This week, became available, reached #1 bestseller status, and continued to hold that position. Seeing a book I wrote alongside the work of Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir (two writers who have helped me find my way) has been a peculiar and wonderful experience. Apparently, neither of them was available to object.
I am grateful to everyone who purchased a copy, shared the book, or helped these questions reach another person. Writing begins in a fairly solitary place. A book becomes something else when it enters other people’s lives.
But the question at the heart of this book resists being settled by a successful launch:
What if you reach the end of your life and realize you never truly lived it?
A person can become accomplished at almost everything a life requires while remaining strangely distant from the experience of having one. We can understand ourselves, fulfill our responsibilities, maintain our relationships, and still feel that something essential is happening just beyond our reach. Even our efforts to recover that contact can become another project to manage, another way of standing over ourselves.
Across five articles this week, I explored how that distance develops and what it asks of us. An additional article, written after the Oregon school shooting, brought the question into the public world: what conditions are we creating for human beings to feel able to live at all?
Taken together, these pieces ask something more demanding than whether we are getting through our days. They ask what those days are becoming, and how much of ourselves we are able to bring into them.
The series began with ** Your Life Keeps Happening Without You**, an exploration of the distance between functioning and inhabiting. There is a particular loneliness in having no obvious reason to complain while feeling increasingly absent from your own experience. Your responsibilities are being met. People can depend on you. Yet the life everyone sees seems to contain less and less of the person living it.
That distance can survive an extraordinary amount of self-understanding. In ** You’ve Analyzed Yourself Out of Your Own Life**, I considered what happens when reflection becomes continuous self-supervision. We become fluent in our patterns, histories, and defenses. Every feeling arrives with an interpretation attached. Eventually, even an ordinary encounter must pass through an internal committee before we can experience it.
These first two articles belong together because they expose a difficulty that competence and insight can conceal. Both are valuable. Neither guarantees contact with being alive. You can know why you withdraw from a conversation and still spend the whole conversation studying your withdrawal. At some point, the person speaking to you deserves your attention, and you deserve the possibility of being reached.
** Loved for Who You Aren’t** carried that question into belonging. What happens when a relationship continues because we have learned which parts of ourselves to leave outside it?
Many of us acquired this skill early. We learned how to remain welcome: which questions to withhold, which emotions to soften, which desires to explain away. Over time, accommodation became so familiar that we stopped noticing its cost. Other people experienced a stable relationship. We experienced the exhaustion of maintaining the person who made that stability possible.
This is one reason acceptance can coexist with profound loneliness. Affection reaches the version of ourselves we have made available, while something more difficult and more alive remains unencountered.
Reading the week’s first three pieces together reveals a troubling possibility: becoming useful, understandable, and lovable can cost us our participation in life. What began as a way to belong can become a way to disappear. How much of our lives do we spend preserving a place in the world that requires our absence?
For people who have left religion, certainty can become the missing permission slip for everything that follows. We may no longer believe the answers we inherited, yet continue to assume that a settled answer must come before a livable life.
** Stop Waiting for Something to Believe In** examined that expectation. Losing a framework can unsettle identity, belonging, morality, and the future all at once. Those losses deserve time and attention. But uncertainty can also become a waiting room we never quite leave.
There are people we can love before resolving the meaning of love. There are commitments we can make without knowing who we will be in ten years. A friendship can matter while our metaphysics remain unfinished.
Something becomes possible when we allow experience to contribute to our understanding. We discover what a commitment requires by keeping it, what we value by making choices, and where we belong by risking some measure of participation. Reflection continues, but now it has a life to learn from.
The series culminated in ** The Grief Comes on Both Roads**, which brought these questions to love and mortality. We can hold something back from a relationship because we know it will end. We can ration tenderness, avoid dependence, or postpone the conversation that would leave us more exposed.
The difficulty is that withholding does not secure the bargain we hoped for. The person remains mortal. The relationship remains vulnerable. We have surrendered some of what was possible between us without obtaining protection from eventual loss.
This essay also reaches into the grief of leaving religion: the community, identity, certainty, and imagined future that may disappear with a worldview. A necessary departure can hurt deeply. Missing what held us does not establish that we should return to it.
Together, the final two essays ask whether we can allow love and commitment to matter without requiring them to become permanent. We cannot settle that question once and carry the answer untouched through the rest of our lives. We meet it again whenever someone matters enough to make us vulnerable.
This week also included ** They Came to School to Live: After the Oregon school shooting, what the gun debate leaves unanswered**. I wrote it as a previously scheduled conversation with educators about existential health in schools took on a terrible immediacy.
The article asks us to consider safety alongside the conditions through which children encounter belonging, agency, responsibility, and trust. Firearms and their consequences require serious attention. So does the wider question of what our institutions teach people about their own lives and the lives of others.
The movement from personal essays to public tragedy matters. An invitation to inhabit life carries obligations for the worlds we build around people. A child needs adults and institutions worthy of trust. A person cannot compensate indefinitely for a community that makes belonging conditional on self-erasure. Our capacity to participate develops within conditions that can sustain it or wear it away.
Existential health therefore reaches beyond the private work of finding our footing. It asks what we owe one another so that having a life includes a meaningful opportunity to live it.
Looking back over these essays, I keep noticing the bargains we try to make with being alive. We will participate when we understand ourselves better. We will become more honest when acceptance is secure. We will commit when certainty returns. We will love more fully when loss feels less threatening.
Each bargain has a history. There are reasons we learned to ask for protection. Some of those reasons remain relevant, and discernment includes knowing when distance or delay is necessary.
But there is also a moment when a reasonable desire for protection becomes an impossible condition for living. We ask a friendship to guarantee that we will never be disappointed, or a decision to establish that we will never regret it. We ask the future to reassure us before we contribute anything to its making.
Consider one part of your life you have placed on hold. What would have to happen before you allowed yourself to enter it? Is that condition something you can reasonably establish, or have you asked life for a promise it cannot make?
The answer may reveal a practical next step. You might need information, a clearer boundary, an honest conversation, or more support. You might also discover that enough is already available to begin, even though much remains unresolved.
I am delighted that The Practice of Being Alive has reached #1, and thankful for everyone helping it find readers. Beneath that celebration is a hope that has accompanied the writing all along: that these pages might help someone recognize where they have gone missing, and find a way to participate again.
You can ** learn more about the book and find purchase options here**. The five articles offer several doors into its questions. Begin with the one that names something you have been living but have struggled to say.
And if someone came to mind while you were reading - a friend who feels trapped in self-analysis, someone rebuilding after religion, a person afraid to love what they cannot keep - consider sending them the article that brought them to mind. Sometimes another person’s words make it possible to begin a conversation we have needed for years.
This weekend will contain ordinary things: a meal, an errand, a message waiting for an answer, someone whose presence has become familiar enough to overlook. Our unfinished questions will accompany us into all of it. There may still be room to listen more closely, say something true, or let an ordinary moment reach us before it passes.
Existential health in schools. This week, I met with teachers and educators to discuss a K–12 existential education pilot through the Institute for Existential Health. We are exploring how schools might help students develop their relationships with meaning, belonging, agency, and uncertainty within the everyday experience of education. The work is early, and public education requires patience, a quality I continue to develop against my will.
Building places to belong. A second conversation focused on an existential health community building and organizing initiative through the Institute. One question guiding this work is how people can help create the conditions for belonging where they actually live. Writing about our need for community brings a responsibility to explore how we build and sustain it.
From training to contribution. Next week, I’ll meet with our Existential Health Practitioner cohort for their first capstone project session. These yearlong projects give participants an opportunity to develop something useful to practitioners, communities, or the emerging field itself. Part of my role is helping them recognize where their experience and interests meet a need worth responding to.
An easier way to explore CNRS. This week, the ** Center for Non-Religious Spirituality** introduced a new public landing page and a free membership option, making it easier to look around and get acquainted. Our twice-monthly Sunday morning Community Hour is also open to anyone—a place to meet others and join the conversation wherever you find yourself with religion, spirituality, or the questions of being human.
Taking the book into your life. I’m offering a six-week online course based on , with practice and live conversation grounded in the questions you’re actually living. You can
What anthropology brings to existential health. This week, I began a more focused study of social, cultural, and applied anthropology as resources for developing the field of existential health. Social anthropology examines how relationships and institutions organize human life; cultural anthropology explores how people learn and live through meanings, beliefs, and practices. The two overlap considerably. Applied anthropology brings these approaches to practical problems in communities and organizations. Together, they offer ways to understand how our encounters with meaning, belonging, and identity are shaped by the worlds we inhabit—and how those worlds might change.
A conversation worth making room for. This week, I had the first of two video calls with one of this Substack’s Founding Members. It was a rich conversation, and I appreciated the opportunity to spend an unhurried hour exploring what mattered to the person on the other side of the screen. Founding membership includes two 60-minute video calls with me - space to bring your questions, experiences, and whatever you’d like to explore together.
If something in this week’s writing caught your attention, these collections offer a place to follow it.
** If You Read Only Fifteen Things I’ve Written** — Start here for the articles that best capture my exploration of meaning, spirituality, existential health, and what it means to be human.
** Ten Articles to Understand Existential Health** — A more focused introduction to the field at the heart of my work.
** What Comes After Religion?** — Essays on losing your religion, reclaiming your authority, and learning to inhabit your life.
20 Articles for People Who Are Done With Easy Answers — For readers whose questions have outgrown the explanations they’ve been offered.
** Nihilism and the Life That Remains: A Guide to Meaning, Spiritual Crisis, and Existential Health** — For those confronting what remains when familiar sources of meaning lose their authority.
** Read at Your Own Risk: An Anthology of My Most Unsettling Articles** — For when you’re ready to examine assumptions you may not realize you’re protecting.
Consider becoming a Paid or Founding subscriber. A paid subscription ($50 annually) supports my writing and includes membership in the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. Founding membership ($250 annually) also includes two 60-minute video calls with me to explore the questions you’re living. Thank you for helping this work grow.
