This is secular 40

In December, New York Times Magazine writer Lizzy Goodman published an op-ed about the midlife crisis of turning 40. The column compared Goodman’s experience, and that of her friends, to her imagining the same event in the life of Lily Allen, whose recent album, West End Girl, seemed to echo those experiences: “It feels as if she had overheard our conversation before we even had it.”

In Goodman’s telling, turning 40, which she calls “early middle age,” is “full of horrors.” This feeling is represented by the chorus in “Relapse” on the album, singing “I hate it here.”

Unglamorous and heartbroken

Turning 40 is “unglamorous,” “your parents are suddenly old,” your kids are still young, or you’re running out of time to have kids. Maybe you’re newly separated and have to return to the dating scene, which is further humiliation at this age. Many develop drinking issues. “The cost of mistakes” is “higher now” and loss lands “harder than it used to.” The messes are harder to clean up “when it’s no longer cute to be messy.” On the album, Allen calls herself “old and heartbroken and destroyed.” This is all a bleakness “that your younger self couldn’t even have imagined.”

But Goodman retains enough ironic distance to also call all this “sort of mesmerizing and hilarious.”

Goodman and her friends get together and talk about their new situation: “we covered the usual subjects—career, money, fertility, sex, good vintage stores upstate and now, more and more often, mortality.” They, and Allen on the album, wonder if a facelift would fix most of their problems and how long it would last.

Although one could hear a lot of gender issues in the column—aging is harder for women than men in this culture—I bet a lot of men turning 40 today feel the same way. Just replace the facelift with a sports car or an affair.

Tellingly, despite references in the column to how millennials think of their lives as a “documentary,” and of the millennial need of “narrating our lives,” there is no sense of storytelling here, no attempt to fit all these events and conditions into a meaningful arc of a human life.

A telling flatness

The absence of any references by Goodman and her friends to God, religion, or any kind of systematic reflection on the human experience, marks the column as a purely secular document. This is the flatness of secular life in America today. It lacks anything like a story of human existence. This column is secular 40.

A religious person would tell the story of turning 40 differently. A Christian might think of how, with the time left to her, she could become closer to God or serve God’s will more faithfully, before her earthly time ends and she must give an account of her life under the judgment of heaven.

A Buddhist turning 40 might reflect on how age actually allows a greater relinquishment of suffering. The passions of youth recede and one can more easily give up ego and enter into enlightenment.

Goodman has absolutely no hope of this kind of greater possibility for the rest of her life. Or, if she does have such hopes, her sense of irony did not allow her to mention them in the column. Taking the dogs to “doggy day camp” is “the most peak middle-age vibe possible.”

Goodman’s column reflects the enormous failure, to this point at least, of what we could call organized secularism. If you care about the future of secular life in America, this column should be a wakeup call. Obviously, we have failed to enunciate a secular vision of human life that resonates in the culture. We have not given to the Lizzy Goodmans of the world anything that can offer the consolations that traditional religion does.

Training grounds for the marketplace

A big part of the problem is capitalism. Increasingly, liberal arts education, which fosters a lifetime of reflection on the meaning of human life, has fallen into decline as colleges and universities see themselves as training grounds for the marketplace rather than founts of human wisdom and understanding. If you proceed that way in your early life, you run the risk of ending up like Lizzy Goodman.

But we secularists share the blame. The decline of religion went hand in hand with the decline in the liberal arts. “Big Questions” courses were accused of fostering privilege of all kinds, under the critique of “dead white men.” But, instead of opening these courses up to more diverse voices, it proved easier to just let them go. Plus, thinking about the meaning of human life itself was critiqued as “essentialism” as if there could be an essence of anything—nihilism met post-modernism here.

Why do we have to worry about the story of human life? Can’t people just make their own meaning, tell their own stories? No. That is Goodman’s problem. It turns out that there has to be some kind of cultural framework.

A cultural framework for meaning

Despite our current shortcomings, we must not make the same mistake that Goodman does of foreclosing the future just because things are not going well at the moment. There is hope for the future. There never has been a genuinely secular society before in all of human history. So, what we are trying to do has never been attempted before and may take awhile.

All previous cultures had the luxury of relying on the wisdom of religion to educate the young into a coherent story of human life. Even the dissenters had that religious starting point. We don’t have that same luxury of relying on a religious tradition to keep up the morale in the culture—the religious stories are not persuasive any longer—and most of us would not want to do that even if we could. We feel those traditions are actually harmful to flourishing human life, especially if taken literally.

So, what do we do? The first step in changing the cultural landscape is simply to accept the responsibility of meaningful storytelling. We should think of ourselves as secular educators, creating new possibilities for young parents raising their children, teachers in elementary schools and deans at colleges designing curriculums. This should be our main focus, rather than worrying about the political and legal inroads that organized religion is making today. Those political and legal efforts have their place, but the main thing keeping religion around is that it at least is something and the alternative is nothing.

There are certainly big possibilities out there. The theologian Tom Berry, for example, called all human beings to “The Great Work” of transitioning from a destructive human presence on Earth to living in a sustainable, mutually enhancing relationship with the planet. The enormous potential of AI to create, at last, a humane economic system is another possibility. Medicine has created the potential for really reducing human suffering, as the amazing response to COVID-19 showed. Then there is the collected wisdom of humanity, from religion to philosophy, from the West to the East, calling us to a renewed global and universal world historical narrative that could never have been developed before. And there is no doubt a lot more that has not surfaced because we have not thought about secular life in these terms.

If we create a new kind of secular framework, we could usher in a golden age for humanity. If we did that, or even began to do that, or even just thought about beginning to do that, secular 40 would look very different.