At around ten years old, my Nana would sometimes take me to our local Catholic church on Saturday mornings to visit the fourteen “Stations of the Cross.” For those of you who didn’t grow up in the Catholic faith, the Stations of the Cross are a devotional practice that retraces the final events of Jesus Christ’s life, from his condemnation to his crucifixion and burial. Here’s how those visits went.

Starting at the back of the church, we would stand in front of station number one. On the wall in front of us hung a framed panel with bas-relief figures and scenes, sculpted in a plaster-like material that projected outward from the surface. Seven stations lined the left side of the church, and seven lined the right.

Holding my Nana’s hand, she would begin praying in a whisper, barely audible, for about thirty seconds. Then we would move on to the next station and do the same. This continued until we had prayed at all fourteen.

As we moved from one station to the next, Nana would explain that Jesus was being mistreated by people who did not know that God was living inside him. I remember feeling a sense of awe as I looked at each scene, wondering how one man could affect so many lives. I also remember thinking that God must be sad to see Jesus being treated this way.

Why was he treated so badly?

What did he do wrong?

Growing up in America in the 1950s through the late 1960s, I assumed God’s existence as a living reality, a fact of life. God was alive in the “heavens,” and He was always around in my life, up to and including punishing me for my bad deeds. (Ouch.)

During this time, broadly speaking, that orientation was shared across much of American culture. The prevailing Protestant-Catholic-Jewish consensus held that God exists, human beings are morally accountable to God, the universe has inherent meaning, and religion plays a legitimate role in public life. Differences certainly existed, yet these traditions largely agreed that the universe is a sacred, ordered reality, and that human beings occupy a defined place within it.

Today, holding such a view about God or the cosmos can seem peculiar or impractical, like reaching for a long-forgotten home rotary phone to call your best friend, only to realize the world no longer works that way, especially if you grew up in the 1990s or beyond.

Back when I was growing up, our rotary phone sat on the end table next to our living room sofa. If it rang, whoever was nearby answered it. Conversations took place within earshot of others in the room. Calls were often short because someone else might need to use the phone. If you called someone and they weren’t home, you waited. Communication belonged, in a sense, to the household. And in the house I grew up in, with seven siblings, there were plenty of fights over access to the phone.

Over time, that familiar rotary phone got replaced by the touch-tone keypad phone. Because my dad worked for the old New York Bell Telephone Company, he was able to get us one of these new phones, which he mounted on the wall in our kitchen. We were amazed at how quick and easy it was to dial a phone number using this keypad, compared with the slow turn of the rotary dial and its steady clicking as it returned to where it started, replaced now by a series of quick electronic beeps.

A few weeks later, our dad came home with what seemed like a magical device, a thirty-foot extension cord that made it possible to stretch the phone receiver all the way down the hallway and around the corner toward the bedrooms. I can still recall pulling that cord down the hallway and around the corner, trying to find a quiet place to talk with my girlfriend.

Then came the invention of the cordless phone. Walking around the house without having to stand next to the phone, or worrying about pulling the phone off the wall by yanking the extension cord too hard, felt like a whole new level of freedom in the house. But the landline touch-tone phone was still, largely, the reliable go-to phone, because reception on these early cordless phones was often spotty.

As reception improved, these personal mobile phones began to shift communication away from a location-specific, shared setting toward something more private and individualized. The cordless phone freed people from being tied to a single place, but it had not yet become the center of daily life, still largely limited to phone calls and rudimentary texting. That shift would come with the arrival of the smartphone.

This expansion was already underway with the rise of the home personal computer and early internet, and later with the portable laptop, though each remained something one had to sit down to access. I can still remember in the early 1990s opening up my IBM Butterfly laptop and dialing up an internet connection via AOL (anyone else remember?).

In 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, what we once used only occasionally became something we could carry with us and access at all times. Communication, information, and interpretation moved into the same device, available almost instantly and in private. Over time, this not only increased access but also created a more continuous form of engagement, where the flow of information and perspectives became constant and varied.

Today, many of us use this device from the moment we wake to the moment we drift off to sleep. (I confess, guilty as charged.) New patterns of attention, habits of behavior, and increasingly, how we understand ourselves and the world around us are shaped by it.

What began as unlimited, private, individual freedom to access the world via the smartphone has, in some cases, become full immersion in a highly speculative digital sphere. Now, with AI, the phone begins to take on a role in our thinking, offering interpretations that shape how we understand our experience and, increasingly, how we understand ourselves.

What was once held within a shared and structured phone culture has gradually morphed into something far more individualized, continuous, and private. Where communication once took place within a common space, shaped by visibility and informal accountability, it now occurs largely in seclusion, on demand, and without the same shared reference points. This creates a new set of conditions in which each person is increasingly responsible for managing a constant flow of input, interpretation, and response, largely on their own.

Just as the evolution of the phone gradually shifted communication away from a shared, visible, and structured setting into something more individualized, continuous, and private, a corresponding change has taken place in how we try to make sense of our lives.

We are now expected, almost as a rite of passage, to figure out for ourselves what is true, what matters, and how to live. Where we once believed we were held by something larger than ourselves, a world understood to be divinely ordered, where direction was already given, we now see ourselves floating in a sea of limitless possibilities, none of which arrive with any shared sense of what to trust or how to proceed.

And so the responsibility shifts, often quietly but profoundly, onto the individual to sort, interpret, and decide. This pressure to navigate our lives, almost as if we have to invent a compass to direct ourselves, can become all-consuming and exhausting. The question of where we actually stand and what kind of world we are moving within remains largely out of view.

What matters, then, is not simply how to navigate this ever-widening field of conflicting options, but whether we have first taken the time to understand where we stand within it. Before deciding what to believe, what to pursue, or how to change, there is a prior task, one that is easily overlooked in a world that encourages relentless forward movement and continual response.

This is what we might call the task of orientation. Of coming to see, as clearly as we can, the ground we stand on and the conditions we live in. Without that, even the best forms of navigation may lead us in circles, like our pet dog chasing its proverbial tail.

The deeper challenge, then, is not simply to move with greater discernment within the field of conflicting options, but to see more clearly the field itself, how it is structured, what it assumes, and how it quietly shapes what feels possible, necessary, or true.

Orientation does not solve the problem of how to live, but it changes the ground on which that question is asked. And without that shift, we may continue navigating, even successfully, without ever quite knowing where we are or where we are headed.

Yet many of our difficulties in life arise from something we might call certainty inflation.

What’s that, you might ask?

A few years ago, while riding on the train with a friend of mine, we got into a conversation about what God is like, or what He is not like. He shared an experience in which the creator of all things, God, directly spoke to him, reassuring him that he is loved beyond measure. It was God’s voice, he claimed, that he heard inside his innermost being, and this unmistakable voice of God instantly flooded his whole body with a feeling of bliss and a “peace that passeth all understanding.”

At this particular time in my life, I was leaning more towards the perspective that such an idea was akin to a young child believing in the existence of Santa Claus. I started wriggling in my seat, feeling more and more agitated as he talked on about this loving God who spoke to him as a human father would speak to his children. I challenged him, and with arms flailing about, insisted that what he was saying about God was a figment of his imagination. My attitude was: How can you believe something so stupid? You fool!

Certainty inflation is what happens when confidence becomes identity, and disagreement feels like a threat.

You see, I once held the same notion about God that my friend was still holding: that God is like a loving father who wants to have a personal relationship with me. I can talk with Him, and He can talk with me. I can pray to Him, and if I try hard enough, God can answer my prayers. I lived in this identity for decades, and was convinced I knew what I was talking about! In fact, I told myself the trouble in the world was a direct result of human beings not holding the same view I held about this God.

As for my friend, we were close enough not to let this disagreement about God create a wedge in our relationship. Over the years of our growing friendship, we built up enough social currency to acknowledge that each of us was bigger than any particular strongly held viewpoint, which could potentially result in a serious friendship rupture.

Looking back on this scene, I can laugh as I see in my mind’s eye the cocky, self-assured attitude I held, as if I could possess the correct or true viewpoint on what God is and is not, or on any other topic, for that matter. Unfortunately, this is not always the case in human relationships or between unlike groups, cultures, or countries. Today I can see that what I carried that day was my own version of inflation certainty.

Whether it’s about politics, religion, environment, cultures, or whatever, the seeming need to be right or on the right side is not going to go away anytime soon. But what happens when we reduce life to stances of right versus wrong, good versus bad, truth versus lies? Do these attitudes and postures foster understanding and cooperation, or something else?

When we are so certain, beyond a reasonable doubt, are we expanding or contracting? Do we get bigger or smaller? If we feel the need to take a stance of “I’m right on this, and that’s it!” toward anything going on in the world, does this create more stability or fragmentation in ourselves or in relation to others?

What happens to curiosity, humility, surprise, and the capacity to be changed when we rush to explain and feel the urge to win?

Is there dignity in admitting to not knowing the answer?

In our current climate of social media platforming for clicks and likes, and the availability of instant information through AI, are we able to admit, with a calm, non-hurried presence, that as limited beings, we will never fully know or understand everything about anything?

What if our deepest strength lies in not knowing?

What if certainty is not what holds us together but keeps us apart from one another?

Recently, I’ve been watching short videos of unsuspecting passersby on a crowded public sidewalk responding to a message board next to a portable electronic piano with the written invitation: Play Me! :)

After sitting down behind the piano and tinkering with the keys, a man dressed in blue farmer coveralls and a long-sleeve plaid flannel shirt, with a baseball-style cap dangling off to the right side of his head, approaches the piano. In a thick southern drawl, he starts to talk as if he’s making an announcement over the PA at Grand Central Terminal. His arms flail about like he’s just stepped on hot coals in his bare feet, and he blurts out:

“Golly gee! Would you mind if I try to play? My nephew’s been teaching me a song…”

A few people quickly agree to the stranger’s request, springing up from their seat and stepping around to the front of the piano. Others stop what they are doing and sit there like a frozen statue. On occasion, an individual will shrug their shoulders and tilt their head to one side, as if signaling an attitude of “whatever.” In nearly all cases, the stranger is allowed to sit down at the piano.

He starts striking the piano keys with only his two index fingers, stumbling to and fro across the keyboard as if it’s the first time he ever tried to play the piano. Responses by the observer to this seeming lack of skill range from boredom to impatience.

Suddenly, the seemingly talentless stranger launches into an expert rendition of a complex classical piano piece that seems to shift this momentary space being shared by two strangers. At the sound and sight of a prior inept piano player now transformed before their eyes into a virtuoso, faces soften and bodies shift. The observer is now focused on the dazzling piano playing taking place in the middle of the day on this crowded city street.

And then, he cuts his playing short, jumps up from his stool, looks at his wrist watch, and blurts out:

“Opps! I gotta run. I have a concert I’m going to, and I’m late.”

And with that, the stranger runs down the sidewalk like a bat out of hell, quickly disappearing into the crowd. The observer is left standing there alone.

In many of these clips, the observer doesn’t immediately move on. They look around, sometimes waving their hands or shaking their heads with facial expressions that hover between disbelief and amazement, as if something just happened and they aren’t quite sure how to make sense of it yet.

A casual reading of this street encounter between two strangers can easily be described as an imaginative prank that created a brief “gotcha moment” for the unsuspecting passerby. But if you have a chance to view multiple clips of these moments, subtle signals are showing up, in different ways, indicating something other than just being fooled might be registering during these encounters.

Merely observing what took place only from the outside and concluding that it was nothing more than a clever trick is not unlike examining a human body solely by its outward form and deciding that this is all there is to a human being. The observation itself is not wrong, but it assumes that anything not visible in that moment doesn’t matter. In both cases, what we conclude depends greatly on how we choose to look.

When the stranger swiftly disappeared, the passerby was left standing alone, and nothing obvious had changed. The hustle and bustle of the street returned, bodies continued to mosey along, and that moment dissolved back into the flow of the day. And yet, for that brief stretch of time, the usual demands and concerns of daily life seemed to recede into the background, and something hard to name briefly took shape between player and observer.

How often do moments like this pass through our day unnoticed, not because they don’t happen, but because they can be difficult to stay with once they do. This essay does not attempt to name what was present in that shared space or suggest how to recover it. It simply pauses long enough to notice that such moments occur, and that noticing them may already be a different way of being in the world.

Is there a shared ground we can stand in that does not depend on a belief system, a worldview, privileged insight, or a set of propositions that demand agreement? If it is not a doctrine to be affirmed, a practice to be mastered, or a hidden truth accessible only through special insight, revelation, or experience, then what does this shared ground actually look and feel like?

In childhood, our experience of this shared ground takes shape before self-reflection. Babies, infants, and children learn what the world is like not through propositions or truth claims, but through the rhythms, responses, and atmospheres that surround them. Before a child can choose values or construct meaning, they absorb a sense of whether life is trustworthy, whether their presence is welcomed, and whether they belong somewhere without having to earn it. These early formations do not tell the child what to think, but they quietly teach how to stand.

When this early sense of standing is conditional or untrustworthy, it often goes unnoticed until much later in life. As adults, we interpret the resulting strain as a personal problem to be solved rather than a formative absence to be understood. We work harder on ourselves, refine our strategies, and seek insight, therapy, discipline, or meaning systems that promise coherence and security. Much of what passes for adult growth, then, is not transformation so much as repair, an ongoing effort to stabilize a sense of ground that was never fully secured in the first place. The self becomes an ever-present project because it was never allowed to rest as a presence that was already enough.

What this shared ground is, then, is not an idea to be grasped, but a condition already at work in us. It is the given capacity to remain present to life as it unfolds, to bear experience without having to secure it first with explanation or justification. This ground shows up as a quiet steadiness beneath our thoughts and emotions, a basic resilience that allows us to meet joy and loss, success and failure, without losing our footing entirely. It does not eliminate pain or difficulty, but it makes endurance possible without requiring constant self-defense. In this sense, the ground is not something we stand on so much as something we are already standing within, a sustaining context that holds life even when our interpretations falter.

What makes this ground genuinely shared is that it does not depend on agreement, belief, particular experiences, performance, or cultural alignment to function. People can stand within it while holding very different interpretations of the world, different stories, practices, and commitments.

Across religious, secular, and cultural differences, human beings still bear loss, uncertainty, love, responsibility, and time in remarkably similar ways. The ground operates not at the level of conclusions, but at the level of capacity, the capacity to remain present, to endure, to respond, and to carry life forward even when meaning is contested or unclear. Because it does not ask us to think the same thoughts or tell the same stories, it can quietly hold differences rather than erase them. In a pluralistic world, this kind of ground does not unify us by agreement, but by participation in the same fragile, sustaining conditions of being human.

A significant barrier to inhabiting this shared ground is the persistent human impulse toward rightness and distinction. Even practices that begin as sincere attempts to heal, awaken, or ground ourselves can quietly turn into markers of moral or spiritual superiority. Insight becomes a form of currency. Experience becomes a credential. Access, whether through religious belonging, specialized training, rare encounters, or costly practices, can start to function as proof of having arrived somewhere others have not.

At that point, grounding subtly shifts from something shared to something possessed. This is often the demarcation line. Practices may genuinely help stabilize, clarify, or open the self, but when they become the basis for status, authority, or exclusion, they no longer point beyond themselves. The shared ground gives way to hierarchy, and orientation once again becomes something one must earn, defend, or display.

Part of what complicates this search for shared ground is our collective exhaustion with how easily meaning hardens into tribal identity. Religious traditions that once offered orientation often became tools for exclusion, coercion, or moral superiority, and the damage they caused was real. In response, many learned to distrust the religious impulse itself, treating it as inherently dangerous or regressive.

But the vacuum left by this rejection has not made us less tribal, only differently so. Belonging still forms around identities, ideologies, and experiences, often with the same patterns of certainty, boundary-making, and dismissal of outsiders. The problem, then, is not that humans seek shared ground, but that we have become wary of anything that resembles it, even when its absence leaves us fractured and alone.

Having rejected the tyranny of abusive religious authority and power, we now find ourselves confronting a subtler tyranny, one in which meaning fragments into rival camps and orientations, and the self is left to negotiate belonging without any ground sturdy enough to hold us together. The freedom to choose without coercion or limits becomes the dominant refrain of modern life, at times resembling a kind of secular religious fervor.

When someone is no longer standing by constant effort alone, the change is rarely dramatic. Life does not suddenly become easier or more certain. What shifts instead is the constant bracing that once accompanied everyday decisions. There is less urgency to secure meaning before acting, less pressure to interpret every experience as evidence of success or failure. Responsibility remains, but it is no longer carried as proof of worth.

Standing within what already holds us does not eliminate struggle, disagreement, or loss. It does, however, change how those realities are borne. Failure no longer threatens total collapse. Difference does not immediately demand withdrawal or domination. Time feels less like a countdown and more like something that can be entered and endured. One still chooses, still acts, still responds, but not as though everything depends on getting it right.

This is not a higher state, privileged insight, or final arrival. It is a quieter way of inhabiting life, one in which meaning is not constantly assembled, defended, or performed. The self is still present, but it is no longer the sole load-bearing structure. Something else is doing part of the holding, even when we cannot name it.

Across this series, we have traced how modern life fractures the self, how we respond to that fracture, and how much effort goes into holding ourselves together once shared orientation dissolves. What emerges here is not another response to manage, but a different way of seeing the problem itself. The deepest question is no longer how the self can repair itself, but whether we have forgotten that standing was once something given before it ever became something achieved.

If the modern struggle has been shaped by the loss of inherited ground, then the work before us is not repair, mastery, privileged insight, or a return to what once was, but learning how to stand again within what has always already been holding us. This does not require agreement, belief, or special access. It does not ask us to be certain, only present. Nor does it require asserting superior truth claims or dismissing claims that do not align with our self-constructed views of reality.

Perhaps the simplest image of this shared ground has been with us all along. Long before we choose, decide, believe, or construct meaning, the human heart is already at work. It sustains life without instruction, agreement, or effort on our part. It does not ask whether we are ready, worthy, certain, or aligned. It simply beats, holding us in existence moment by moment. We do not manage it into action or earn its reliability. We learn to trust it by living.

Standing on ground we did not create will never feel triumphant. It feels quieter than that, more like a release from the need to keep proving, securing, or justifying our place in the world. Life still asks much of us. But when the ground is trustworthy, we no longer have to hold everything together by effort alone. We can finally begin, not by constructing meaning, but by inhabiting the life that is already here.

So, the next time you feel the familiar pressure to fix, secure, or explain your life, it may be worth pausing long enough to notice whether that urgency reflects a lack of insight or a deeper exhaustion from standing alone. What if nothing new needs to be added, and the invitation is simply to stop bracing and let yourself rest within the ground that has been carrying you all along, long before you knew how to name it?

A note for readers:

This seven-part essay series will soon be gathered into a seven-module exploration available on my Everyday Spiritual Health website. The essays you have read here form the narrative backbone of that work.

The modules are not designed as a program to complete or a system to adopt, but as a structured way of slowing down and staying with the questions we have been circling together, questions about meaning, orientation, disorientation, and what it might mean to stand in the world without having to construct everything from scratch.

More details will be shared in the coming weeks.

That is enough. Anything more would feel like marketing.

The relentless demand for total self-authorship, the kind Friedrich Nietzsche gave voice to, and the kind that quietly shapes modern lives from an early age, can be exhausting and isolating. Over time, the effort required to keep meaning intact begins to feel less like freedom and more like fatigue.

But what if the problem is not simply fragmentation, or the absence of the right response to it, but something more basic: how people are first oriented to live within a sense of meaning that does not begin and end with the self?

If orientation is something we absorb long before we know how to examine it, then the question is not merely how fragmented adults recover meaning and grounding, but how people are first taught to stand in the world at all. Long before beliefs are chosen or frameworks questioned, we learn by osmosis what claims our attention, what demands performance, and what quietly goes unanswered.

I have seen a different form of early orientation up close. When my wife’s nephew came to the United States for middle school and high school, he struggled deeply during his first few years. Much later, he told us how isolating and overwhelming that transition had been. Yet there was one thing he never questioned: he did not want to disappoint or embarrass his parents.

That obligation was not something he reasoned his way into or chose after reflection. It was already there, quietly shaping how he endured the experience. He cried in private, gritted his teeth, and made it work, not because it was easy, but because he knew where he stood. This kind of early formation carries its own costs, which are real and should not be minimized. Still, it reveals what it means to be oriented by something that precedes personal choice.

We are not born into the world only to carve out a life according to our own inclinations, preferences, or capacities. Long before choice, repair, or reorientation become conscious tasks, we are already being invited to stand somewhere. A world receives us, not as a blank slate to be engineered, but as a place with contours, rhythms, and claims that precede our approval or disapproval. Orientation, in this sense, is not something we invent after the fact, but something we learn to inhabit. The ground was already there before we knew we needed it.

From the very beginning, we breathe in and out Earth’s atmosphere tens of thousands of times a day, long before we are capable of noticing, choosing, or questioning what we are breathing.

What this suggests is that our deepest struggle may not be how fragmented adults repair and ground themselves after the damage is done, but how we are first taught to stand in the world at all. Modern life assumes orientation is something we assemble later, under pressure, after losses and missteps force us to take stock. As a result, much of what we call meaning becomes a form of continual repair, managing fractures that might never have needed fixing if the ground beneath us had been trustworthy from the start.

Yet this raises a more fundamental question: whether there is a way of standing that does not originate in self-construction, but in something already given, something we step into rather than invent. A way forward that doesn’t try to recover a lost past or impose another doctrine. The next essay turns toward that possibility, asking what it might mean to stand on ground we did not create, and to be oriented by what precedes choice rather than by what must be endlessly maintained.

We often assume that we are living in a neutral reality, free from any shared story that once might have shaped how people understood themselves and the world. Yet the ways we make sense of life are rarely self-chosen. They are absorbed gradually, like a native language taken for granted, so familiar that it becomes indistinguishable from reality itself.

In our pluralistic world, we’ve absorbed the idea that meaning must be self-assembled, justified, and privately sustained. There is no longer a felt need to inherit any prior framework on how to live or behave in the world. German philosopher F. Nietzsche’s prized work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), captures this shift vividly, presenting a world in which inherited meanings no longer hold and the task of value-creation falls squarely on the individual. It is both a celebration of human possibility and an unflinching exposure of what such freedom requires. This modern-day shift inward to derive meaning and coherence in one’s life carries a particular weight, even when life appears to be going well.

When meaning must be continually generated and sustained from within, the self is never fully at rest. Orientation becomes something to monitor, revise, and defend, rather than something quietly inhabited. Even when life appears stable, productive, or successful, there is an underlying vigilance at work, a sense that coherence depends on ongoing effort. Nothing collapses all at once. Instead, meaning must be continually tended, like a structure that holds only as long as it is actively maintained. This, we are told, is simply the price to be paid for the vigilance required to create and sustain oneself in a world now free of past dogmas, traditions, and superstitions.

This way of living is not a universal human condition. In many cultures outside the modern West, identity, responsibility, and belonging have traditionally been embedded within inherited social, familial, and moral structures that precede individual choice. One does not begin life by assembling a personal framework of meaning but by being claimed by relationships, obligations, and expectations that situate the self within a larger order.

While such arrangements carry their own tensions and costs, they spare the individual from having to invent coherence from scratch. The modern Western condition, by contrast, asks the self to stand alone first and orient itself later, bearing a weight that other cultures distribute across shared forms of life.

What makes this situation especially difficult is that we lack a shared language for distinguishing between meaning that is imposed and meaning that is received. Having rightly rejected dogmatic systems that claimed authority through coercion or fear, we have grown wary of anything that might orient us before we choose it. Yet in discarding those structures, we also lost confidence that a shared sense of reality could exist without domination. The result is not neutrality, but a quiet narrowing of our imagination, in which the self becomes the sole site of meaning-making by default.

This leaves us suspended between two unsatisfying options. On one side lies a return to inherited frameworks that many can no longer affirm in good faith. On the other lies a life of continual self-assembly, where coherence must be managed, defended, and sustained without rest. Pluralism offers freedom, but little guidance for how meaning might be received, shared, or carried together without collapsing into dogma. We are left highly skilled at choosing, but poorly equipped for inhabiting a world that can hold us in advance. What this raises is not yet a solution, but a deeper question: what would it mean to live within a fuller sense of reality again, one that does not demand belief we cannot affirm, yet does not leave us alone to manufacture meaning from scratch?

If the modern self has been shaped by the loss of inherited structure, then the task ahead is not repair or retreat, but reorientation. The next essay turns toward that possibility, asking what it might look like to recover a way of being in the world where meaning is not merely constructed, but encountered, shared, and sustained.

Many of us have now reached the limits of that promise. As a result, a subtle crack has formed in our sense of meaning and orientation, one that is easy to overlook at first but difficult to ignore once it is felt. This essay turns toward that moment, exploring ways modern life responds when the fracture becomes visible, and the impulse to seal it quietly takes hold. What follows is a look at six distinct ways we attempt to live with, manage, interpret, or move beyond this fracture once it can no longer be ignored.

In my bathroom, there is a medicine cabinet above the sink. While shaving one morning, I noticed some small cracks in the drywall by the mirror. As I stared at them, I wondered how long they had been there, since I’d not noticed them until this moment. Because it wasn’t doing any obvious harm, it was easy to dismiss. So I did. I went on with my busy day and quickly forgot about it.

For many people, a momentary sense that something is off in their lives can arise and quickly fade, as life continues to function well enough. Over time, work, success, productivity, and forward movement provide sufficient meaning and orientation. Even if a sense of disorientation appears now and then, external validation through activity and accomplishment is enough to hold one’s identity intact, with no felt sense that something needs to be repaired. This response is reinforced by a culture that rewards productivity, achievement, and progress, which supplies enough external validation to keep the deeper questions of life at bay.

When I first began to sense something was off in the way I was living, I pushed it aside. I didn’t want to examine this feeling further, so I kept moving forward and ignored the unease, focusing instead on my major tasks and responsibilities.

Another response, rather than ignoring the cracks in the wall, is to quickly paint over them, without trying to understand what caused them, but to make the wall look normal again with minimal effort. It’s a reasonable response, especially if you don’t like home renovations or don’t want to waste time messing around with a bathroom wall.

Once the unease of an unsettled mind is felt, a common response is to find a way to calm it without wanting to know what lies behind it, or, in the case of the bathroom wall, what lies behind the crack itself. Life still functions. Work moves forward. Relationships are intact. Yes, the crack is noticed, but there’s no felt need to open up the wall to see further into the source of the problem.

A variety of contemporary wellness modalities operate on the assumption that distress is primarily a physiological or cognitive imbalance, rather than a signal of disorientation within a larger cultural or existential context. In this view, the cracked wall of unease can be smoothed over by providing the self with relief, calm, stability, and emotional breathing room.

Programs such as stress-management techniques, mindfulness practices, self-care routines, and wellness coaching are among many approaches that acknowledge something feels off and offer pragmatic, often helpful ways to restore stability. They allow life to continue with minimal disruption.

These responses are like painting over the cracks in the bathroom wall so it looks normal again, without needing to examine the underlying structure. They help manage the self more effectively, but leave unaddressed how to re-situate the self within a larger, shared framework of meaning, one able to provide genuine direction beyond continual self-repair.

As the practices and strategies I’d relied on for years no longer seemed as effective, I started to explore alternatives to stabilize my growing sense of discomfort and confusion. More than anything, I wanted to quickly recapture a feeling of safety and support that I felt was slowly slipping away.

Over time, for some people, reframing and self-management start to feel inadequate, as deeper, unaddressed needs keep returning. The crack begins to call for something more than effective techniques or sound explanations. At this point, there is a felt pull to look more closely, even if that pull is accompanied by hesitation or a resistance to getting too entangled in trying to make sense of what’s really going on.

Instead of quickly painting over the wall crack, time is taken to sand the paint down to the drywall and apply joint compound to the exposed area. Once it dries, it’s sanded again and repainted. Although the underlying cause of the cracks lies hidden, no attempt is made to explore further. The wall is assumed to be fundamentally sound.

At this level of response, specific program types help people to regain their footing, sense of direction, and a sense of meaning. Work around life purpose, values clarification, and restoring a sense of personal power all aim to help people find their way out of disorientation. For some, this also includes re-engaging with an institutional religion or becoming involved in a fringe or minority religious group, not necessarily out of conviction, but in search of structure, language, and a sense of cohesive belonging.

When I reached a point where I felt like there must be something wrong with me, I did something I’d never have considered before: I saw a professional counselor. My loss of confidence and sense of failure in my life orientation demanded more than a surface coat of paint.

There comes a point when fixing the crack through repair and management no longer feels like the right response. Instead, we look further, perhaps for the first time, at what the crack itself might be trying to reveal. Is there a structural issue with the wall itself that is causing the cracks to appear? The crack shifts from being a problem to solve to a signal of a larger issue we’ve not yet considered. In this light, our experience of unease or disorientation is no longer treated as something to eliminate or solve, but as an indication that the larger structure we’re living within may be under a hidden strain.

Programs and practices designed to help people step back from trying to fix, optimize, or master, but stay with uncertainty and listen to what the fracture is revealing, operate at this level. Contemplative traditions, silent retreats, therapeutic inquiry without guaranteed outcomes, and presence over problem-solving offer no quick wins and no clear metrics to measure results.

Four years ago, I attended a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the Vipassana tradition. No talking. No eye contact. Eight hours of meditation every day, with the first group session starting at 4:30 AM. I wasn’t looking for answers, but was curious to see how I’d respond to the experience of remaining present with reality as it is, without reaching for explanation, relief, or escape.

Up to this point, the crack has been treated either as a problem to fix within the wall or as a signal revealing something about the structure itself. At this stage, some people decide to open up the wall, exposing what’s going on underneath, to see what the exterior has been hiding from view. This is the point where the work moves beyond solutions and reflective inquiry into direct encounter.

The opening up to what’s been hidden is often marked by risk-taking, vulnerability, and exposure. It involves being acted upon, not just acting, allowing individuals to come into contact with forces larger than the self. Here, the work is no longer about fixing what feels broken or mastering oneself more effectively.

This response is marked by experiences and containers that deliberately open up the wall, allowing the individual to be in contact with forces larger than personal control or explanation. Meaning is not constructed or managed here, but it is encountered through vulnerability, risk, and surrender. The self is no longer doing the acting, but is being acted upon, altered, and addressed in ways that are unpredictable and cannot be fully contained.

Extended retreats, initiatory rites, depth-oriented therapeutic work, carefully held psychedelic experiences, wilderness solos, and contemplative disciplines can all function in this way when approached with care and seriousness. These modalities are united by a willingness to enter spaces where the self can no longer manage outcomes, but instead, must be opened, addressed, and reshaped by forces beyond its own authorship.

Two years ago, I found myself in a carefully contained setting where my habitual sense of self as manager and interpreter of events quietly failed. What followed was not understanding, but a sudden release of tears, along with involuntary shaking, sadness, and grief, suggesting a process happening through me rather than one directed by me.

What becomes clear at this level of engagement is that opening the wall does not, by itself, restore stability or meaning. Something essential has been touched, but how that encounter is held, interpreted, and lived with over time remains an open question.

Across these varied responses, it also becomes clear that modern life offers several ways to deal with fracture once it has been noticed. People are not sitting around in passive indifference. They are actively searching for ways to live in the aftermath of a shared story once largely carried by religious institutions, stories that no longer hold the imaginative or communal commitments they once inspired.

Some approaches downplay the fracture, while others attempt to explain or open it up for repair. Each approach has its appeal, and each can help in limited ways. Taken together, they also point to a deeper question: whether the unease we feel is less about finding the right response and more about considering the larger framework within which we are trying to respond at all. Is our task ahead about repair and management, or about re-orientation? That is the question our next essay takes up.

Few today object to the claim that the Enlightenment period (roughly 1680-1800) transformed Western society, giving birth to modern democracy, individual freedoms, and human rights. But would you be surprised to learn that its aftershocks have been more disruptive to our collective well-being than the destructive radioactive fallout unleashed by the above-ground nuclear blasts carried out by the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s to the early 60s?

The European Enlightenment was not simply a shift from old religious and traditional ways of thinking to a new confidence in reason and science; it also reorganized the very framework through which people understood themselves, their purpose, and the meaning of the world around them.

Read on to understand how the physical fallout of nuclear testing eventually settled and decayed, while the fallout of the Enlightenment continues to radiate its invisible dust into every aspect of modern life.

To appreciate this comparison, it helps to recall how little was understood at the early stages of the Cold War. The world entered a new nuclear age, experimenting with a power whose full dangers and consequences were barely understood. Scientists at the time had only a partial understanding of what radioactive fallout actually was, and whether the particles released into the upper atmosphere would remain aloft, whether they would drift back down to Earth, and what damage the individual isotopes could inflict on human bodies, plant life, animals, or even bodies of water—and for how long.

Deadly Radioactive isotopes circling the globe

I’m not a scientist, but I did a little digging to understand how these repeated nuclear explosions affected the environment. Turns out that the fallout left behind was far more damaging than most people realize. Six widely documented isotopes from above-ground testing spread through air, soil, water, and food chains, leaving measurable and long-lasting effects on both the environment and human health. Some, like Iodine-131, moved quickly through grasslands and dairy supplies, contributing to thyroid disease in children. Others, such as Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, settled into soil, water, and even the bones and teeth of human beings, raising cancer risks.

Longer-lived elements like Plutonium-239 lodged themselves in dust and sediments for decades, while Carbon-14 traveled the globe and entered plants, animals, and human tissue. Even short-lived isotopes contributed to early waves of contamination. Though only faint traces remain today, their environmental and biological footprints reveal just how far, and quietly, radioactive fallout traveled.

What once seemed to promise boundless energy and strategic advantage carried an unsuspected shadow: invisible clouds of radioactive dust swept up by high-altitude winds, circling the globe and eventually settling thousands of miles from the testing sites. In hindsight, unleashing this power above ground revealed its consequences only gradually, long after the blinding flash of each explosion had disappeared.

The devastation was real and far-reaching. Yet even these consequences would prove temporary compared to the Enlightenment’s deeper, longer-lasting fallout, one that still shapes the way we think, choose, and understand ourselves.

To understand this deeper fallout, we need a closer look at the cultural atmosphere we’ve inherited from the Enlightenment. Its influence didn’t end with reshaping ideas or institutions; it seeped into the inner world of modern people in ways we rarely stop to notice.

And just as there are many ways to slice a pie — in quarters, halves, or twelfths — there are many ways to describe the consequences of this shift. The six I explore here are the ones I’ve felt most directly, patterns that slowly unraveled the world I thought I understood and that still shape the inner experience of countless others today.

As I look at these six effects, I can see the outline of my own journey, how I slowly drifted away from a world that once felt alive and whole, into a life that had grown flat, stale, and strangely solitary. And perhaps you’ve felt some version of this yourself, not necessarily a collapse of belief, but a subtle loss of grounding, a loss of meaning, or a faint ache that ordinary life doesn’t quite add up the way it once seemed to. These are the quiet signatures of the same fallout, expressed in different lives.

What has been lost in the long aftermath of the Enlightenment is not just a set of old religious or traditional beliefs, but a way of “being in the world.” It was a communal framework, a shared story that helped people understand who they were, what their lives meant, and how they fit into a larger cosmic order.

Reclaiming any sense of depth today doesn’t require returning to doctrines we can’t affirm or to systems that no longer speak to us. Instead, it calls for a renewed posture toward life, one that makes room for mystery, for presence, and for a common shared story that arises from lived experience rather than one imposed from the outside.

With that in mind, let’s turn to the first of the six effects, beginning with the quiet collapse of the story we once lived by.

1. Collapse of Shared Story

Before the Enlightenment, many people tried to live within a shared story that gave their lives a deep sense of purpose and belonging to something larger than themselves, a divinely ordered plan. When that framework gradually dissolved, individuals were left to construct their own meaning in a universe that no longer guaranteed significance or protection.

For the first half of my adult life, I believed I had been called to a special role within a divinely ordered plan. When that story suddenly collapsed, the meaning that once held my life together fell with it, leaving me standing in a world that felt strangely unmooored and distant. This turned out to be the first ripple in a much deeper shift, one that began rewriting the entire structure of my inner world.

For those who remain inside a strong, coherent religious framework or deeply disciplined spiritual practice, this kind of collapse may seem unfamiliar or even unnecessary. But for many who have stepped outside the story they once believed in and trusted, this loss of cosmic grounding is often the first quiet fracture, a fracture that reshapes everything that follows.

2. Loss of Aliveness

When the old cosmic story began to fade, the world itself started to flatten. What had once felt vibrantly alive and charged with presence and mystery became silent, mechanical, and emotionally distant. Something vital had gone missing, and no amount of effort or explanation could bring it back.

After the larger story I’d been living fell away, the aliveness drained out of every aspect of life. What once felt intimate, bursting with meaning, became hollow, as if a large hole had opened up in the middle of my chest, where every ounce of enthusiasm for life seemed to disappear. This shrinking of aliveness set the stage for a deeper kind of loneliness, one that grew not from being alone but from feeling cut off from the world itself.

American singer-songwriter Don McLean captured this feeling in his 1972 number-one folk-rock hit American Pie, when he wrote about ‘the day the music died.’ The song tries to capture a moment when the innocence of American life seemed to crack in two. That line has always stayed with me. Not because my crisis resembled his cultural moment, but because it captured the feeling of a sudden, irreversible shift, the sense that something vital had gone quiet inside me, and that the world I once knew would never return. McLean was naming a public rupture. I was living a private one, but the recognition was the same.

3. The Walled-off Self

As autonomy became a central theme to live by, individuals began to rely more on their own capacities and inclinations, and less on tradition or communal authority. This walled-off self came to be seen as its own source of meaning-making. People became isolated within their own minds, developing protective layers like skepticism and emotional detachment, closed off to being penetrated by anything “other-worldly.”

I recognized this walled-off self when my inner life began to feel distant, finding myself wanting to be as far away as possible from anything or anyone I perceived as trying to dictate how I thought, felt, or lived my life.

4. The Burden Starting Over

When the story you’ve lived inside falls apart, what follows is more than confusion; it’s the shattering of trust. Suddenly, the framework that once held your deepest commitments no longer feels reliable, and the task of rebuilding a meaningful life falls squarely and heavily on your own shoulders. What felt like “liberation” in Enlightenment terms becomes a mandate for each person to chart their own way without the advantage of a compass pointing to true north. And when you must build or rebuild a life without a reliable compass, the self itself begins to fracture, setting the stage for the next, deeper layer of fallout.

For me, this meant owning up to a truth I never wanted to face: that in a very real sense, I had been sold a bill of goods. The world I once trusted with all my heart no longer held. And so I had to walk away. But this was not just about me. I was married and raising a family when this collapse occurred. My sense of self and of the future suddenly found itself without a trusted framework, and I shuddered at the thought of how this unraveling might ripple through my marriage and my children’s lives.

5. The Fractured Self

When the shared frameworks that once held identity in place erode, the self becomes increasingly fragile and internally conflicted. Without a stable narrative to live inside, modern individuals often experience themselves in fragments, being pulled between competing roles, values, and expectations. Enlightenment autonomy promised human freedom and prosperity, but it also left people responsible for holding themselves together in a world no longer offering a unifying center.

In my own life, the collapse of the outer story quickly turned inward. The energy that once drove me began to ebb away, leaving a quiet hollowness where confidence and clarity had been. And as that inner structure weakened, a restless search took hold, a need to find something capable of restoring depth and direction.

6. The Restless Search

Once the self loses its sense of cohesiveness, a new and distinctly modern restlessness begins to take shape. Without a shared story to inhabit or a trusted point of orientation to follow, we become wanderers, moving from idea to idea, system to system, practice to practice, hoping to recover and reclaim some sense of meaning or depth, beyond the reach of anything purely rational or self-constructed. The Enlightenment promised clarity through autonomy and individual freedom, but its unintended legacy is a perpetual searching, an ache that keeps us looking for something we can no longer name yet cannot live without.

I felt this restlessness take hold in me. After the collapse of what once anchored my life, I found myself searching for something that could ground me, like a floor under my feet to walk on. I moved through ideas, books, practices, and possibilities, hoping that one of them might rekindle the depth and purpose I had lost. But every path seemed unable to settle the ache inside me. What I was really searching for, though I didn’t have the words for it then, was a place to stand, something trustworthy enough to hold the weight of my life. Gradually, I realized my restlessness could not be resolved by adopting a new system or set of ideas, but by recovering a different way of being in the world altogether.

If the Enlightenment stripped away many of the old certainties, it also exposed a deeper truth: we cannot live well without some sense of meaning, connection, or orientation. The six fallout effects show how this loss continues to shape our inner and outer lives, often without our awareness. The question now is what might be recovered. In our next essay, we’ll examine some key responses to this fractured condition we find ourselves in today.

Unlike the little dog we can point to and shoo away, this gnawing feeling is difficult to name. Today, many of us feel a strange emptiness. Not because we’ve failed, but because we’ve lost access to a larger story that once gave meaning to our lives.

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor argues that for most of Western history, the world was viewed as a place where mysterious powers of cosmic origin intermingled with human life. Whether influenced by angels or demons, the stars and planets, or seasonal changes, human beings didn’t see themselves as walled off from outside forces, but rather, vulnerable to them.

These forces, at times incomprehensible, were always at work in the background of daily life. Nothing was viewed as random or empty of spirit. Cooperating with these invisible forces was necessary to ensure a prosperous and blessed life. According to Taylor, this was a time in Western history when not believing in God was nearly inconceivable. But not anymore.

Perhaps the gnawing at our souls comes from the modern tendency to reduce life to what can be measured and explained through the sciences of physics, biology, and chemistry. We’ve become ill-equipped to speak of mystery, meaning, and the sacred in a culture that no longer makes room for them.

It’s as if the predominant modern worldview has locked the sacred and mysterious into a closet and thrown away the key, insisting there’s nothing inside worth remembering.

Yet still, many people who identify as agnostic, atheist, or secular humanist speak ardently about the magnificence of our universe, the mystery of human consciousness, and our ethical responsibility to one another. But without a shared framework to hold them, it’s like trying to cobble together scattered stones without a blueprint to erect a cathedral, and not knowing what is meant to be inside.

What happens when we live for too long in a world that seems flat and without any mystery or sacredness? A world where the most important things are already figured out and self-assuredly explainable? A world where there are no surprises outside of our neatly constructed views on how the world works—and doesn’t. How might this affect our inner world, our ambitions, and our relationships?

In Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol, there’s a scene that depicts this tendency to rule out or deny the mysterious and the unknown.

Scrooge, an 18th-century, miserly businessman in London, is suddenly confronted alone at midnight on Christmas Eve by the ghostly appearance of his then seven-year-dead former business partner, Jacob Marley. Frightened and confused by this phenomenon, Scrooge is desperate to deny and explain away what is happening:

Ghost of Jacob: You don’t believe in me.

Scrooge: I don’t.

Ghost of Jacob: Why do you doubt your senses?

Scrooge: Because a little thing affects them — a slight disorder of the stomach. You… you might be an undigested piece of beef….

Unlike the earlier worldview in which the cosmos and human life were seen as deeply intertwined and penetrated by divine powers and spirits, the rise in modern science gave us a new understanding: we now inhabit a vast universe governed by impersonal laws that are measurable, explainable, and devoid of mystery. Any phenomenon viewed as out of the ordinary is promised to eventually be understood through the penetrating, trusted lens of the scientific method.

But what if the gnawing feeling we have isn’t something to be fixed?

What if it’s a call to remember something we’ve forgotten?

And what might that be?

Perhaps life once felt rooted in something larger than our personal goals, aspirations, and obligations. It belonged to a deeper story, a story that we still long to return to. A story in which our lives weren’t random happenstance or solely self-constructed, but woven into a larger tapestry of meaning.

A story that reaches back to what has been alive in us before we were self-aware, before we even understood human language.

Is there a shared presence we belong to?

The next time the barking chihuahua tries to chew on your heel, don’t just swat it away.

Ask it what it wants you to notice.

Has there ever been a time when you were walking down the street and suddenly realized your mobile phone was missing from the pants pocket where you usually keep it? This happens to me on occasion, and whenever it does, I’m always curious why it took me so long to recognize it was missing in the first place. We face a similar scenario when it comes to noticing what’s missing from the atmosphere of modern life.

Just like the phone missing from our pocket, some things can be missing from our lives long before we recognize their absence.

“Like what?” you might ask.

Here’s something we rarely pause to consider: in modern American culture, we no longer share a common story about who we are, why we are here, or what we belong to.

“What?” you might blurt out, in exasperation. “What are you talking about?”

An example from the evolution of the telephone in American life can help put this into perspective.

A child born in America in 2010 or later—today’s 14 or 15-year-old—has rarely seen a rotary or touch-tone phone outside of a museum, let alone used one. Yet these phones were an integral part of American household life from the early 1920s until around 2015. They are now largely forgotten, replaced by a new story, the mobile phone.

When these phones disappeared, a shared cultural experience in millions of American homes also vanished from view: reaching for the wall phone and lifting the receiver from its cradle, listening for a dial tone, tapping out a number on the touch-tone pad, or grabbing the phone extension cord and stretching it into the next room for privacy.

Every household shared this same experience. It was all part of the larger story of how we communicated and what it meant to be connected. As technology changed, the old story of how we communicated faded from view.

One day, we woke up to a new and different way of communicating and interacting at home and in public. Largely unnoticed, like when a sunset sky is bright red and yellow, and then, in the next moment, it has slipped below the horizon, a central piece of our common cultural ground slipped away.

Before we explore whether American culture once shared a common story that has now faded away and been replaced, let’s examine the current narrative circulating through the atmosphere of modern life, permeating our surroundings like an invisible weather pattern.

Imagine a landscape full of hundreds of “bubbles,” each containing a different person. Inside each bubble, the person’s environment consists of: headlines tailored to them, favorite social media feeds, personal goals, self-improvement plans, and anxieties.

Some bubbles are lightly bumping up against each other; others are drifting off into seeming nowhere. The spaces between the bubbles are fog-like, indicating the lack of a shared reality.

In today’s America, each person inhabits a personalized reality, shaped by algorithms, identity, preferences, and narrative. It’s a world of private worlds.

Our modern lives move like hundreds of self-contained bubbles, each one drifting through a shared forgetting of mystery, of sacred connection, and of a deeper story we once knew but no longer know how to name.

How did we arrive at this place?

If something here stirs you, don’t keep it to yourself! Leave a comment or reach out to me at: everydayspiritualhealth.com

Is it true that American culture produces too many people who live with chronic discontent and quiet, existential anxiety?

Ask a devout practicing Christian, Muslim, or Jew, and they will likely agree and claim it’s because we sin and have strayed from God and His commandments.

A seasoned meditator or Zen practitioner might say we’ve been distracted and cut off from the “stillness” inside that allows us to see the illusions built around who and what we think we are.

Self-proclaimed atheists might point to American consumer culture, hyper-individualism, and technological overstimulation, all part of a system never meant to make us whole in the first place.

This essay doesn’t pretend to supply a definitive answer. But it does offer something to reflect on.

What we might be longing for, beyond the noise of our hypercompetitive, consumer-driven, and overly stressful lives, is a return to something always with us from the beginning, beyond words and beyond description.

You don’t have to give it a name.

You don’t have to believe in it.

You don’t have to be for or against it.

Try this the next time you interact with someone: While they are speaking, quietly ask yourself:

What is it that has been alive in this person since the beginning, before they were self-aware, and before they could understand human language?

How about asking the same question of yourself?

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If something here stirs you, don’t keep it to yourself! Leave a comment or reach out to me at: everydayspiritualhealth.com

Sometimes what we hold onto isn’t the memory itself, but the wish that someone else had seen the story the way that we did. We keep returning to it over and over again because the story contains a detail we’ve been unable to notice and process.

It’s like the ambiguous black-and-white line drawing of the “young woman/old woman” reversible figure. At first glance, you see a young woman turning slightly away, her chin lifted, with hair flowing behind her. You make out the delicate jaw line, the small ear, the gentle curve of her neck. It appears to be a portrait of a beautiful young woman wearing a necklace.

Then, with a subtle shift in how you gaze at the picture, it completely changes. You suddenly realize the drawing contains two people. The ear becomes an old woman’s eye, the jawline becomes the long, curved nose, and the necklace turns into the old woman’s tight mouth. The lines haven’t changed at all. Only your interpretation has shifted.

I had a story like this, one that I carried alone for years. I didn’t realize I had been seeing only one version of the story. Each time the memory resurfaced, I interpreted it in the same way. Only much later did I realize a quiet truth had been hiding in front of me the entire time, waiting for me to shift how I was looking at it.

It isn’t easy to pinpoint how I came to experience this shift, but when it arrived, I felt a mixture of shock, sadness, embarrassment, and release. The story I’d been resisting for years suddenly rearranged itself, penetrating my soul like a truth I’d been resisting, yet sensing all along, unable to give a name to.

Once the deeper truth came into view, I realized the story I had been carrying was never the real problem. The problem was the part of me that had been waiting patiently for the truth to be acknowledged. That hidden piece shaped my feelings, my reactions, and even the way I remembered events. All it needed was my willingness to see it. Once I did, the old version of the story loosened its grip, as if it finally had permission to return to its proper place in the past.

Do you have a story like that, one that lived inside you longer than it needed to? If so, consider the possibility that the story you’ve been telling isn’t the whole story. If you can pause long enough to notice the hidden truth, it can have a way of softening everything—your memory, perspective, and the quiet weight you’ve been carrying all these years. That is when the story begins to let go of you, because you have finally learned what it came to teach, and you can repackage the story, storing it away on your renewed memory shelf.

In my case, I needed to acknowledge a truth I’d been resisting all along: the ending I’d been hoping for would never unfold the way I wanted.

Once I was able to turn the spotlight away from my own expectations and back toward what was actually in front of me, I could finally understand the truth of what stood there, waiting to be seen.

Some stories stay with us longer than they should. But if we can stay with them long enough for the hidden truth to reveal itself, the story eventually releases its hold. At that point, we can set it down with gratitude, knowing it is now complete.

If this essay sparked a question or stirred something in you, I’d love to hear it. Add your reflections below.

Hmm…. Act naturally, as a human being… What’s that all about?

In the natural world, whether animals, birds, or insects, we observe patterned behaviors that scientists call “instinct.” It is a scientist’s way to try to explain how these seemingly unlearned behaviors are possible.

Let’s take the case of spiders. Spider researchers know spiders get no instruction on how to make a spider web. For example, experiments have been done where researchers take spider eggs and raise the hatchlings in separate containers with no mother, no contact with other spiders, and in environments where they cannot see any webs.

In a matter of a few days or a week or more, these spiders build complex, intricate webs made of silk that are stronger than steel by weight, more elastic than rubber, and light enough to float on air currents.

Somehow, a “something” inside the spider, its “nature,” causes it to weave its web, often in the dark. Every spider will act and behave the same, according to its nature. This is why you will never see a spider bark like a dog.

But scientists don’t know what that “something” is comprised of, calling the spider’s behavior “instinctive.” So the instinctive idea acts like a placeholder, a way for scientists to say there’s something that guides this behavior, without having to say they don’t fully know what that is or how it works.

Neuroscientist Mark S. Blumberg examines this complex and unresolved problem in his 2017 article, Development Evolving: The Origins and Meanings of Instinct.

“Invoking instinct to explain behavior is a way of closing inquiry rather than opening it. It is an admission of ignorance dressed in the language of understanding.”

Blumberg says that the simplistic notion of instinct as a fixed, inborn, genetically pre-programmed behavior is inadequate and misleading. Instead, a richer, more interactive developmental process, built up over aeons, is unfolding as an organism grows within its species-typical environment. Even the most automatic actions may be the result of a long evolutionary process that expresses itself through the body, nervous system, and the environment, according to Blumberg.

But why is life built like this? Why would evolution spend millions of years to give that spider the ability to weave its web?

And what about human beings? What is our distinctive nature? Are you curious?

Let’s say you grew up on a remote farm with no mechanical machines and never saw or heard of a car. One morning, you wake up and walk outside of your farmhouse onto the front porch, where you see a strange metal creature, shiny, enclosed, and resting on four round black legs in the front yard. Would you be curious about what it is, how it got there, and how it works?

Have you ever wondered why human beings appeared on Earth and why we act the way we do? What is this human nature that has evolved over millions of years?

Clamoring with noisy self-assuredness, animal behaviorists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and psychologists try to tell us what our human nature is and how we acquired it. But no scientist, if honest, knows exactly how our human intelligence, awareness, morality, and social nature emerged from millions of years of evolutionary pressures.

The monotheistic faith traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam assert that the deeper aspects of our human nature are derived not from accident or evolution alone, but from a “meaningful source beyond ourselves.” But what is this source, and where is it located?

Cultural-philosophical traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism allow people to explore the nature of reality, suffering, consciousness, and human behavior, without a single creed or fixed set of beliefs, like in the Western religious sense.

Various African cultural traditions indicate that our human nature isn’t a fixed, programmed essence, but flows from the Creator through people, community, nature, and ancestors.

Perhaps the farm boy we spoke of a moment ago glanced at the car in his front yard, shrugged his shoulders, and moved on with his required daily tasks, starting with milking his herd of cows in the barn. The decision to examine or not the strange shiny object in his front yard is his to make, based on what he considers most important in life.

But you or I are not the farmboy. Something has appeared before us: the question of who we are and why we are the way we are.

If life has woven millions of years of developmental evolution to shape the patterns of all species, what has life been shaping in each of us that longs to be expressed, just as the spider cannot help but weave its web?

If this essay sparked a question or stirred something in you, I’d love to hear it. Add your reflections below.

In this hit song, Luther gave voice to a whole generation—the Baby Boomers—rebelling against moral certainty and established cultural norms. The song was less about the forbidden love between a married man and another woman and more about claiming the authority to feel, to rebel, and to challenge assumed social obligations.

That was fifty-three years ago. Fast forward to today, and we face a new kind of social contagion, not one of being liberated from inherited constraints, but of the need to be right: “Be on my side, I’ll be on your side. Be on their side, and you’ll never be on my side,” so claims the 2025 “outrage generation.”

It’s not about being kind and compassionate. No. It’s about being right, at any cost.

The Baby Boomers’ rebellious current of uncertainty and questioning spread through protest marches, music, fashion, and film. The polarization embodied in the outrage generation spreads through social media platforms and digital systems that feed their biases.

Social performance and public theater are automatically deemed acts of righteousness and moral virtue, without the need for self-reflection. I address this phenomenon in two essays posted on my everydayspiritualhealth.com website: “Social Media and Cotton Candy,” Parts I and II.

I’ve witnessed firsthand how this polarization plays out among friends and colleagues who take their religious faith seriously.

People who once prayed together, laughed together, and wept together now look upon one another as mortal enemies. Former friends no longer speak, or politely pretend all is okay. Others condemn those who refuse to “take a side,” equating neutrality with cowardice or betrayal of conviction. Even family members of the same faith for decades now point fingers at one another for “being on the wrong side.”

Whether it’s politics, religion, or golf, when the need to be right overrules the need to be kind and compassionate, we’ve lost sight of what it means to connect.

The Baby Boomers’ contagion was the call to unrestrained freedom. The outrage generation might well be suffering from the fever of certainty, what one former Catholic teacher at seminary used to call “the church’s lust for certitude.”

When will we be able to grow beyond our own limited circle of certainty?

This pattern occurs over and over again in the stories we tell ourselves. In George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner, Silas comes to believe the only thing he can trust in life is his hoard of gold coins. Similarly, we can be tempted to idolize the smaller part of ourselves, the part that desires to stay independent and self-contained, cautious about committing to anything beyond our well-placed plans for success and security. The tension only increases when the question of religious commitment, belonging, and spiritual devotion enters the picture.

Between the 1970s anti-cult messaging and today’s self-help industry, we learned to treat serious commitment to anything outside our immediate ambitions as something to avoid if we want to stay “whole.” Commitment came to feel like captivity. Yet, in playing it safe with our souls, we may have lost, or maybe forgotten, a depth of meaning that makes life feel fully alive.

I know this tension from the inside. When I was young, I gave myself completely to something I still can’t quite name, a current of faith and belonging that outsiders tried to define, but never fully understood. To me, it was a community, a shared search for God, purpose, and belonging. It shaped the trajectory of my twenties and thirties, and it shaped me.

There were lessons I had to unlearn later, but what I carried away wasn’t just disillusionment or bitterness. I held a memory of what it felt like to live with that much meaning, to wake up every morning believing my life was part of something larger than my own comfort or personal ambition.

When I hear people say that seriously committing to any form of religion or devotional spiritual path is suited to people who “can’t make it on their own,” I think of someone who tunes a musical instrument but never plays the song. Many of us weren’t trying to escape responsibility or let someone else run our lives; we were trying to find a reason big enough to take on responsibility, not run from it.

In desiring to protect ourselves from any perceived dangers of devotion, we’ve made devotion itself taboo. But what if commitment to something larger than your own preferences and inclinations isn’t the enemy of independence, but its foundation?

The anti-cult panic of the 1970s quietly reshaped our collective imagination. In fear of losing our freedom to a charismatic leader’s manipulation, we transformed that fear into a deeper suspicion, not only of authority, but of devotion itself. Now, any language that sounds like self-surrender, implicit trust, or spiritual obedience triggers a gag reflex in our culture; if commitment requires a cost beyond what we’ve planned for, it must be dangerous.

We like to celebrate autonomy, self-actualization, and endless choice. Sociologists call this expressive individualism. Philosophers like Charles Taylor go further, describing the modern world as an “immanent frame” — a world that runs smoothly without any reference to anything beyond the self and everyday human interactions. Here, all meaning-making is self-manufactured rather than “received from above.” There is no above; only what comes into view within the boundaries of our carefully drawn horizon.

This self-manufactured life results in a peculiar kind of existential fatigue, like a low-grade toothache that sometimes flares up, then recedes from our awareness for a while, only to reappear and remind us that something is out of alignment.

We feel strangely restless in our quiet moments, in the way even success or victory can feel hollow. We are masters of our own fate, but have forgotten the experience of awe.

Commitment, rightly understood, is not captivity; it’s the structure that allows meaning to deepen. It’s the hand reaching beyond the finger, the part of us that remembers how to belong, to serve, to be changed by something greater than our own self-design.

When we risk devotion, we rediscover a dimension of life that the modern unconsciously longs for: the joy of being held by what is worthy of our trust.

Agh… and what might that be that is worthy of our trust?

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If something here stirs you, don’t keep it to yourself! Leave a comment or reach out to me at: everydayspiritualhealth.com

I’d love to hear what’s moving through you.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz addresses this phenomenon in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (2004). The book explores the psychological costs of consumer abundance in Western societies. While some choice selection is beneficial, Schwartz notes that too many choices can lead to confusion, decision paralysis, ambivalence, and dissatisfaction.

Schwartz’s book came to mind recently when I visited the website of One Commune, a teacher-driven platform for societal and personal well-being. The platform bundles more than 160 on-demand courses, thousands of short practices, and a wide range of videos and podcasts covering yoga, meditation, breathwork, goal-setting, nutrition, functional medicine, spirituality, and environmental regeneration. Its library features an impressive array of well-known popular teachers and subject expert influencers.

In the era of ramped-up wellness capitalism and spiritual branding, One Commune represents a pinnacle of high-production value, vast choice, charismatic teachers, and light community gatherings. It’s well worth checking out, but it’s not without its inherent contradictions that one needs to be aware of.

Today’s wellness landscape can feel like standing in front of that same toothpaste aisle displaying that endless array of brightly packed tubes that promise whiter teeth, fresher breath, and stronger, healthier gums. One Commune is like the deluxe endcap display in the drugstore: beautifully designed, expertly marketed, and genuinely effective, in doses.

But no matter how dazzling the options, you still have to pick one, apply it daily with focused attention, or nothing changes.

That’s where the rubber meets the road.

Years ago, when I studied the practice of Falun Dafa, we were encouraged to dedicate ourselves solely to its teachings and not be distracted by jumping among other spiritual systems and wellness modalities. This single-minded orientation reveals something often overlooked in today’s smorgasbord of wellness options: true inner transformation requires going deep, not only wide. This single-focused concentration remains one of the greatest challenges facing individuals who genuinely want to make progress on the inner path.

Picking up a little of this and dabbling in a little bit of that can bring on a feeling of immediate gains and initial rapid progress. Yet, from among the 160-plus offerings on One Commune, each one requires years — maybe even a lifetime of dedicated, committed practice for permanent changes to be experienced.

You might feel excited to sample as much as you possibly can from the overflowing palette of wellness programs, like someone participating in a high-end wine tasting, sniffing and sipping each option with gusto and increasing light-headed exhilaration. However, without staying true to any one wellness offering long enough to absorb its deepest texture, taste, and color, your experience can become more about variety and novelty than transformation.

Paradoxically, less might be more when it comes to nurturing one’s spiritual health.

The choice is yours. Choose wisely.

At everydayspiritualhealth.com, we’re not trying to compete with the volume of what’s out there in the wellness sphere. We help people to integrate what they already know, what they’ve always carried within, and to cultivate presence as a daily practice.

In a world bursting at the seams with content, we are here to remind you that spiritual health doesn’t emerge by adding more, but from learning to live fully what’s already alive in you, the quiet within that’s always been there.

If something here stirs you, don’t keep it to yourself! Leave a comment or reach out to me at: everydayspiritualhealth.com,

I’d love to hear what’s moving through you.

Empirical studies demonstrate that most people dream regularly, but only a small number of individuals pay attention to their dreams. Those who do pay attention usually do not try to interpret them or record them for insight or future reference.

Before we go further, we need to understand why, in our culture, most people don’t consider their dreams a significant part of their lives.

One reason many Americans overlook their dreams is cultural conditioning. In a society that prizes productivity, logic, results, and measurable output, dreams often seem too vague or impractical to be worth our time. After all, if success means mastering a craft, making an impact, or “getting ahead,” then ambiguity and inner wandering don’t cut it. Another issue is our society’s obsession with the scientific method as the primary way to determine what is true or real.

The scientific method is built around forming hypotheses, testing them through controlled observations, and drawing conclusions from repeatable, measurable results. By design, this method struggles to account for deeply personal or subjective experiences produced by the dream process. As a result, many adopt the mindset: “If you can’t measure it or quantify it, it doesn’t exist.”

There’s also a built-in cultural bias toward the purpose of why we sleep. It’s viewed as a biological necessity, as the way to recharge the tired physical body and allow the physical brain to unwind from the busyness of a demanding workday. Sleep is seen as a means to an end, namely, that of supporting productivity and output during one’s waking hours. This is a utilitarian view of the sleep process that excludes dreams from having any meaningful value in one’s life.

This approach to sleep is like viewing one’s physical body, including its shape, size, and skin color, and assuming that’s all there is to a human being. It’s like judging a car by its paint job, without ever looking under the hood to see what makes it run.

In recent decades, dream science has revealed a great deal about what happens in the brain during sleep. Working with the most advanced tools available, scientists still cannot explain how we experience space, time, color, sound, emotion, and even unexpected insights while dreaming.

If you believe only physical matter is real and everything is explainable by physical processes, don’t worry, I’m not here to argue with you. You’re welcome to read this essay and take from it whatever you like. Or, if it strikes you as nothing more than a fart in the wind, that’s fine too. I’ll happily refund the money you didn’t pay to read it.

In all seriousness, is it possible our waking reality is only one slice of something broader and deeper we’ve not considered up until now? If so, what can one do to begin a process related to one’s dream world?

One can begin with a broad review of the literature on this subject, and also investigate individual anecdotal stories related to dreaming and its impact on one’s life. In one of my early essays on Substack, I share a significant dream I experienced about my favorite uncle, who unexpectedly passed away from brain cancer when I was in high school.

In the dream, I’m walking down a long, dimly lit hallway in an old office building. About one hundred feet in front of me, I see the outline of someone standing in an office doorway. As I draw nearer, I realize it’s a man dressed in a white T-shirt and baggy blue jeans. I suddenly recall this is how my dead uncle used to dress all the time. Getting closer, I can see that the man is indeed my dead uncle! I’m confused and startled.

Suddenly, our eyes lock. In silence, we stand there, staring at one another. I’m drawn to the contours of his mouth. His lips appear to be pressed firmly together, and I get the feeling he is struggling mightily to say something to me, but he can’t open his mouth. What are you trying to tell me, Uncle? I hear myself cry out in my mind. The dream ends there. This dream had a profound impact on the trajectory of my life, from this moment forward. You can learn more details by clicking HERE to read the full essay.

Numerous books have been published on dreams, dreaming, and how to experience a dream life, from both secular and sacred perspectives. Matthew Walker’s 2017 book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, is a neuroscientific, evidence-based account of sleep. The 2024 book, Dreamwise: Unlocking the Meaning of Your Dreams, authored by three Jungian analysts, looks at the dream world through the lens of inner exploration, personal growth, and symbolic meaning.

If there is something to the idea of a dream world that wants to interact with us, making an effort to understand this dimension of our life might lead to unexpected or surprising outcomes.

💬 Have You Had a Dream That Won’t Let You Go?

We’d love to hear about it.

• Share your dream in the Comment Section below.

• Or, if it feels personal, message Jack privately through the One-on-One Conversations portal at everydayspiritualhealth.com

To get started immediately, here’s a simple guide to help you.

1. INTENTION: Create a specific intention for this practice that you can refer to often, like: I intend to consciously enter the dreamworld with openness, humility, and readiness to receive what the deeper wisdom of life is offering.

2. SHIFT TO RELAX MODE: Give yourself a few minutes to slow down. Put away your phone. Use silence or soft music to help make the shift.

3. GROUNDING ACTIVITY: Use a grounding activity such as washing your face and hands, or gently breathing, and repeat: I cleanse the day from me. I release all I carry that is not mine to bear.

4. PHYSICAL RELEASE: Lightly stretch or breathe deeply into your belly and repeat: I soften into rest. My body is no longer needed for striving.

5. Write down a grounding ritual phrase you can slowly repeat to yourself. Here’s an example: I now cross the threshold from waking to dreaming, leaving behind the noise, the effort, the burdens of daylight. Tonight I enter the dreamworld with reverence, asking nothing but to be shown what wants to speak. I offer my sleeping self to the greater wisdom of life.

6. Here’s an Amazon link to look at a DREAM REMEMBRANCE JOURNAL. You will need a way to record your dream impressions, and this kind of journal helps by providing specific prompts you can use. Keep the journal nearby, or use your phone for a digital voice recording you can later transcribe, if you like.

Start tonight. If nothing comes through, no worries. You can record this fact and consider it part of the process.

What if your dreams aren’t just random noise or misfiring neurons, but instead, messages from a deeper part of you, or from something greater than you?

You don’t need to solve the mystery of your dreamworld all at once. Just begin by paying attention. Keep a journal, notice patterns, or lie down at night with a little more wonder before you lazily drift off to sleep.

You might be surprised at what you encounter while you sleep.

Good luck, and I’d love to hear about any progress you make.

What we face on these platforms is a legitimacy crisis, similar to the one Dorothy faced in the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, when her tiny dog, Toto, pulls back the curtain concealing a man pulling levers on a machine next to the distorted, fiery image of a larger than life human face towering above them, projecting the booming voice of a supposed great and powerful wizard.

Dorothy and her companions were shocked and angry at the man for creating this mechanical illusion and giving them false hope in a powerful wizard they believed could grant their wishes and make their dreams come true. They immediately demanded that he deliver on his promise to help them realize their dreams. Their journey ends with a lesson worth revisiting in the original movie.

The action of Dorothy’s dog, Toto, who, by pulling back the curtain to reveal a little man running a machine that projected the illusory image of a powerful wizard, woke up Dorothy and her companions to the false reality they’d all been unknowingly believing in.

We also need to pull back the curtain of fluff, foil wrappers, and hollow performance expertise flashing across the screens of social media platforms and smartphones. We need to tip the scales away from the illusory nature of these social media “wizards” and smartphone apps, which project authority, expertise, and mastery, but often deliver only shiny tin foil wrappers that lack substance and fail to nourish the soul, like a deeply satisfying and nourishing meal does.

Like Todo pulling back the curtain, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, is concerned about how these platforms and smartphones negatively impact one’s mental, emotional, and psychological health. In his 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, he points out numerous debilitating consequences connected to these platforms and constant smartphone scrolling, especially among teenage girls: anxiety, depression, self-harm, sleep deprivation, scattered attention, social comparison, status anxiety, isolation, loneliness, and suicidal ideation, to name a few.

Haidt offers some practical suggestions to offset these debilitating consequences, such as: no smartphones for kids until age 14; no social media access until age 16; phone-free schools; device-free zones and times at home; and public policy regulation of platforms’ influence with parental controls, among others.

His proposals highlight the need for both structural and behavioral shifts to offset the unfavorable effects of these platforms and the ever-increasing, almost cyborg-like effect of smartphone scrolling on the general public. However, we also need to refine our principles of discernment, which help us distinguish between flashy performance and nourishing wisdom in our daily lives.

For starters, let’s examine the following axioms:

• Whenever an individual speaks in absolute terms on any subject or proposed solution to a social problem, consider this behavior a red flag.

• The most credible voices use caution, not overstated certainty.

• Genuine wisdom makes way for uncertainty, mystery, nuance, and the capacity to have one’s mind changed—especially when strong disagreements rule the day.

• Certainty without humility is always the mark of a performer rather than a practitioner.

• Genuine discourse aims for clarity and understanding, not winning or being right.

• You can discern the meal from the wrapper if you learn to look past the foil wrap and ask what truly nourishes.

These six axioms speak to a path of discernment in a screen culture dazzled by spectacle and performance expertise. They turn our attention to the red flags of absolutism and showmanship, directing us toward the quiet inner authority of humility and nuance, reminding us that genuine discourse seeks understanding, not conquest.

Ultimately, these principles call us to train our eyes and hearts to look past the shiny wrappers of performance and spectacle and reach for the meal that truly nourishes, the meal of grounded presence wrapped in a sauce of humility and patience.

Each of us must decide what kind of food we want to consume. We can reach for the hollow, empty calories of cotton candy that quickly dissolves in the mouth, leaving us with a craving for more, or turn toward the deeper meal of grounded presence and integrity that, in the long run, satisfies our deepest hungers.

In the end, it’s personal, but it’s also shared. Together we can tilt the balance back toward substance, grounded presence, and integrity.

The invitation is simple: take it from here, and consider how you can be part of the solution, rather than the problem.

Everyday Spiritual Health grows through conversation. What insight or question did this essay stir in you? Share your voice below.

A few years ago, when I was trying to figure out how to be a better singer, my sister recommended a book to read. I was shocked to learn that in some training systems for opera singers, individuals were not allowed to sing any part of a song for four years—only voice training and practice exercises! Imagine the discipline, patience, and humility that it requires!

If you aren’t well-grounded in knowledge, wisdom, and experience on a given subject, but you think you are because you can broadcast your face to millions of people, this is a recipe for a poorly cooked meal that will surely cause your palate and stomach to protest louder than a smoke alarm in the middle of the night.

Author Robert Greene, in his book Mastery (2012), warns of the dangers inherent in walking a path littered with glittering performance-based expertise without being undergirded by apprenticeship, mentorship, and humility. He writes:

“The very desire to find shortcuts makes you eminently unsuited for any kind of mastery.” (Mastery, Chapter 2, p. 113)

Social media, by contrast, allows unqualified, ill-prepared individuals to shorten the required time and circumvent the slow process required for mastery. These platforms reward visibility over depth, novelty over substance, and confidence over competence. (Follower counts and clicks, anyone?) Popularity is more highly regarded than grounded authority.

Is it any surprise we are awash with echoes that sound loud but carry no depth? You need not look too far back on YouTube to see what happens when visibility outpaces depth, integrity, and grounded presence; ImJayStation, Austin Jones, Ruby Franke, Etika, and Big Li, to name a few.

Watching someone’s meteoric rise to becoming a star on these platforms is akin to what happens when you chomp down on the visually alluring promise of cotton candy—it’s big and fluffy, and smells good, but after you take a bite and chew for a bit, you get the uncomfortable feeling you've just been had!

Perhaps we are facing an epidemic of shallowness, sparks, and glitter that bombards our sensibilities, tempting us to choose the allure of cotton candy superficiality over the steady diet of bread grounded in presence, masterliness, and integrity.

In Part II of this essay, we’ll explore ways to counterbalance the social media scales of superficiality and commercialized performance, which right now tip the balance away from true weight as though we’ve been piling feathers on one side of the scale while ignoring the gold on the other.

I’d love to hear how this resonates with you. Feel free to share your thoughts or add your voice to the conversation below.

To satisfy one’s spiritual hunger, advocates of this DIY approach draw from a seemingly endless well of non-traditional wisdom paths: mind-altering drugs, meditation, somatic modalities, coaching, therapy, psychology, music, and self-help.

Does the DIY spiritual model support a spiritually rich life and society more effectively than the once widely accepted cradle-to-grave religious models, despite their inherent flaws?

The strength of the spiritual freelancer model is its access to freedom and flexibility in the pursuit of truth and self-understanding. There is no requirement to adopt a particular belief system or truth claim.

One need not pledge commitment to a particular group or submit to a prescribed approach to how one should live, think, feel, and behave—one hallmark of the three monotheistic religions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. There’s no existential concern about the meaning of death or where one might or might not end up once separated from their mortal coil.

Without the pressure to conform to a given authority figure, sacred text, or proscribed set of behaviors, it’s easier for the spiritual freelancer to explore alternative points of view and integrate them into one’s idea of life fulfillment.

Freelancer spirituality allows a lot of room for personal healing, transformation, and honest self-expression, but can easily slide into loneliness, disconnection, and spiritual disorientation.

The promise of personal autonomy can feel intoxicating and empowering. No creeds to conform to, no beliefs to proclaim, no hierarchy to report to, and no rigid dogma to swallow. (I ain’t got to be under nobody’s thumb—nohow!) Still, the DIY model reveals a spiritual fragility susceptible to serious challenges.

Imagine lighting a candle in a house with no walls. The flame burns brightly. It is real and heartfelt. But seeping in like rainwater through cracked roof tiles, the winds of doubt, grief, exhaustion, and distraction begin to blow through on all sides.

With no protective communal shelter, no shared mutual practices, common language, or sacred container, the flame flickers, hovering between being completely smothered and desperately fighting to stay upright.

The spiritual freelancer must create, sustain, initiate, and do everything on their own. Over time, the initial warmth of the candle becomes harder to maintain. There’s no built-in cycle to return to when you are grieving, tired, distracted, or spiritually dry. This can lead to burnout, inconsistency, and a nagging sense of drifting, unanchored, like that candle in a house with no walls. It can be like navigating with a map that has no clear paths to follow.

But is it any better within the walls of established religious communities and traditions? What is their strength?

Unlike the spiritual freelancers, the walls of religious traditions maintain stability and continuity through shared community and recurring spiritual patterns, which help support people through life’s inevitable ups and downs. You’re not alone in your hardship or glory, grief or joy—in the loftiest sense of religious life.

Ironically, the walls of religious communities can also be fertile ground for disconnection, loneliness, and spiritual disorientation.

For the first half of my adult life, I was immersed in a faith tradition that spoke with certainty about who God is, what God wants, and how we are to live. It was a faith loaded with words, imagination, and intensity.

For a time, this faith tradition provided me with a deep sense of purpose, intentional community, and clear direction. In fact, I met my future wife in this religious community, which was a totally unexpected happening, especially since I’d given up all hope of ever finding someone who would want to spend the rest of their life with me.

But this community also required me to stay in a space that gradually could no longer hold the fullness of my evolving experience. I began to sense that all religious teachings and claims about truth, God, and how the world works are simply a story—nothing more, and nothing less. One experience in particular led me to this realization.

When the news broke in our community that a highly respected and admired married couple with several young children was getting a divorce due to infidelity, I was shocked. The husband, in a high leadership role in the community, constantly talked about the need for us to have strong marriages and raise faithful and honorable children. How could this happen? I asked myself.

This man seemed to me to be saying and doing all the right things in his life. As it turns out, he wasn’t doing as he was saying. This one incident alone clearly helped me see that no matter what one purports to believe in or claim as the truth, such claims and beliefs cannot take the place of one’s lived experience. What one does and how one acts is more powerful than any exclusivist claim to truth or teaching on the right way to live or what to believe.

Eventually, I needed to move beyond it. Not because I lost faith, but because I discovered that faith is more vast than any single story, tradition, truth claim, revered figure, sacred book, belief system, spiritual experience, or institution.

I don’t regret those years. They formed me. They showed me the hunger people have for belonging, meaning, and transcendence, and I’ve integrated those years into my journey. So, I am aware of the value of traditional religions and the benefits they offer.

Spiritual freelancers who’ve yet to be deeply involved with a traditional religious path cannot possibly know what they have to offer, beyond a surface-level understanding.

Before I committed to a dedicated religious path, I considered myself a seeker for truth and understanding. Raised in the Catholic Church faith, my folks had designs for me to one day become a priest. But when I hit middle school, sports and girls became my religion. By the time I graduated from high school, I’d all but given up on organized religion, without ever having immersed myself in its teachings or practices beyond sixth grade. You can learn more about those years by reading my first published essay on Substack

Paradoxically, after I moved beyond the confines of the religious path I’d been dedicated to for decades, I once again found myself walking the path of a spiritual freelancer. So, I know this path too—what it has to offer, and what its limits are.

As a now-again spiritual freelancer, I dabbled here and there for spiritual nourishment and growth. Yoga, meditation, spiritual books, seminars, and constant study and learning on a variety of subjects occupied my mind and heart.

At times, it was hard to keep momentum, to keep up with the new rituals and practices I adopted into my life. In my former faith community, I had lots of like-minded people around me to help reinforce the same rituals and practices. Doing it on my own proved far more taxing and difficult than I’d expected.

So, where do we go from here, in the uncertain space between the old spiritual maps of religion and the new, unmapped terrain spiritual freelancers are carving out?

For many, this moment is marked by both opportunity and ache. We’re freer than ever to seek, mix, question, and redefine what a meaningful life looks like, but many are quietly suffering under the weight of too much freedom, too little structure, and no overarching philosophy of life to help bind them together with something beyond the self.

People long for connection but lack a consistent, shared rhythm. They seek transformation but find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options—like going to your neighborhood drugstore for toothpaste and staring blankly at the shelf with forty-five different kinds of toothpaste to choose from! They want to go deeper but don’t know where to start or how to return when they’ve lost their way.

We don’t need to retreat into rigid belief systems, unless we want to, nor do we need to wander alone, on a hit or miss path marked by stutters, stops, sudden changes, and potholes.

What we need now is something rooted but open, trustworthy but not controlling, a spiritual language and set of practices that help us navigate meaningfully through the shifting terrain of modern life.

This essay is the beginning of a larger unfolding, both in my own life and in something I’ve been quietly building. It’s a project called Everyday Spiritual Health. It’s a space where I bring together years of reflection, practice, questions, and resources for those who still long for depth and presence in their life.

If what you’ve read here resonates, you’re invited to explore more, stay connected, and if it feels right, support the work at everydayspiritualhealth.com. It’s early, it’s honest, and it’s being built in real time, with care and an open heart.