It was a long, thoughtful response to an essay I published on June 19, 2026.

The essay my friend responded to begins with the story of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer sent in 1944 to Lubang Island in the Philippines with orders to destroy the airfield, harass the population, and never surrender.

Living deep in the jungle, Onoda was unaware that Japan had officially surrendered to the Allied Powers in September 1945.

For the next 29 years, he and a small group of men held out on the island, convinced the war was still going on.

In October 1945, American aircraft dropped leaflets over the island, announcing Japan’s defeat and surrender, urging combatants to come out of hiding and prepare to return to Japan.

When Onoda and the men with him examined the dropped leaflets, and later the Japanese newspapers, letters, and photographs left by search parties—all announcing that the war had ended, and pleading for them to come out of hiding—they concluded it was fake, enemy propaganda.

In Onoda’s world, the only thing that could end the war was his commanding officer’s direct order, not the world’s evidence that the war had already ended.

Any evidence against his perceived reality was reinterpreted as deception, and the structure of his world remained untouched.

One of the most striking reinterpretations of disconfirming evidence Onoda made concerned Japanese newspapers left on the island, which clearly showed post-surrender life in Japan.

Instead of seriously considering the possibility that the war was over, Onoda saw these newspapers as proof that the war against America was still going on.

In Onoda’s mind, if Japan had truly been defeated, no Japanese citizen would be alive, because he believed every Japanese citizen would fight to the death before ever surrendering to the Americans.

The newspapers, Onoda reasoned, far from proving the war had ended, proved it had not ended. They showed Japanese civilians living normal lives, which, in his logic, would be impossible if Japan had truly lost.

Evidence that clearly demonstrated the war was over was recast by his self-sealing logic as convincing proof that he must carry on fighting the enemy.

I saw the same kind of self-sealing logic at work in my friend’s responses.

Over several days of email exchanges about the essay, an unsettling, almost Twilight Zone–like feeling came over me.

At first, I called it disorientation, but that word does not aptly capture what I experienced.

Disorientation suggests confusion, a temporary loss of bearings.

What I felt, as the messages accumulated, was a shifting mix of sadness, rage, exasperation, bewilderment, and, by the end, a quiet hopelessness.

Beneath all of it was a single, persistent question I asked: When does accumulating disconfirming evidence make it necessary to critique or re-examine a framework?

I’m writing from inside a tradition that understands itself as carrying a divine mandate, with a clear structure of authority, calling, and assignment.

I have seen, first-hand, how this framework allowed for abuse, neglect, and tragic circumstances to play out in the lives of faithful, devoted people.

When I suggested that potential disconfirming evidence against a framework might require the framework to be questioned, my friend’s response was not to examine the framework, but to reinterpret any so-called disconfirming evidence.

In his view, the framework remains pure.

Any failure is the individual’s failure to stay properly aligned with it, for whatever reason.

The framework cannot be blamed for what happens to individuals within it.

Instead, it must be upheld as the standard by which individuals within it are judged.

That move is what made our exchange feel so uncanny.

I was bringing concrete pain, lived experience, and observable harm with my question.

He was offering a self-sealing logic that turned those very facts into proof of personal misalignment.

At first, the sadness surprised me.

I had expected disagreement, maybe even debate.

What I didn’t expect was how quickly our exchange became a place where lived harm was translated, almost gently, into a lesson about personal responsibility and alignment.

I thought of all the faithful, devoted individuals doing everything asked of them, whose suffering gets reinterpreted this way.

The sadness wasn’t just for them.

It was for the realization that someone I cared about could hold this logic so firmly.

With each message, the same logic returned: the framework remains pure. It is the individuals within it who are found wanting.

Something in my gut tightened when I realized what my friend was alluding to here.

It wasn’t just intellectual disagreement.

It felt like a betrayal of the very people the framework claims to serve.

There were moments I wanted to grab hold of him, shake him, plead with him, just as the search parties and dropped leaflets pleaded with Onoda to come out of the jungle, give up, and acknowledge that the war was over.

But every plea I made to my friend got absorbed into the same logic.

In his world, my leaflets of possible disconfirming evidence were not evidence at all. They were temptations to be rejected.

I would ask, “When does the pattern itself become evidence?”

He would answer, “The pattern is always a collection of individual stories.”

I would press, “What if the individuals are faithful, devoted, doing everything asked of them?”

He would return, “Then the issue must be alignment.”

The loop closed neatly every time.

Exasperation set in.

I was playing chess while he was quietly playing checkers and insisting I was breaking the rules.

There were moments I read his messages and had to pause, not because they were unclear, but because they were too clear.

They made perfect sense inside a world I no longer recognized as my own.

We were speaking the same language about framework, evidence, and responsibility, but the grammar had changed.

I was using those terms to ask when a framework might need to be questioned.

He was using the same terms to explain why that question, properly understood, cannot and does not need to be asked.

The bewilderment was not about his clarity.

It was about the realization that we were living in different realities, built from the same words.

There was one crucial difference between his world and Onoda’s.

Onoda’s conviction, however rigid, was a belief about the world, a claim that could, in principle, be proved false.

That is why it could end.

When his commanding officer arrived in 1974 with the standing to declare the war over, Onoda could finally give up the fight and return to Japan. He was finally able to let the evidence in, evidence that had accumulated over decades, but which his self-sealing logic had refused to let in.

My friend’s posture cannot be approached the same way.

There is no commanding officer who can arrive to confirm any disconfirming evidence, because the vow he has taken is self-authored, self-enforced, and self-sealing.

Any “commanding officer” who showed up with contrary evidence would, by his own logic, be just another biased observer, another individual whose testimony is tainted by misalignment.

By the time of our final exchange, the rage had burned down.

What remained was a quiet hopelessness.

Not about my friend, not about our relationship, but about the possibility of this conversation ever reaching a different place.

The framework he described was built to withstand exactly what I was bringing to it.

Onoda at least had a commanding officer who could arrive and end the war.

My friend had no such off-ramp.

The vow he had taken offered no end date.

And to make it even harder, this was someone I had called a friend for years.

We had developed and nurtured a relationship in which I felt safe enough to share my doubts, my questions, the experiences that didn’t fit the story I’d been given, the story I’d lived in for decades.

Over the years, whenever I shared with my friend about my doubts and the things that didn’t fit the story I’d been given about the framework, I now realize he rarely directly replied or tried to argue with me.

He often remained politely silent.

I told myself this was openness, a kind of generous space for my uncertainty.

What I didn’t realize was that the silence wasn’t neutrality.

It was the quiet carrying of a framework that, when finally voiced, reclassified everything I’d shared as personal failure, for whatever reasons or excuses I might offer, to remain aligned.

The silence, I came to see, was not a space for my doubts.

It was a holding pattern for a logic that, once spoken, left no room for them.

That realization added a new edge to everything.

Sadness, yes, but also a sharp sense of betrayal.

Not because he disagreed with me, but because the terms of our friendship, as I understood them, were not the terms he was operating under.

My vulnerability was being quietly reclassified as misalignment, a failure to stay aligned with the framework.

I’m not trying, in the end, to prove who is right or wrong here.

What I care about is identifying the pattern and its consequences.

What it does to people, to relationships, to the possibility of truth-telling inside a community that claims to value it.

Here is the core of my friend’s logic, as I see it, stated plainly:

Individuals within the framework will never uncover objective evidence against the framework, because such so-called evidence will always be tainted and biased by the observer, whatever their reason or motive, and thus cannot be trusted.

It always comes down to misalignment with the framework.

The people are the ones who, unfortunately, fail to adhere to it.

That is the self-sealing move.

Evidence is not weighed.

It is automatically disqualified by definition.

The observer in possession of what is claimed as disconfirming evidence is always suspect.

It cannot be any other way.

The framework is always innocent.

I still don’t have a clean answer to the question I started with: When does accumulated disconfirming evidence make it necessary to critique or re-examine a framework itself?

What I do know is what it felt like to live inside that question for several days with someone I care about.

I know the sadness of seeing harm reinterpreted as failure.

The anger of watching a system protect itself by placing all the blame on individuals.

The exasperation of circling the same logic with no exit.

The bewilderment of sharing a language but not a world.

And the hopelessness of realizing that, for my friend, the framework is not something that can be questioned from the inside.

That realization does not end the question.

It only makes it more urgent.

Because the danger is not just in holding a self-sealing view.

It is in inhabiting a system that reflexively reinterprets all disconfirming evidence, folds it over into something it is not, and calls that faithfulness.

On the last day of our email exchange, I told him I was planning to use this experience as the basis for my next essay.

He acknowledged that.

And that’s where it stands.

If he believes I’ve misrepresented what passed between us, he’s welcome to respond in the Substack comments or with me, personally.

Perhaps you have sometimes wondered how such a thing is possible. I have asked myself the same question in relation to my own life.

Before looking more closely at my own situation, let us examine the case of Japanese World War II soldier Hiroo Onoda, which may help us understand a persistent human tendency: the refusal, sometimes for years, to let contrary evidence reshape our prevailing view of reality.

Onoda was not a typical Japanese soldier. Before being sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines in December 1944, he trained as an intelligence officer at an elite military school specializing in guerrilla warfare and counterintelligence.

His orders were to destroy the airfield and pier there and harass the enemy. His commanding officer told him never to surrender and not to commit suicide, even if it meant being captured by the enemy. He was promised that, whatever happened, the Japanese military would one day return to retrieve him.

Onoda carried these orders and promises with him long after World War II ended.

He first heard news about Japan’s defeat and the end of the war a few months after the formal signing of Japan’s surrender.

A campaign of dropping leaflets throughout the island had started, declaring the news of Japan’s defeat and surrender, but when Onoda and the other men with him examined them, they concluded that they were fake, enemy propaganda.

Over the next twenty-nine years, each time more convincing evidence was presented that the war was over and he could safely come out of hiding, he continued to disbelieve it, finding new ways to dismiss it.

In Onoda’s imagined world, the newspapers dropped on the island showing daily life in Japan did not convince him that the war was over. Instead, they confirmed that the war was still going on.

If Japan had really lost the war, he reasoned, there should not have been any life in Japan. Everybody should have been dead, because he believed every Japanese citizen would fight to the death and never surrender to America.

Onoda believed that his country, and by extension himself, had been assigned the task of creating what was, at the time, referred to as the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere,” Japan’s wartime vision of a Japan-led Asian bloc presented as liberation from Western colonialism.

Only after his former commanding officer came to the island in March 1974 and declared that the war was over and Japan had lost, could Onoda allow the evidence before him for years to penetrate his imagination and overturn his deeply held convictions.

At the end of his memoir, No Surrender: My Thirty-Year War, Onoda describes the scene of his departure from Lubang by helicopter the day after his surrender. In a moment of reflection as he looked down at the island where he had spent the last thirty years of his life, he wondered, “Why had I fought here for thirty years? Who had I been fighting for? What was the cause?”

Earlier in the memoir, he seems to hint at possible inner turmoil when he recalls looking out of his hotel window after returning to Tokyo:

“When finally I did see those thousands of cars in Tokyo, moving along the streets and the elevated expressways without a sign of war anywhere, I cursed myself. For thirty years on Lubang I had polished my rifle every day. For what? For thirty years I had thought I was doing something for my country, but now it looked as though I had just caused a lot of people a lot of trouble.”

Because the memoir ends with his 1974 return to Tokyo from Lubang, we cannot know for sure what internal changes he experienced after his surrender.

We do know that he eventually moved to Brazil, where he worked on a cattle ranch. Then, in 1984, at the age of sixty-two, he returned to Japan to work with young people through the Onoda Nature School.

He may have gradually constructed a new world of meaning and orientation, or he may have carried his old orientation forward into new circumstances without fully letting go of the old.

His memoir suggests that factual recognition and inner transformation are not the same thing. One can be brought face to face with reality and still have to reckon with the slower, more uncertain work of becoming someone who can actually live in relation to it.

In my case, what I had taken for granted as reality was, in fact, a reality of my own making. Through imagination, story, narrative, and truth claims, I constructed a world that felt solid, necessary, and true. I lived and moved confidently within that framework for decades.

When that world began to break apart, when the leaflets started falling and contradicting my carefully constructed world of beliefs and attitudes, I initially denied the conflicting evidence.

The first leaflet contained rumors that a highly respected leader in the organization had been drinking and using drugs. This was inconceivable to me. So, I denied the possibility.

I had been living for so long in this imaginative world that nothing from the outside could make its way in. As far as I was concerned, this was an unsubstantiated rumor meant to besmirch the reputation of a righteous man. It later turned out to be true.

The second leaflet announced that the wife of a popular and respected man in our faith community, whom I personally knew, one day, up and took her kids, and left her husband for good, never to return.

I would have readily dismissed this evidence as well, seeing it as another attempt to sully the reputation of a morally upright man, if not for the fact that I happened to be around on the day she left, at the time not knowing she and her kids were never coming back.

This was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me, cracking open the door a bit for me to take a closer look.

My denial of factual evidence up to then stemmed from the belief that I had been called by a transcendent God to carry out a special task through a specific organization sanctioned by God for that purpose.

This vision was shaped by an aspiration to help build a world of unity and cooperation among all nations and peoples, without physical violence.

How could these kinds of problems and behavior be a part of my imagined world? I asked myself.

As mounting evidence continued to contradict the story I had been telling myself for decades, I slowly confronted the frightening possibility that I would have to transform the way I saw myself and the world around me.

The implications of this realization felt like the floor I had been walking on suddenly giving way beneath me. It was as if a large hole had opened up in the middle of my chest, a hole so wide and deep, it took all my strength to get out of bed every morning and face the world.

And yet the way forward was not simply to adopt a better interpretation or quickly exchange one story for another.

The deeper task was to move through the discomfort of that collapse and let it affect the very center from which I understood myself.

That meant not only revising what I believed, but changing my relation to belief itself. It meant learning to live with less certainty, less defense, and less need to force reality into forms that could protect me from pain.

In that sense, the transformation was not primarily intellectual, though thought was part of it. It was existential. It involved a gradual reorientation toward myself, toward others, and toward the larger world I inhabit.

What changed was not only the content of my view, but the way I stood in relation to truth, vulnerability, and reality itself.

And perhaps that is the hardest kind of change: not replacing one framework with another, but the slow becoming of a person able to live without needing every question answered.

Recently, I pulled a printed photograph from among a heap of old pictures in my bedroom dresser drawer. Looking into the faces of the six adults in the photo, I realized that three of them had already died.

When they were alive, each seemed as if they would always be around, always a part of my life.

I felt pulled into the photograph, into memories of these men and women who had helped shape my life and whom I loved dearly. Now, each of them was gone from my life.

Never to be seen or heard from again—gone just like that.

The photograph raised a larger question: all of us will be part of this one day.

When our time comes, those who’ve loved us will also stare at our photo and feel that same sense of finality.

One of the men in the photo was my old boxing coach. I met him when I signed up for his boxing class at the local community college. In his late sixties, he had trained champions in the New York City area decades earlier.

We stayed in touch long after the boxing course I took with him ended, and over time became close friends.

I got to know his wife and children. I helped him with chores inside and outside his three-story home. Occasionally, we’d have lunch or dinner together. He used to bring me along to help with his annual boxing dinner event, where he honored former champions.

As time went by, we both got older, and I got busier with family and work. Gradually, we saw one another less and less.

One day, after a long stretch between visits, I went to see him.

After his assistant told me he was in his upstairs office, I went up to see him.

I found him in a wheelchair behind his desk, his back to me, staring out the window onto the street below. His hair was now snow white and nearly all gone, and he seemed much smaller. I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or awake.

I slowly walked up and stood behind him, wondering what he was thinking, how he was doing.

He never turned.

Two months later, he was gone.

One day, we are not going to wake up again.

Here one moment, gone the next.

It all started innocently enough.

One Saturday afternoon, while stretched out on our living room couch scrolling through YouTube on my phone, I stumbled across music reaction videos. Here, people who looked young enough to be one of my own kids expressed awe, admiration, and respect for the songs I listened to in high school and college.

As I lay there watching, a smile spread across my face, and a quiet warmth seemed to spread over my body. Watching young people from diverse backgrounds and musical interests react this way stirred up my own long-standing attachment to music and all it has carried for me over the years.

Gradually, I started making sure my phone was on the nightstand before going to bed. It became a familiar, needed presence I could turn to like a trusted friend.

I can now see that the familiar surrounding space filling the bedroom gradually faded from my awareness until little remained except the glowing screen in front of me.

A couple of nights ago, while reaching for the phone as I crawled into bed, I paused and stared at it in my hand. For a moment, the routine seemed strange. Here I was, preparing for sleep with a glowing screen inches from my face, voices and music flooding my ears. For the first time, I considered whether it would be better to stop bringing my phone to bed.

Over the next few nights, this question kept gnawing at me, but I still kept taking the phone to bed.

And then, one night, I didn’t put the phone on the nightstand. For the first time in months, the nightstand was empty.

When I lay my head on the pillow, the bedroom seemed to expand. My bed and the surrounding space, previously faded into the background, suddenly felt present again. Somehow it all seemed alive, almost as if the room itself were talking to me.

What’s happening? I asked myself.

Then I became conscious of the darkness in the room and how my body seemed to blend with it as I sank into the mattress.

I began to wonder whether I’d be able to fall asleep right away or lie awake for a long time.

Suddenly, several unrecognizable images, green and flesh-colored, appeared in rapid succession. Were my eyes closed when this happened? I couldn’t tell, and I had no idea where the images came from. Were those human faces I’d just seen? I asked myself. I couldn’t be sure.

At once, my thoughts turned to some recent family concerns. Faces, conversations, and situations involving specific family members began moving through my mind. I began to meditate on these concerns, consciously sending thoughts of love and care to specific family members.

With my eyes closed, I turned my attention to what might happen after I fell asleep. What kind of dreams might I have? Would I be ready for whatever came, especially if it brought fear or dread, as sometimes happened over the years?

Almost immediately, I found myself offering a simple prayer: I want to be ready for whatever comes, not trying to avoid or deflect it, but meeting it with courage, faith, and openness.

The empty nightstand had given something back to me I hadn’t realized I’d been missing.

It would be hard to go back.

But the story of this knee is much older than three months. It goes back to 2021, when swelling and discomfort finally brought me back to my knee doctor.

“Your knee,” he said, directing my attention to the X-rays on the screen, “shows signs of osteoarthritis. The degree of cartilage degeneration is more severe on the inside of the joint, and that’s likely where your discomfort is coming from. Because you’re not in significant pain right now, I’d be careful not to place too much stress on it, and if it gets worse, come back and see me.”

I trusted what my doctor told me. He came highly recommended by a close friend. At the time, I knew little about the inner workings of the knee.

The diagnosis worried me. This same doctor had already performed total knee replacement surgery on my left knee two years earlier. The first few weeks after that surgery, my wife had to wait on me hand and foot. It took nearly six months before I trusted the knee enough to return to work.

I didn’t want us to go through that experience again.

Unfortunately, my fears began to grow. Gradually, walking became increasingly difficult. With nearly every step, I felt a stabbing pain at the center of my kneecap. If you can imagine a hundred sewing needles clumped together, jabbing straight into your knee and then retracting, that’s what it felt like each time my foot hit the ground.

It seemed like my knee had a mind of its own, functioning according to its own logic, and there was little I could do about it. Before all of this, I just assumed my knee would always function smoothly. Now it had become something I constantly had to contend with, no longer silently cooperating.

All I knew was that I wanted the pain to go away. I feared I was slowly heading toward another knee replacement, and I felt helpless.

As all of this was happening, I kept recalling two earlier injuries to the knee, both of which I had pushed past without ever really dealing with them. At that time, my attitude toward doctors was to stay away from them as much as possible.

Both injuries resulted from my martial arts practice. The first injury frightened me more than anything else. During judo practice, my partner threw me in a way that rapidly twisted my right knee counterclockwise. As the knee twisted, I heard clicking and felt popping across the middle of the joint. My mind raced: What the hell just happened? As I hit the mat, I wondered if I’d be able to stand back up and walk.

To my surprise, I was able to get off the floor and move around without any pain or discomfort in the knee. I was shocked and relieved. As far as I was concerned, since there was no pain, no real injury had occurred, and I simply carried on with the remainder of the practice.

The second injury happened years later during a self-defense class. My instructor was demonstrating a judo sweep, and I landed forcefully on the inside of my right knee. Upon impact with the mat, a piercing pain shot through the inside of the joint, as if the tip of a sword had penetrated deep into the knee.

Unlike the earlier incident, this time, as I picked myself up, a hot, burning sensation flooded the inside of my knee, and when I stepped forward, sharp pain pulsed through my knee. Embarrassed more than anything else, I tried to ignore what had just happened and gutted out the rest of the practice as best I could. But I knew an injury had occurred.

For several days, I could hardly put pressure on the knee, walking with a slow, deliberate limp. Gradually, the pain went away on its own, and I was able to resume my practice. It felt like the knee had completely healed.

From the beginning of my training, I could feel the stress certain kicks and judo throws placed on my knees. I always pushed through the discomfort and pain anyway. Martial arts became part of my professional training while working in executive protection for high-profile individuals. At the time, I had made up my mind that if my knees ended up worn out or damaged down the line, that was a price I was willing to pay.

For the next three years, my knee became something I had to think about all the time. Simple activities like going for a walk or meeting up with people in public places were always accompanied by this nagging pain with every step I took. Constant swelling and a lingering sense of heaviness in the knee became an unwanted companion. I could no longer run, and sitting cross-legged on my meditation cushion became increasingly painful.

What I couldn’t see at the time was how completely I had adapted to living with the knee. I no longer expected the pain to go away. The discomfort became part of my everyday experience, something I quietly and reluctantly accepted. My knee became more like a separate part of my body, always demanding attention and limiting my comfort with nearly everything I did.

There was no way I was going to go back to my knee doctor for another X-ray. I did not want to hear that another knee replacement was only a matter of time. Looking back now, I cannot remember making any real effort to strengthen the knee or improve what was happening until one day last year, when I had a conversation with my oldest son about it.

After dinner one night, as we talked about what I could do for the knee, he suggested, “Before you get too old, why don’t you have the surgery done? You might be prolonging the inevitable, and the longer you wait, the longer it will take you to recover. The surgery you had on your left knee was successful, and it seems to have solved the problem. Why not just get it done?”

His suggestion was sound and based on the fact that my surgeon had taken a severely compromised knee and replaced it with one that functioned normally again. I went from limping around like Chester on Gunsmoke to what now feels like a normal knee again. Yet, something in me resisted his suggestion.

About a year earlier, I came across several well-known studies involving patients with chronic knee conditions facing surgery as a last resort. The patients were led to believe that surgery had been performed on them when, in fact, it had not.

In some cases, patients who were given these sham procedures reportedly improved. These reports raised questions about the role of expectations, beliefs, and the mind in pain and healing. At the time, though, my interest remained mostly intellectual. I was fascinated by the possibilities these studies pointed toward, but never seriously considered how my situation might improve if I actually applied some of the ideas they were exploring.

During a recent visit to my son’s house to see our newborn grandson, he suggested I check out a professional sports medicine facility to see how they might help with the knee. I found myself immediately getting excited about the possibility, even though I had never seriously pursued anything like that before.

The following week, I found myself at this facility. I remember standing there in front of the kinesiologist, pointing to my swollen knee. After explaining the history of the knee, he hooked me up to three different machines for ten minutes at a time, telling me these treatments could help increase blood flow, reduce swelling, encourage healing, and loosen scar tissue. At the end of our session, I could see the swelling had gone down a lot, but the sharp, shooting pain was still there with each step.

I returned four more times over the next few weeks. By the time my wife and I were ready to return home, the swelling seemed to be under control, and on occasion, while walking around during the day, I’d suddenly realize that I was walking and the knee felt almost normal.

The first time I experienced little or no pain in the knee, it was a shock. I’d gotten so used to walking around in a constant state of nagging pain that suddenly being without it seemed almost alien.

YouTube videos explaining the mechanics of the knee became an important part of learning about how the joint functions and responds to injury and trauma. As I learned more about the intricate relationship between muscles, ligaments, bones, cartilage, and nerves, it felt like discovering an unexplored world inside my own body.

The more I watched, the more I found myself marveling at what it actually takes for our knees to function properly. I began to realize how much I’d taken for granted what my knees had quietly done for me over the years, and also how my lifestyle and habits may have contributed to their deterioration.

As the knee slowly began responding, I found myself relating to it differently. While walking, I’d quietly talk to the knee, sometimes imagining it moving smoothly with each step. During rehab exercises, I began paying close, gentle attention to how the joint actually functioned, how muscles, tendons, and movement all worked together. Somewhere along the way, this evolving relationship with my knee deepened into a growing appreciation for the remarkable complexity and quiet intelligence of the human body.

Today, my knee feels lighter with less discomfort and pain. That’s today. I’m not sure what tomorrow will be like.

Whether my knee will continue to improve or eventually require surgery is not of primary concern right now.

What stays with me most through all of this is the mystery of how debilitating or life-threatening conditions can slowly or suddenly emerge, often without us even noticing what has been building beneath the surface for years.

Perhaps by learning to pay attention and listen more carefully to what our bodies may be communicating through pain, tension, fatigue, limitation, or even silence, we may discover ways of living with greater care and attentiveness.

At the start of my senior year of high school, I found myself drawn to books about improving my attitude and outlook on life.

I turned to titles such as Psycho-Cybernetics, Thoughts Through Space, and How to Use the Power of Prayer for solace, guidance, and inspiration.

At eighteen, I couldn’t name what was going on, but moving in this direction felt natural.

These books suggested that human beings possess underused mental and spiritual capacities, and that through certain techniques and practices, life could be dramatically improved.

At the same time, they implied the self needed to be healed, empowered, or expanded.

However, I wasn’t aware of these deeper implications. I simply experienced the books as hopeful, inspiring, and filled with possibility.

Few, if any, of my classmates shared my enthusiasm, and I never mentioned any of this to my mom or dad.

For weeks, I had been having a hard time falling asleep at night. I would turn on my transistor radio next to my bed and listen softly to my favorite AM station out of Chicago, WCFL. The reception was often spotty, and I’d feel a small sense of relief whenever I turned the dial just so and locked in a clear signal of the music I liked. WCFL was located several hundred miles from where I lived in New York.

When sleep didn’t come, I would sometimes lift my leg up into the air and let it drop back onto the bed, almost as if I were trying to exhaust myself physically.

During this time, something else started happening.

As I struggled to relax and drift off to sleep, I would suddenly feel as though some force were trying to enter my body.

It felt as if my spirit, or some part of me, was being squeezed out and off the side of the bed. I fought against this sensation inch by inch, feeling as though I were trying to claw my way back into my body.

If this had been a one-off experience, I’d probably have forgotten about it. But this happened several more times over a few weeks. I had no idea what was going on.

I first corresponded with the author, Harold Sherman, when ordering his book How to Use the Power of Prayer. When the book arrived, I found a small prayer meditation pamphlet tucked inside the book jacket.

On the typed pamphlet, Sherman had written a personal note encouraging me to use this seven-point meditation each night before bed. As I read it, I felt my body begin to relax and sink more deeply into the bed. I told myself I now had a way to protect myself from this strange experience, and that perhaps I could finally fall asleep more easily.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but looking back, I can see how his personal correspondence may have encouraged me during a sensitive and uncertain time in my life.

Not long afterward, I ordered his book Thoughts Through Space. It arrived a few weeks later in an oversized brown padded envelope. To my surprise, inside was a thick hardcover copy of the book. I had been expecting a paperback.

The book felt heavy in my hands. Its dark blue cover and gold-lettered title gave it the appearance of something old and important, while the thick, parchment-colored pages made it feel as though it belonged to another era. It even carried a slight musty smell.

Sitting on my bed in my downstairs basement bedroom, I opened to the front cover and was thrilled to discover Sherman’s handwritten inscription directed to me:

“Dear John: My thoughts go out through space to wish for you the finest things in life!”

In the weeks that followed, I began using these books in an effort to make things better.

I recited the prayer meditation each night before going to bed. This practice gave me a warm feeling of being held and protected by an invisible force I hoped would watch over me and protect me.

From Psycho-Cybernetics, I started to rehearse in my mind’s eye successfully shooting foul shots on the basketball court, hoping to improve my performance and increase my chances of becoming a starter on the high school team.

In Thoughts Through Space, I was fascinated by the idea that thought itself could travel and influence the mind of another. At night, lying in bed, I would focus my thoughts outward toward a high school friend, as if I might be able to reach his mind and send him messages.

Looking back, I can see that each of these approaches, though different in form, pointed in the same direction.

Whether it was prayer, visualization, or directing thought outward, each suggested something within me needed to be improved, strengthened, or brought into alignment.

Only later would I begin to recognize how easily this way of thinking can also carry the sense that something about the self needs fixing or repair.

What I did not yet understand was how naturally this longing could evolve into a search for a more complete and authoritative vision of reality.

Over time, that search would lead me into deep involvement with a religious movement that appeared to provide the right answers to my most pressing questions.

I felt fortunate to have found a story large enough to make sense of my life. It gave me a way to stand in the world with confidence and conviction about the future.

My steps grew lighter. There was more energy and bounce in my stride. My posture straightened. I smiled a lot more. I felt a renewed sense of purpose and meaning to my life.

But over time, things began to happen that gradually loosened the certainty I had once carried so completely.

I recall an experience during this period involving a co-worker who invited me to attend a Sunday service at his church. At one point during the service, a slim, elderly-looking man with silver-gray hair came to the front to give his personal testimony of faith. Early in his remarks, he said:

“I must be different than most people. Because, since the beginning of my faith journey many years ago, I’ve not changed one iota regarding my conviction about the truth of our teachings.”

Sitting there next to my co-worker, I marveled at what he had just said. Here was a man involved with his faith for decades who had not altered his views about his church and its teachings one bit. I took him at his word.

On my train ride back home afterward, I thought a lot about what this man had to say. What struck me was not whether he was right or wrong, sincere or insincere.

It was the realization that I could never again inhabit certainty in quite the same way.

The sentences came quickly, almost like a stream of consciousness. There was no pause to question what I was saying. What I was writing felt straightforward and factual, almost self-evident.

I finished the letter with the sense that I had said what needed to be said.

At the time, I wouldn’t have described this as believing something. It felt more like stating what was already the case.

Years later, while trying to reorganize a box of old correspondence, I came across an envelope with his name on it. Inside were several letters he had written in response

One in particular stood out. In it, he said that after reading my letter, he had thought what a loss it was to the Catholic Church that I had not become a priest.

“It’s your church’s gain,” he wrote, “but our loss.”

I remember reading that and recognizing something familiar in it. The same sense of certainty that had been present when I wrote to him was reflected back to me in his reply.

Looking back, that period of my life carried a particular momentum. Situations were addressed and resolved. Questions led to answers that felt complete and final.

That didn’t remain.

I watched the wife of a close friend load her minivan with belongings, her three children beside her, and drive away from the home they had shared for twelve years.

There had been no visible break, no noticeable conflict. One day she was there, the next she was gone. Where had she gone? What would happen to her and her children?

I remember standing there, waiting for some way to understand what had happened. Thoughts began to form, but they didn’t settle in the way they once would have. Nothing fully closed around it.

That wasn’t an isolated moment.

I began to notice it in other situations. During that period, questions arose that the answers I had once taken as complete no longer settled. The familiar sense of resolution didn’t come.

At one point, after an experience that brought up strong physical and emotional reactions, I sat with someone who offered a way to understand it.

As he spoke, I could feel something well-known beginning again, the movement to organize what had happened into something that could be understood and settled.

I started to follow it, with the sense it might take me somewhere I hadn’t been able to reach before.

It felt like it might finally come together.

Then I stopped.

Not because it didn’t make sense. Not because it was wrong.

But because the same movement was there again, the pull to be taken somewhere I hadn’t been able to reach before.

I saw the movement itself.

The attempt to resolve, to fix.

That movement was there again.

And with it, everything I had turned to before.

It was all there.

But it no longer held.

Over time, other things began to fall away.

Books once cherished no longer held my attention. Programs and podcasts that once promised to lead somewhere no longer held their pull.

What remained was not a new conclusion, but no conclusion.

And yet, nothing else seemed to stop.

Conversations continued. Decisions were made. The day moved as it always had.

What was no longer there was the sense that something still needed to be settled.

I’m sitting at my desk again now, writing this.

The same movements are still here. Thoughts form. Words appear. Memories come and go.

But they don’t land in the same way.

What stands out is not how that earlier certainty disappeared.

What stands out is that it is no longer here.

And there is no clear sense that it needs to return.

Just this, as it is, in the middle of an ordinary moment.

It’s not just about the rope. You're watching how the cowboy works with its motion without forcing it. It may look like it’s all in the wrist, but the whole body has to be aligned just right to keep those loops from collapsing to the ground, going slack and lifeless. The rope tends to follow when it’s handled just right.

The wind doesn’t respond in quite the same way.

No cowboy in his right mind would try to lasso the wind with his rope, would he?

Human ingenuity has found ways to harness the wind through sails, windmills, wind turbines, and gliders, but it cannot be captured or controlled. It can only be influenced, channeled, and adapted. It moves on its own terms, not ours.

And yet, that doesn’t stop us, does it? We look for methods, techniques, breakthrough moments, and new information, trying to get somewhere else, moving beyond where we currently stand.

We aren’t talking here about business acumen, time management, or career-track programs, which can all be measured and improved through the implementation of proven strategies. This is something else.

In those areas, progress is enhanced by controlling clear inputs, monitoring measurable outputs, and producing repeatable gains. But what if what we’re touching here doesn’t yield to control at all?

Is there a way this “wind” can be experienced as it is, without trying to harness it, control it, or influence it? What might that be like, not trying to get somewhere else, but remaining within what already is?

Or do we find ourselves trying to locate it, name it, describe it, and sort out what it can and cannot do?

If I had followed that path, much of my life would have been structured in advance. I would still have faced the question of how to live, but it would have unfolded within a shared framework rather than one I had to construct alone.

Some people say they knew from a young age what they wanted to do and simply followed it. Maybe they are fortunate in that way. For many of us, though, there is no clear path. We are left to piece things together ourselves, deciding what matters without a common map. That was certainly true for me.

For much of history, that burden was carried differently. Religious traditions offered shared beliefs and practices that oriented a person’s life. They did not remove uncertainty, but they gave it a shape and a place. This was my experience while living for decades inside a tradition that helped me better understand the meaning of my life and my place in the world.

Today, that shared framework has largely given way to something else: a world where the individual is responsible for determining meaning, truth, and purpose. You can hear it in the language we use. We are told to find our purpose, do what we love, and build a life that feels authentic. I first noticed this back in the early 1970s, with the sudden surge in popularity of self-help books, seminars, and workshops that emphasized self-discovery and personal development.

What are we already living inside of?

We move through daily life under these assumptions so naturally that they rarely come into view. They shape how we think, choose, and judge what matters, often without our noticing. I rarely questioned it.

Even our deepest questions—why am I here, what is the purpose of life—are asked from within this same self-referential frame. I remember sitting in a field overlooking a valley, asking myself what my life meant, and realizing that no shared answer was waiting for me. Whatever answer I arrived at would have to be my own.

What are we living inside of?

People respond to this in different ways. Some turn toward religious communities, where belief and practice offer a way to receive answers rather than construct them alone. I can see the appeal in that, especially in contrast to the endless stream of systems, programs, and advice all promising clarity or transformation.

Others take a different route, identifying as spiritual but not religious. They tend to distrust large institutions, especially religious ones, and place authority within personal experience. I have felt that pull as well, the desire for meaning without submission to something that feels imposed from the outside.

Still others approach these questions without reference to any higher authority, or remain uncertain about whether such answers can be known at all. And many people, occupied with work and relationships, rarely dwell on these questions in explicit terms. Even when I was fully immersed in pursuing a spiritual path, I often found little time outside of working and raising a family to focus on such concerns.

But across all these differences, the underlying situation remains the same: we are expected to determine for ourselves what is true, what matters, and how to live.

Before trying to answer those questions, it may be worth seeing that situation more clearly and recognizing how much it already shapes our answers.

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