I want you to kill Jim Palmer. I mean the Jim Palmer who takes shape in a reader’s mind after enough time with my work to anticipate what I would say. His voice begins to explain an experience before it has been fully lived. His approval starts to feel necessary, even to someone who has worked hard to stop asking permission.
I know how easily such a figure forms. Someone gives words to an experience that has resisted language, and the recognition brings relief. Their next sentence arrives with a little more authority than it deserves. Over time, their account of a life begins to feel more trustworthy than the life itself.
The title echoes a saying associated with the Zen teacher Linji: “If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha.” I borrow its provocation on a much smaller scale. Any teacher, including me, becomes an obstacle when the image of that teacher stands between a person and their encounter with life. Words that once opened something begin to close around it.
There is an easy way to write this essay. I could declare that you belong to yourself, welcome disagreement, and receive credit for being a leader humble enough to say so. Even the refusal of authority has a flattering pose available to it. I would like to make that pose harder to inhabit.
I once stood before large congregations and spoke about God, truth, and the meaning of life with more certainty than I possess now. People brought their grief, their marriages, their private shame, and their questions about whether they had disappointed God. I believed much of what I said, but belief was only part of what gave my words power. The room, the institution, and the role I occupied had already taught people how to hear me.
Leaving that world did not remove the pleasure of being listened to. This is uncomfortable to admit because it complicates the familiar story of the former pastor who discovered freedom and now helps others discover it. I did leave behind beliefs I could no longer defend. I also brought a trained voice into my next life, along with a capacity to make difficult experiences sound coherent. Those qualities are useful. They are also capable of recreating the old arrangement under a different name.
There is a line in John’s Gospel I hear differently now. Jesus tells his disciples that it is for their good that he goes away. In the story, his departure makes room for the Advocate; I do not want to turn that into a claim the passage was written to make about me. Still, after years in a role that made my presence seem necessary, I find the image difficult to escape. A teacher who cannot imagine people growing beyond his voice has begun to confuse their life with his place in it.
A religious leader might say, “God wants this for you.” A secular teacher has other ways to settle a question before the person asking it has had time to think. We speak of growth, agency, authenticity, and healing. We call one response courageous and another fearful. We have terms for the person who remains, the person who leaves, the person who forgives, and the person who refuses. Sometimes we have understood something. Sometimes our vocabulary has simply become a more elegant way to tell someone how to live.
I have caught myself enjoying the ease with which a well-turned sentence travels. It is gratifying when someone says my work gave them words for their life. I am glad when it does. Yet the distance between “you helped me name this” and “tell me what this means” is short, especially when the speaker and listener both feel the comfort of their familiar roles.
People leaving religion are often told to think for themselves at the very moment the structures that once supported their thinking have fallen away. They may have lost a community, a family’s trust, a marriage’s shared language, or the sense that the future follows a recognizable path. “Trust yourself” is a demanding instruction when you are no longer sure who that self is.
A confident new voice offers temporary ground. It says the old system was the problem, explains why leaving hurts, and describes the life waiting on the other side. Some of that account may be true. The danger appears when its usefulness makes it difficult to question. The person who brought relief becomes woven into the reader’s new sense of reality.
This happens well beyond religion. Public life now offers an abundance of people willing to interpret your distress, diagnose your relationships, name your enemies, and tell you what your freedom requires. Their authority rarely looks like the authority many of us were taught to resist. It feels chosen. We follow because the account is compelling, because the speaker seems to understand, and because belonging among people who share that understanding feels good.
I am part of that landscape. I publish essays about authority and self-trust to people who have good reason to be wary of both. I know how readily the language of deconstruction becomes its own collection of approved conclusions. One can learn all the right things to say about autonomy and still feel anxious when the admired writer, teacher, or community disagrees.
I do believe some things strongly. Institutions should be answerable for the harm they do. People deserve communities where belonging does not depend on self-betrayal. Spiritual and psychological care should increase a person’s capacity for discernment rather than make them dependent on the person providing it. I am willing to defend those claims.
Being right about a danger does not make a person immune to causing it. A leader might accurately describe manipulation and still cultivate a circle in which disagreement feels costly. A practitioner might teach self-authorship while quietly rewarding clients who make choices the practitioner approves of. A writer might attract readers by exposing the certainty of others, then enjoy being treated as the exception.
The test arrives when someone uses the freedom I have taught to challenge me. Welcoming disagreement sounds easy in theory, where it serves as evidence of my openness. It feels different when someone questions an argument I care about, refuses my preferred language, or tells me that a community I founded has failed them. In that moment, my stated belief in self-trust is beside the point. What matters is what happens to the person who practices it in my presence.
Good intentions offer little protection here. People learn where the edges of belonging lie by watching what receives warmth, what receives silence, and whose concerns become a problem to manage. A community has an ethic in its documents and another in its ordinary reactions. The second one is usually easier to feel.
I am helping to build a field around existential health: our relationship to being alive amid uncertainty, mortality, meaning, identity, belonging, and responsibility. I care deeply about that work. I also want to be suspicious of the moment its language starts sounding indispensable.
A field develops concepts because people need ways to study and respond to what they encounter. Then the concepts acquire an authority of their own. A practitioner names an experience, and the person living it begins to wonder whether the name is more trustworthy than the experience. An organization develops a method, and the method starts deciding which lives it knows how to recognize.
Existential health faces a particular danger because its subject is the person’s relationship to their own existence. We enter conversations about what gives someone a reason to continue, where they feel they belong, and how they meet what cannot be repaired. These are places where influence reaches deep. If our work leaves a person better able to repeat our framework but less able to question it, we have gained something at their expense.
That is why I want the work tested by people whose lives resist my account of them. I want practitioners to notice when their desire to help becomes impatience with a person’s ambiguity. I want CNRS to hear criticism without immediately translating it into a failure of understanding on the critic’s part. And I want the people building alongside me to have room to say that I have mistaken my own perspective for the center of the field.
These aspirations will have substance only where they change decisions, relationships, and the distribution of power. The future of existential health cannot depend on everyone learning to speak in my voice. If it does, we will have built a small institution around a large claim about human freedom.
Self-trust does not mean believing that your first interpretation is correct. We are capable of fear, vanity, wishful thinking, and cruelty. Other people know things we do not, and some have earned our trust through study, care, and a willingness to be corrected. I would not want to live without teachers.
I want a different relationship with them. I want to listen closely enough to be changed and remain free enough to notice where their account fails. That freedom asks more of us than independence as a slogan. We have to bear the unease of making judgments without a guarantee that a respected person would agree. We have to return to experience, listen to those affected by our choices, and revise what no longer holds.
There are people I have had to “kill” along the way. Some were teachers I loved, whose words once gave me ground when I had none. Others were people I had never met, but whose approval I carried in my mind as though they were watching my life unfold. Letting their authority die did not erase my gratitude or settle every disagreement. It meant accepting that they had accompanied me as far as they could, and that I would have to answer for the life beyond their reach.
In practice, self-trust sometimes begins with a pause before adopting a persuasive explanation. I have to ask what I actually observed, what I am assuming, and whose experience my preferred account leaves out. Sometimes I need to live with an unsettled question long enough to hear my own response beneath the voices I admire. At other times, trusting myself means taking a challenge seriously and admitting that someone else has seen more clearly than I have.
Sometimes the person whose ideas have helped us most is the hardest to question. We remember what it felt like when their words first found us. We may fear that pulling at one thread will undo the comfort of the whole account. Yet an idea that cannot survive a question should not govern a life, however grateful we are to the person who gave it to us.
I do not know the full circumstances of a reader’s life. I do not know what happened at the kitchen table this morning, what that person has survived, or what a difficult decision will cost them. However closely one of my sentences seems to describe an experience, I have not gained authority over its meaning.
I hope some of my words are useful. I hope others provoke the kind of resistance that helps a person discover what they actually think. There are claims I would revise now, and there will be more. That is part of thinking in public, and it gives readers every reason to examine what I say rather than protect me from examination.
Kill the Jim Palmer who appears to have arrived somewhere you must reach. Kill the expectation that I will recognize the right version of a life and give it my approval. If a sentence of mine gives you language, use it for as long as it helps illuminate experience. Let it go when it begins to stand in the way.
I will still be here, writing and teaching, arguing for what I think is true and listening when someone shows me what I have missed. I would rather meet readers as another person answerable to life than become a voice they hear in place of their own.
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