” is an accurate send up of the comments sections of my favorite food blogs. Don’t know a lot about The Book of Clarence, but it looks like it has a TON of potential. In the meantime, I’ve been getting a lot of mileage lately from YouTube channel There I Ruined and its desecrations of beloved music icons. That said, long time readers of this site will know that Brian Wilson has suffered enough to sing Nine Inch Nails alongside the late Johnny Cash.
7. The winner of this week’s best headline goes to the Church Times and their author profile titled “Do Less, and Know God Better.” In it, Madeline Davies recounts her conversation with Andrew Root about his new book When Church Stops Working, and in the process, wonders how the Church of England (or any denomination or church in any country) might apply his insights.
The problem with strategies for combating decline, [Root] argues, is that they belong to the secular age. Driven by the logic that we must speed up or die, that “more” is the alternative to extinction, they demand that we schedule more activity and/or “try to smuggle God into all the other activities we do to find meaning”. In this framework, God is no longer “the active agent”, as the Episcopalian priest the Rev’d Fleming Rutledge puts it.
“The secular age blinds us to God’s action, but, even further, it makes the very possibility of God’s action impossible to imagine,” Dr Root writes.
This effect is evident in sermons that offer “life hacks” from the self-help school, or present human beings as “the star of the story”, he tells me. “We want to remind people that the Church’s only story is the story of God’s action in the world.”
If the book steadfastly refuses to offer a programme, it does provide reassurance and an invitation. “We believe God continues to act in the world, and because God acts in the world, we believe it is possible for the Church to flourish,” the authors write. Citing the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, in which “God is the hero, and the Church waits”, they invite churches to adopt a position of “waiting in a ready stance”.
Inevitably, the recommendation has prompted accusations of “quietism”. Yet, Dr Root argues, “Waiting, as practised by the disciples and advocated by us, is not inactive … In the end, perhaps our greatest fear is that we will wait but God will not show up.” Over Zoom he reflects that, even for clergy, talking about God as living or active “does comes with a challenge. You do wonder: can I talk like this and be a modern person?”
Twelve steppers talk about having this same mindset. One popular slogan used for people who are dealing with an entrenched character defect is to say: “it’s the same ol’ stinkin’ thinkin.'” It’s a phrase that connotes the need and desire for a new outlook or a new way in the world because the old way got them addicted and sunk them to rock bottom.
For another take on Root’s book, see Giles Fraser’s exploration of the topic this week. Be prepared, however, for a recounting of the most pitiful and “cringe” attempts at outreach you’ll ever come across.
8. The last word this week goes to Sarah Clarkson, whose reflections on her OCD diagnosis led to a startling and theologically rich question. In Plough, she describes her stark realization that, if her mind is truly her enemy, then Jesus’s prescription is unlike anything the world (and the church) had to offer her:
A central aspect of my coping mechanism was to treat my mind as my enemy. I was taught to interact with my mind in terms of hostility: as something I must resist, fight, subdue. This was a battle and my mind was my foe. My prayers reflected this. I took all the frayed faith of my childhood I could grasp and asked God to subdue, or change, or obliterate the broken part of my mind. This idea was encouraged in me by Christian counselors who linked my illness to demonic influence, and by psychiatrists who told me that medication would subdue the beast within me. […]
What does it mean to love your enemy?
I didn’t think of Christ’s command in the early days of my illness. I never thought it might apply to my rogue mind, or my frail, maddening self. In fact, I had never considered these words of Jesus except in the abstract. […]
All the language of conflict and combat centered upon… power. I suppose it makes sense. The promise of God’s power at work in our lives is central to the gospel, and we want to see it firsthand: opponents smashed, illness zapped, prosperous lives, and conversions by the thousands. And if our troubles are not obliterated — if we are not changed into powerful people ourselves — we wonder if God has turned against us.
Humans have often been pretty confused about what divine power looks like, but I think we struggle particularly in the modern world to conceive of God’s power as anything other than force, because we live in a world of dominative power. We have the relentless mechanical power of technology and the oracular power of unprecedented information and the social power of instant access to mobilize great mobs of people. But these sorts of power are all fundamentally about increased control over ourselves and the world, a kind of power rooted far more in the philosophy of writers like Nietzsche than in the teaching of Christ. Nietzsche understood the “will to power” as the basic drive of human identity, the kind of power that pushes for self-expression, destroying any obstacle in its way. It’s easy to baptize this view of power and see God as the ultimate strongman, just waiting to crush all the things we most dislike (including what is weak in ourselves).
But the power of God is Jesus, the suffering servant, born simply to die for the healing of his people. Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of Nietzsche’s theological critics, wrote that in Christ we discover that God’s “absolute power is identical with absolute self-giving.” He comes not to destroy his enemies but to forgive them. He comes not to obliterate broken minds but to bear and heal them.
This is what it means to be human: created for joy yet broken by sin and in need of redemption. It wasn’t just my mind but my whole self that was a tangle of glory and disaster, one that God would not discard but cherish, forgive, and heal.
Strays:
- What Adults Forget About Friendship: a ton of insight here about freedom, play, the tyranny of efficiency, and glimpses of what friendship can look like in midlife.
- The D&D Players of Death Row: Well worth reading in conjunction with the Mercy Issue’s interview with author Alex Mar.
- A Christian Approach to Treating Fentanyl Addiction: A writeup on an Orange County recovery mission and its successes in a hard and dangerous place.
- Why the World Seems So Resentful: “We can choose one: mastery or meaning, controllability or calling, resentment or resonance. But pursuing the one means sacrificing the other.”
Wow, that Book of Clarence looks like an updated Life of Brian…