Publishing an article called “Stop Letting People Like Me Tell You Who You Are” while promoting a new book introduces an awkward question: why should you buy it, then? That question deserves an answer, especially now that has reached #1 on Amazon’s Existentialism bestseller list. I’m grateful for that reception, but a ranking does not make me an authority over your life.
I wrote the book to explore how we find meaning, recover self-trust, and participate more fully in lives no one else is qualified to live for us. Those commitments require me to examine my own influence, including the possibility that readers might give my words more authority than they deserve.
I hope you read the book closely enough to question it and bring your experience into conversation with mine. It brings together some of the most consequential work of my writing life, and I believe it is worth your time. The article below makes explicit the responsibility that comes with asking for that time, especially when the subject is your life.
I sell books, teach courses, and lead a community I founded. Part of my livelihood depends on people believing I have something worth listening to. I care whether my work reaches people, and I feel the disappointment when something I have labored over seems to disappear without a trace.
Writers need readers, and meaningful work needs material support. But earning a living this way gives me a responsibility to examine something uncomfortable: a reader might agree with everything I write while surrendering the very judgment my work is meant to strengthen. Their appreciation would make that failure easier for me to overlook.
Not long ago, I published an essay called ** Kill Jim Palmer**. Here I want to pursue a question that deserves more than a warning against following teachers: how does someone who helps us recover our voice become someone whose approval we need before using it?
In ** The Church of Deconstruction: Deconstruction’s New Authorities (and the case for existential health)**, I examined how the world beyond religion develops its own authorities and expectations of belonging. Here I want to bring that scrutiny into the relationship between you and me, where good intentions offer no exemption from the dynamics I criticize.
The authority often begins with something worth trusting. A writer names an experience we have struggled to articulate, and we feel understood. The danger emerges as that earned trust expands into areas where the writer has neither sufficient knowledge nor legitimate authority.
Someone who once needed a pastor to approve their questions now needs a writer to validate their conclusions. The relationship feels more generous, yet an old dependency survives inside it. They still hesitate to trust an experience until someone else has explained what it means.
My work in existential health concerns meaning, identity, belonging, mortality, and self-trust. If readers become more fluent in my language while feeling less entitled to question my account of their lives, I owe them more than another essay about freedom. I owe them an examination of the power I hold, the interests it serves, and what happens when their judgment takes them somewhere I would not have led them.
** When I was a pastor**, authority came with recognizable architecture. There was a pulpit, a sacred text, an institution, and a set of expectations about who was qualified to interpret reality. Questions about your life arrived inside a larger story that had already established what a human being was and what a good one ought to become.
** Leaving that world** required more than changing my conclusions about God. I had to confront how thoroughly I had learned to experience myself through an authorized interpretation. Even resistance remained entangled with the authority I was resisting, because I still felt compelled to establish my innocence before its court.
People often describe this after leaving religion. ** They no longer believe the doctrine**, yet they feel obliged to prove that they are good, that their departure was justified, that their freedom has not made them selfish. An abandoned belief continues to organize their emotional life through the questions they feel required to answer.
Under those conditions, a new source of certainty offers considerable relief. Someone understands the harm, supplies language for it, and speaks with the confidence you have not yet recovered. Their explanation gives shape to an experience that had felt private and bewildering.
That relief deserves respect. The trouble begins when gratitude for an explanation becomes allegiance to the person who supplied it, and their interpretation starts governing experiences they know very little about.
There are writers whose words reach us at a moment when we have almost lost the ability to describe ourselves. A paragraph names something we have carried for years, and the recognition feels intimate. We think: this person understands.
Sometimes they do understand something important. A stranger’s language might help us recognize coercion, grieve a loss, or question an obligation we had mistaken for love. I would not be doing this work if I doubted the value of that encounter.
But recognition creates an opening through which more authority might enter than the original insight warrants. Someone’s perceptiveness about religious shame does not establish their wisdom about your marriage. A moving account of their recovery offers no guarantee that their explanation fits your history.
Imagine a reader who finds an essay that finally makes sense of her fear of disappointing her family. She begins to notice how often she confuses obedience with care, and that insight changes her life. Months later, she encounters the same writer’s account of estrangement and feels pressure to interpret every difficult family relationship through it.
Nothing requires the writer to have demanded this allegiance. The reader’s relief has extended their jurisdiction, turning a useful insight into a broader authority over her life. She now struggles to acknowledge affection, obligation, or ambiguity that does not fit the account that first helped her.
The experience of being understood is powerful enough to weaken our scrutiny of the person who understands us. Both readers and writers need to reckon with ** that vulnerability**, especially when the relationship feels unusually safe.
In ** Gurus, Grifters and TikTok Tricksters: Seeking Existential Health in the Influencer Age**, I explored the broader culture in which people seek guidance about who they are and how to live. Here, the scrutiny reaches a more uncomfortable relationship: the writer you trust for good reasons, whose insight into part of your experience gradually becomes authority over the rest.
A reader who disagrees with me might be engaging my work more seriously than someone who shares every article. They might have tested an argument against experience, found a weakness, and refused a conclusion that I find persuasive. That refusal deserves a better response than an assumption that they have failed to understand.
I want my arguments to be strong enough to withstand examination. Agreement means more when a person has felt free to withhold it, and disagreement becomes useful when neither of us has to protect an identity built around being right.
The harder possibility is that someone agrees because my language has become the language in which they feel acceptable. They learn what counts as liberated, aware, or spiritually mature within the world my writing creates. Soon they are supervising themselves according to a new set of expectations.
A person might begin to feel embarrassed about enjoying a religious service because they imagine I would regard it as regression. Another might conceal uncertainty about a position associated with our community. Someone else might force a complicated experience into the language of existential health because that seems like the vocabulary an insightful person ought to use.
I would have no grounds for celebrating that as the success of my work. It would mean my ideas had become another standard people were using to disqualify their own experience.
Freedom demands room for responses that disappoint the person who helped awaken it. A teacher who praises independence has to face what happens when a student exercises it in an unexpected direction.
There is an easy escape from this problem that creates problems of its own. We tell people to trust themselves, follow their intuition, and stop listening to anyone who challenges their truth. ** The individual** becomes the final authority simply by being the individual.
I do not believe self-trust requires treating every feeling as accurate or every conviction as deserved. We misread situations, defend ourselves against unwelcome evidence, and confuse familiarity with safety. An honest relationship with our own judgment includes recognizing its limitations.
Expertise has a legitimate place here. A physician knows things about illness that I do not, and a historian brings knowledge that my personal impressions will not replace. Friends sometimes recognize a pattern in my behavior long before I am ready to acknowledge it.
We need ways to receive that knowledge without handing over unrestricted authority. A person’s competence has a scope, their advice depends on assumptions, and their understanding of our circumstances remains incomplete. Listening responsibly involves attending to those limits as well as to what they know.
For me, self-trust means remaining a participant in the formation of my judgment. I seek help, consider evidence, revise conclusions, and take responsibility for decisions whose outcomes I cannot guarantee. Uncertainty belongs inside that process rather than serving as proof that someone else should take over.
A trustworthy teacher helps make their thinking available for examination. They give reasons, acknowledge limits, and leave room for the possibility that an attentive student will reach a different conclusion.
Communities devoted to freedom face a particular temptation: believing their stated values exempt them from the dynamics they criticize elsewhere. A group that celebrates questioning might become remarkably defensive when the questions concern its own leadership.
The welcome is usually sincere. People find friendship, language, and relief from experiences of isolation. Over time, however, they also discover which interpretations receive warmth and which produce a subtle withdrawal of recognition.
A community develops a preferred account of what its members have survived and where they are going. That shared account helps people find one another, but it also creates pressure. Someone whose experience complicates the story risks becoming inconvenient to a group that once made them feel visible.
Suppose someone joins a community after leaving religion and later develops a renewed interest in prayer. If they hesitate to mention it because they expect concern about their progress, the community has acquired an unspoken condition of belonging. The same problem arises when a member questions the founder’s interpretation and finds their motives examined more closely than their argument.
As the founder of the ** Center for Non-Religious Spirituality**, I have a responsibility here that good intentions will not discharge. People need room to bring experiences that resist my language, question decisions I have made, and pursue directions I would not choose. Otherwise, the community asks them to trade too much of themselves for inclusion.
No community accommodates every behavior or every demand. Boundaries, accountability, and shared commitments are necessary for people to live together. The question is whether those boundaries serve the community’s actual work or protect its leadership from the discomfort of being challenged.
I use the term ** existential health** because people need support in their relationship with being alive. Questions of meaning, identity, mortality, belonging, and responsibility shape daily life, whether or not someone has a religion or a philosophical vocabulary.
In ** There Is No Cure for Being Human: The Six Existential Realities We Spend Our Lives Trying to Escape**, I explore the conditions of existence that no teaching or teacher resolves for us. Someone who promises certainty about how to live offers relief from having to judge, choose, and bear the uncertainty ourselves. Existential health has to help us shoulder those responsibilities without making dependence on an authority the price of support.
This work concerns what happens when we face a consequential decision, lose an identity, confront death, or discover that the life we have built no longer feels inhabitable. It asks what helps us engage those realities with greater honesty and participation.
That purpose places a limit on the framework itself. Existential health becomes self-defeating if people feel required to demonstrate that they are practicing it correctly. Someone who once worried about being spiritually deficient should not leave my work worrying about whether they are existentially adequate.
A person grieving a death does not owe anyone an eloquent relationship with mortality. Someone exhausted by caregiving should not have to produce a lesson about meaning before their exhaustion is taken seriously. Human experience exceeds the language we develop to understand it, including language I have spent years trying to make useful.
My responsibility is to keep that language answerable to life. When a framework obscures something, we need to revise it or set it aside. Its usefulness depends on what it helps us notice and address, rather than on how thoroughly someone learns to speak it.
I hope readers carry parts of my work into their lives. I also hope they develop judgments, relationships, and ways of living for which they no longer need my explanation.
There is a material dimension to all this that deserves plain speech. I want people to subscribe, read my books, and join programs that support this work. I also know that someone’s continued engagement might reflect attachment to me as much as value in what I offer.
Every departure does not represent liberation, and every long relationship does not represent dependence. Readers leave for ordinary reasons and stay for good ones. But I have to resist treating continued attention as evidence that I am helping, especially when that attention supports my livelihood.
The ethical difficulty appears when what benefits a teacher begins to diverge from what benefits a student. A person might need to spend less time reading about their life and more time attending to it. They might need a different perspective, a local relationship, professional help, or an afternoon in which nothing has to become an insight.
I do not get to interpret that movement as failure simply because it takes them away from my work. Nor should affection make a reader responsible for reassuring me that I remain important.
I value the people who have supported my writing, often through periods when their encouragement mattered more than they knew. That gratitude has to leave them free, or it becomes an obligation wearing the language of relationship.
After years of writing about life beyond religious authority, I am wary of becoming too easily recognized as someone who has arrived. Publication creates an impression of coherence that ordinary life rarely sustains. Readers encounter the paragraph after I have had time to wrestle with it; the people close to me encounter the wrestling.
My history gives me experience to draw from and responsibilities to accept. It does not grant me privileged access to the meaning of someone else’s life. I remain capable of mistaking a hard-earned insight for an answer that applies more widely than it does.…
