A few weeks ago, I told a friend[1] that the most embarrassing thing about my 30s so far is that I’ve become an avid listener of Glennon Doyle’s podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. I first learned of Doyle following the release of her book Untamed, which—if Instagram stories are sufficient evidence—every other young woman in my social circles seemed to have read and adored. But however good for Doyle, the book’s massive popularity meant that I refused to read it thanks to the juvenile sense of contrarianism that I developed as a teenager and am unfortunately still carting around with me as an adult (maybe this is the actual most embarrassing thing about my 30s now that I think about it).
I think my initial resistance towards Doyle and her work was driven by a desire to differentiate myself from the kind of millennial white woman I stereotyped as her target audience – someone still invested in attending each year’s Women’s March, who practiced yoga in a tank top emblazoned with some insipid phrase like SPIRITUAL GANGSTA, who touts the benefits of a $20 “gratitude journal” and evangelizes therapy as some kind of cure-all with no mind to the factors that make it completely inaccessible to the average person.
A prime example of making up a guy to get mad at, I know. I suppose I wanted to make clear to the non-existent jury of my peers I am forever trying to impress that I was not this kind of person; that their (imagined) earnestness, naivety, and milquetoast liberal politics did not mesh with the kind of cynicism, detachment, and general disaffectedness I have spent way too much of my life trying to cultivate.
Still, I’ve gravitated toward We Can Do Hard Things over the last few months, which have frankly been some of the hardest months of my life. Last fall, I moved from Minneapolis—my home for almost a decade—to a small Illinois farm town to start my first job as a pastor, left to build my social circles from scratch. It’s hard enough to make friends as an adult, never mind in the digital age, never mind following the collective atrophy of our social skills after the COVID-19 lockdown, never mind as a leftist in a part of the country where such beliefs definitively put you in the political minority. (I went running in an old Bernie 2020 shirt my first week here, and a guy in a pick-up truck flipped me off as he drove past me – although it could have had nothing to do with the shirt and was because he just didn’t like my vibe… Who can say?)
In the midst of a very lonely chapter in my life, We Can Do Hard Things has become a sort of companion. I’ve been surprised by the depth of the conversations that Doyle has with her cohosts – her wife, Abby, and her sister, Amanda – and with the diverse range of guests they invite onto the show. I listen to new episodes about as soon as they drop. They’re often the background noise while I’m at the gym, on my daily walks, in the kitchen cooking dinner, or puttering around the house doing chores. I’ve been especially moved by the way Doyle speaks about her recovery from alcoholism, which has deeply resonated with me, nearing four years of sobriety myself. The podcast has been a real gift in a lot of ways, and I think that its emphasis on earnestness, vulnerability and courage has had a sort of medicinal impact on me, helping me break out of the dumb irony-laced façade I’ve built around myself, encouraging me to show up in the world more sincerely and genuinely.
I say all of this because I want to stress that I really do like the podcast, and I think it is generally quite good. What I want to discuss may be interpreted as a criticism of Doyle’s ethos—and maybe it is—but I don’t think that it’s exclusive to her by any means. If the cheery, pastel-colored Instagram infographics that pop up on my discover page are any indication, we are more obsessed with self-help, personal development, and wellness (whatever that means) than ever. These things once piqued my interest, but they’re falling increasingly flat these days, I think because “the self” is becoming an increasingly weak centering point for my life.
I realize that I am coming at this from an explicitly Christian angle, and it isn’t fair to expect the non-Christian hosts of a non-Christian podcast to adhere to the tenants of Christian theology – but also this is my Substack and I get to talk about what I want and what I want to talk about is Jesus. 😇
Now that I work in rural ministry, I feel like at least half of my waking hours are spent driving from one place to another. On a recent set of drives, I queued up several episodes from the back catalogue of We Can Do Hard Things on Spotify to lessen the tedium. In the middle of one about the false promises of productivity, the conversation suddenly took what I felt like was a very theological turn. I’m just going to copy and paste those bits from the transcript because I don’t feel like trying to summarize them myself.[2]
Amanda Doyle: If productivity is your God, then this world that we live in is happy to oblige, productivity being your God, and then you will follow a vengeful and mean God.
Glennon Doyle: Okay, stop there. If productivity is your God, then of course busyness is your religion …. And your discipline. You are a disciple of productivity, so it would make sense that in any capitalistic culture, productivity is the God. That’s pumped into our veins from the time we’re born, so it would make sense that if our worth… We’re all trying to figure out our human worth down here, if we are told from the pulpits of every commercial, every speech, every whatever that our God is productivity, then busyness will be our discipline.
At this point, I am like hell yeah!!!! So true, queens!!!! This is what my problematic fave Martin Luther talks about in that one part of the Large Catechism where he calls an idol anything we turn to that isn’t God!! This is what my other problematic fave David Foster Wallace talks about in that one part of This Is Water where he says that there is no such thing as atheism because we all end up worshipping something and worshipping anything but some sort of higher power will eat you alive!! I’m vibing with it!! But then the conversation takes a very self help-y turn and then I am no longer vibing with it.
Amanda Doyle: It’s scary because… I mean anyone who’s paying attention can know that that is a losing battle. You are never going to please God because it’s never going to be done because you’re never going to be able to be like, “I did it. I’m done,” and so that is scary. But I think that the thing that is even scarier than that is being your own God because then you have to figure out what, if not that, makes me okay how in the absence of having something that I can look at that’s a scorecard that says I am enough, I’ve done enough, then I have to decide something that is off grade that only I determine. Being your own God is scarier than following a mean God that at least you have something to measure yourself against.
Glennon Doyle: Okay, so it’s like everybody gets a puzzle. Yours might have been religion, it might be an eating disorder, it might be people pleasing, it might be productivity, but none of us know how to be, and so we get a puzzle. People give us a structure or a plan or a discipline or a way of being and they say to us, “If you just solve this puzzle, you’re going to be okay.”
Amanda Doyle: The puzzle, whatever we got, whatever kind of puzzle you got makes you crazy and insane all day. There’s only one thing that is scarier than spending every day of your life trying to solve that unsolvable puzzle, and that is packing up the puzzle and putting it away. It is less terrifying to just spend your entire life trying to complete a puzzle that has no last piece than saying, “Oh my God, there’s no puzzle,” and putting it away. Imagine yourself putting that puzzle away and just sitting on the couch and staring into the abyss. That is why we all continue to do our puzzles and we would rather try to do that puzzle than put the puzzle away ….
Amanda Doyle: That’s what I was trying to express with the God thing.
Glennon Doyle: Yes.
Amanda Doyle: It is easier to serve a God that will always be displeased with you and that you’ll never satisfy than to claim yourself as your own God, because that’s what you’re doing when you make your own puzzle.
At the third mention of “claiming yourself as your own God,” I yelled “EWWW!!” and shut my car’s audio off. I don’t know how exactly this is supposed to work, but I do not think it is nearly as radical or countercultural as the Doyle sisters seem to believe. More pressingly, though, I do not think that it leads to the kind of freedom that they seem to believe it does.
I want to assert that “following a mean God” and “being your own God” are two false options (there is also… following the God revealed to us in Christ Jesus) but maybe that would be faulting the We Can Do Hard Things crew for not being sufficiently Christian in the way that I am. My issue here is less them and this conversation and more a line of thinking prevalent within contemporary culture: that the ultimate purpose of life is to find one’s most authentic self (which is always good and never bad) and that in the process of finding said self, we are permitted to do just about anything. We can forgo responsibilities in the name of self-care, cut off ties with ‘toxic’ people (who are always bad and never good), prioritize personal gratification over the well-being of others, and so long as it’s all done in the name of healing/personal growth/self-discovery, no one can question our motives or actions.
This kind of thinking is commonplace nowadays, but it’s not particularly novel or new. What is To thine own self be true if not the moral maxim of the last millennia of western history? It’s not even exclusive to the secular world either; it’s proven pervasive in many of the church circles I run in, too. My congregational care class in seminary taught me little about how to care for a congregation but a great deal about how to care for myself. We really never talked about how to counsel a parishioner in the throes of grief, but we did have to turn in poems in response to the question, “Who were you before the world told you who you were?” – a task whose relevance to day-to-day ministry still eludes me.
Beyond its moral implications, I find our collective fixation on self-discovery boring and shallow. Self-centeredness takes sneaky forms, donning labels like “self-care,” “introspection,” “authenticity.” It’s not that I think these things are inherently evil so much as I think they’re shoddy tools for the task of living. They just don’t get us very far, at least not beyond turning each of us into our own Narcissus, staring into our own reflection in our own private reflecting pool, isolated from each other and from the world around us. P.E. Moskowitz writes about this very well in an essay about quitting therapy for their very good newsletter Mental Hellth:
I have begun to see an excess of introspection not as a sign of high personal responsibility or desire to better oneself, but as a potential symptom of captivity (self-imposed or otherwise). If you are placed in a room with four white walls, your thoughts will turn inward because they have nowhere else to go. Solitary confinement is torture precisely because of this lack of stimuli (social, physical, intellectual). Without claiming that many of us are living lives equivalent to those in solitary confinement (which is deeply evil and should be immediately abolished), I would like to argue that, under capitalism, we all do live on a spectrum of captivity, with access to social and physical and intellectual stimuli unequally distributed. And thus we live on a spectrum of forced introspection, in which we ruminate on our own lives excessively because we do not have adequate access to external stimuli.
And, I believe, this captivity is increasing, not through any directly punitive force, but through learned behavioral changes encouraged by our current culture.
We live in an age of therapy speak, in an age of seemingly every song and TikTok and book using the language of introspection and healing and self-care, because we live in an age of increased isolation, of detachment from the messiness and joy and danger of the real, physical world. A culture of excessive introspection is not a sign of collective or personal growth, but a sign of disconnection from the outside world and each other. And even more depressingly, we have accepted that this is good and moral and correct; we are lauded for living alone within four white walls, and lauded for the imagery and thoughts we produce under these conditions.
In 2022, I quit therapy myself after six years of weekly sessions, worried that my therapist and I had hit a wall and weary of our tendency to spend our 50 minutes talking in circles. To be clear, therapy has been a great benefit in my life and is surely one of the major reasons I am currently alive and sober. But I grew frustrated by the sense that I was essentially paying a stranger a significant amount of money each week for her to do little more than respond with uncritical affirmations that my feelings were “valid” – an assertion I’ve become more and more suspect of in recent years. Sometimes I have outsized and inappropriate reactions to things! Sometimes my head needs to be pulled out of my ass! Sometimes my instincts are simply not good and should probably not be followed! Sometimes the problem is me!
Maybe I buck up against this kind of cultural messaging because it’s failed me so profoundly. The most transformative moments in my life have not come from discovering and actualizing some perfect version of myself but instead from being brought face-to-face with my own limitations and failings—and met in those moments by some force that is outside of me and decidedly not-me. I don’t know what else to call that force but the grace of God. I’m convinced that it could not be me and could not have originated from within me. This is the self that is supposed to have all the answers? This same self that is so often petty and cruel and small-minded and ungenerous; that was so often driven to drink to excess and use it as an excuse to make incredibly stupid and short-sighted decisions? Somewhere buried within this self is the one that’s supposed to save me? If that’s the case, I’m fucked.
It's into these trappings that the Christian faith speaks a word of hope. We don’t have to be our own God, and we don’t have to save ourselves—in Jesus, the true God has already come to save us. He invites all who are weary and carrying heavy burdens—which I think has to be just about all of us these days—to come to him. He promises to give us rest, assuring us that his yoke is easy and his burden is light. In Jesus, God frees us from the futile pursuit of self-sufficiency, the hamster wheel of constant striving, from proving our own worth to ourselves or others through productivity/accomplishments/status – and not just for our own sakes but for the sake of our neighbors and creation.
We can’t claim ourselves as our own Gods, but I think that’s good news in the end. We’re already claimed by the true God, whose grace and hope originate outside of us but are nevertheless for us, calling us away from lives lived inward in service to our own egos and outwards in service to the world that God made and the people God loves.
[1] That is, I tweeted.
[2]Transcript here: https://momastery.com/blog/we-can-do-hard-things-ep-304