Some questions follow us through every version of our lives. We change our beliefs, leave familiar communities, begin again in unfamiliar places, and discover that the questions have come with us. What does it mean to be human? What makes a life worth living? How do we meet the knowledge that everything we love is vulnerable? What deserves our trust when the answers we inherited no longer hold?
For much of my life, these questions arrived in religious language. Eventually, that language no longer expressed what I understood or experienced. Leaving religion opened a wider inquiry into the human needs beneath its promises: our longing for meaning, our fear of death, our need to belong, and our struggle to inhabit a life we cannot fully explain or control.
I’ve gathered twelve essays from my archives that explore this terrain. Together, they offer an introduction to the questions at the heart of my work in existential health—our relationship with meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, and self-trust. You can follow the collection from beginning to end or start with the question closest to your own life.
Before we ask how to improve our lives, we need to consider the kind of creatures living them. We have bodies, limits, histories, and needs that no amount of ambition abolishes. We depend on one another. We need rest and connection. We are capable of extraordinary imagination, yet still vulnerable to loneliness, exhaustion, and the loss of someone whose presence made the world feel like home.
The Creature Civilization Forgot: Why Modern Life No Longer Fits the Human Animal
What happens when the lives we are expected to lead become increasingly difficult for human beings to inhabit? This essay opens the collection with a question about the relationship between our human needs and the civilization we have built. It invites us to reconsider how much of what we experience as personal failure reflects the demands of a world that has lost touch with the creatures living in it.
There Is No Cure for Being Human: The Six Existential Realities We Spend Our Lives Trying to Escape
We devote enormous energy to securing ourselves against the conditions of existence. We seek beliefs, achievements, relationships, and practices that promise to make us invulnerable. This essay turns toward the realities we keep trying to escape and asks what becomes possible when we begin learning how to live with them.
Half the Story Is Killing You: The Affirmative Givens of Human Existence
An honest account of existence must make room for more than its difficulties. Human life also holds the possibility of connection, discovery, creativity, and participation. Read alongside There Is No Cure for Being Human, this essay asks whether we have become so practiced at naming what threatens us that we have forgotten to recognize what sustains us.
We want to know that our lives will amount to something, that love will endure, and that the ground beneath us will hold. Sometimes our search for assurance becomes the condition we place on living: we will participate fully once we know it is safe to do so. Meanwhile, the days continue to pass.
Mortality, uncertainty, and the collapse of inherited meaning bring us to questions that no final explanation settles. They also bring us closer to the choices through which a life takes shape.
The Gift of Mortality: Why Human Beings Are Not Built for Forever
What does finitude make possible? This essay approaches mortality through the question of how an ending shapes the life that precedes it. To know that our time is limited is to confront the significance of attention, love, and the ordinary opportunities we will never have in quite the same way again.
The Gifts of Nihilism: Only the Idols Died
When a once unquestionable source of meaning loses its authority, it can feel as though meaning itself has disappeared. This essay enters that unsettling space and asks what has actually been lost. What remains available when the structures that told us why life mattered can no longer carry our trust?
Beyond Meaning: Viktor Frankl in Conversation with Existential Health
The search for meaning has shaped generations of reflection on suffering and human possibility. This essay brings Viktor Frankl into conversation with existential health, opening questions about the place of meaning in a life and our relationship with existence when a satisfying explanation remains out of reach.
Religion has carried some of humanity’s deepest fears and aspirations. It has offered stories about our origins, practices for grief, structures of belonging, and ways of locating an individual life within a larger world. It has also exercised authority over bodies, identities, and the boundaries of acceptable human experience.
Understanding that history requires room for both its contributions and its costs. We can examine what religion made possible while asking which of its answers still serve the people we are becoming.
The First Question Wasn’t God: Beyond Theism and Atheism Toward an Existential Anthropology
What human experience gave rise to the question of God in the first place? This essay moves beneath the familiar debate between belief and unbelief to consider the creature asking the question. It opens a broader inquiry into how human beings seek orientation, face vulnerability, and make a home in existence.
How Religion Saved Our Species: Why Big-R Religion Was Humanity’s Greatest Evolutionary Innovation
This essay considers religion through its role in the human story: the problems it helped address and the possibilities it helped organize. It invites readers to understand the force of an institution whose influence cannot be explained solely by whether its claims are true.
10 Religious Ideas We No Longer Need to Believe: And the Human Problems They Were Trying to Solve
An idea can lose our belief while the human concern beneath it remains. This essay revisits religious answers through the needs they attempted to meet. The question becomes how to respond to those needs with greater honesty, without requiring ourselves to affirm what we no longer find credible.
Leaving an inherited framework does not automatically give us the capacity to live without it. Freedom brings its own demands. We have to discern what deserves our attention, take responsibility for our choices, and develop relationships in which belonging does not depend on hiding who we are.
Self-trust grows within this work. It includes the willingness to listen, revise, acknowledge harm, and learn from experience. Claiming a life of our own means becoming more able to participate in it honestly, alongside other people whose lives are equally their own.
What Becomes of the Self? Beyond Ego, No-Self, and the Future of Human Identity
Who is the “self” we are learning to trust? This essay explores identity beyond the familiar alternatives of defending the ego or dissolving it. It asks what develops as we become more capable of inhabiting existence, taking responsibility, and participating in a shared world.
The Existential Impulse: What Replaces God When You Outgrow Religion
The longing that once found expression through religion often survives a change in belief. We still want depth, connection, and a way to meet the strangeness of being alive. This essay explores that continuing impulse and the question of where it leads when religious answers no longer feel like home.
The Authority to Be Human: The Truth Behind Religion’s Conflict with LGBTQ Identity
Who gets to decide which forms of human experience are permitted to belong? This essay brings the question of authority into the lived reality of LGBTQ identity. It asks what is at stake when religious belonging requires a person to distrust, suppress, or disown their own humanity.
The Human Yes: Why Existential Health Begins with Learning to Trust Life
The collection closes with the question of trust. How do we become willing to participate in a life that offers no exemption from vulnerability? This essay explores the human yes: an openness to living that has room for uncertainty, grief, relationship, and all that remains unfinished.
You do not have to read these essays in order. Begin with the question that has been keeping you company. Follow whatever gives language to something you have felt but struggled to express. Stay with what challenges you, and bring your own experience into the conversation.
My hope is that this collection helps you meet your life with greater clarity and self-trust. The questions explored here already live in our relationships, our losses, our decisions, and the ordinary hours through which we become ourselves. Reading gives us a place to consider them. Living gives us a place to practice.
If these questions speak to something unfolding in your own life, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support sustains my writing and helps create spaces where we can explore what it means to be human together.
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Thank you for reading and for considering supporting this work. I’m grateful to share this conversation with you.
