The ferocity of evolution at play. It is a serious flaw in the process of evolution that it depends on the “survival of the fittest.” And I believe we’ll eventually discover that that ugly process was a wrong turn, not a necessity; and that there are many “alien” planets (yet to be discovered) where the evolutionary process is based on dilation and merge, instead of fear and aggression. We think plants are stupid life-forms whose only purpose is to provide food for the animals. But we’re now discovering that plants have consciousness. They’re sentient beings. And if animals never arose and there were only plants, sentient life on this planet would be inherently and effortlessly beautiful, peaceful and ecstatic.
For many raised in the church, escape presents a singular problem. “They have an identity to go back to,” says one former Scientologist. “We’re trying to discover our identity in a vacuum.”
Christi Gordon’s childhood scrapbook. Photo by Justin Kaneps for Rolling Stone.
Scientologists have special words for the people gathered at a sleek Airbnb townhouse on a mild day in September 2018. They’re irrational, or “banky.” They’re putting off bad vibes, or being “downtone.” They’re full of negative energy, or “chargey,” and they won’t contain it — they won’t “get their TRs in.” But the people sprawling on the living room’s vinyl wraparound couch don’t use those words to describe themselves anymore. Growing up in Scientology, they say they were constantly told to be stoic. Now that they’ve left, they’re tired of jargon about repressing emotion. Instead, they’re looking for new words to describe themselves—new ways to express the psychological consequences of their upbringing—and they’ve traveled all the way to Brooklyn to tell their stories. They’ve already landed on one new way to think about themselves—a phrase that helps illuminate why it’s so hard for them feel things. They call themselves the Children of Scientology. Psychologists call them SGAs, or Second Generation Adults.
Christi Gordon is an SGA, meaning that she — like everyone she’s invited today — grew up immersed in Scientology before eventually cutting ties. SGAs aren’t like people who join and leave cults as adults. “Many first gens choose to leave their families,” Gordon explains, “but ours were stolen from us. Scientology hijacked our parents’ hearts, minds and time, and it hijacked our childhoods.” Gordon was never taught how to be a kid. Instead, she was expected to be what Scientologists like to call an “adult in a small body,” taking care of herself, by herself, and repressing the fear, grief and loneliness that came with that. She says the experience is like bending over your whole life, trying to avoid hitting a ceiling someone assures you is there. And once you realize there is no ceiling, you’ve already grown up crooked. Gordon believes that people transitioning out of Scientology don’t just need a home, or a job—although they often need that. They also need a support group, a community where people can put new words to real emotions and experiences. And that’s what the meetup today is all about.
As more people leave Scientology, more people like Gordon are speaking out. They call the church a cult, and claim that it uses the promise of self-improvement to control and abuse its members. They also accuse the Sea Org — an elite group of the religion’s most dedicated members — of being a front for forced labor and surveillance, and criticize the church for tearing apart families, demanding that parents disconnect from children who oppose the religion. As these accusations have snowballed, the church has held its ground, continuing to deny that the church has anything to do with forced labor and family separations. It claims that its beliefs and practices help members to “freely experience their emotions and live life to the fullest.” It calls the Children of Scientology an “anti-religious hate group,” full of people that they say have a vendetta against the church, and accuses this magazine of “pandering to anti-Scientology propaganda” by publishing the group’s claims. But for Gordon, Children of Scientology isn’t about hate, or vengeance. After a lifetime of bending over, Gordon is trying to show others — and herself — that it’s possible to unkink what’s crooked so they can finally stand up straight.
***
When I first meet Gordon, she looks like the opposite of crooked. She’s tall and thin, her blond hair swept up in a sensible twist. As I enter the kitchen, she’s busy arranging snacks on the kitchen table and refreshing people’s drinks. Everything about her manner exudes competence and confidence. She doesn’t look like someone whose mother left her at the Cadet Org at the age of nine, a church-run “boot camp,” as she calls it, where Gordon says she lived with dozens of other “neglected and abandoned” Scientology kids and one adult. She was stuck taking care of infant babies in the nursery and trying to avoid the parasite outbreaks that flared up in the squalid living conditions.
The church acknowledges that Gordon enrolled in the Cadet Org, but disputes the idea that it’s a boot camp. They describe the Cadet Org — which was dissolved around the turn of the Millennium — as “a facility that provided children of Sea Organization members with an excellent basic education and Scientology religious instruction.” They claim that Gordon lived in a converted Quality Inn that was regularly inspected by the county health department.
When Gordon grew up, she decided the organization wasn’t for her. She remembers walking out of the Commodore’s Messenger Org in Clearwater, Florida, after being ordered to write confessions of her crimes as part of the church’s “ethics handling.” It was the last straw for Gordon. (The church says she was not called for ethics handling in Clearwater and says that her account is fabricated.).
You might expect a person like that to be frazzled, a mess. But if anything, Gordon knows she’s too calm, too competent. In fact, for years after leaving Scientology, Gordon could barely feel at all. Growing up in the church, she says, emotions like grief or frustration were discouraged, while enthusiasm and serenity were celebrated. So Gordon stuffed away her feelings to survive.
Her experience is a common one. And, according to many of the ex-Scientologists I spoke with at Gordon’s gathering, it’s not just prevalent — it’s baked into the religion in something known as the emotional tone scale. The scale was developed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who created it in order to gauge a person’s life-force energy, or theta. The current scale goes from -40, or Total Failure, to 40, Serenity of Beingness, ranking emotions from grief and anxiety to cheerfulness and enthusiasm. Emotions on the low end of the scale aren’t just discouraged — they’re signs of bad theta, which must be converted to good theta so a person can progress spiritually. According to the members I spoke with, the tone scale became the basis for punishing emotions that the church deemed negative, and Scientology’s mission became almost indistinguishable from the project of repressing “bad” emotions. The solution to coping with these bad moods wasn’t to express or acknowledge them, the Second Gens explain. The solution was to go through a series of communication drills, or Training Routines, some of which critics say are designed to leave believers in a state of hypnotic calm—and then to keep the effects of those TRs in, or contain them. The result? A generation of children who grew up numb, unable to feel or even recognize basic emotions.
The church rejects the idea that it discourages negative emotions, and claims that all of its principles and practices are designed to help people recognize their emotions in order to “become more able and more aware spiritually.”
Gordon, 52, first stepped away from Scientology 31 years ago, but it took her decades to recognize her emotions. People called her flat, superior, condescending, cold. When she fell into an abusive relationship, she had to learn to react when her boyfriend hit her, because her natural reaction — to do nothing — made him even angrier. But eventually, her emotions started leaking out. She’d cry during Hallmark commercials, or during movies, and rush out of the theater, ashamed. She felt like an alien amongst enemies, afraid to reveal her true self. She wanted to heal, but she had no idea who she was. Where did Scientology end and her real self begin?
Christi Gordon in California, May 2019. Photograph by Justin Kaneps for Rolling Stone.
Eventually, she realized she couldn’t do it on her own, but she couldn’t do it with just anybody, either. Over the course of several years, she got in touch with a few Second Gen ex-Scientology friends and eventually proposed a radical idea: getting together. She called the group Children of Scientology, and she envisioned it as a place where SGAs could come and get support, building an ad hoc family where they could learn to feel, think and survive in safety.
***
The retreat in Brooklyn is the fourth and largest of Gordon’s Second Gen meet-ups. Fifteen people have RSVP’d for today’s get-together, with the plan to share stories and chart the future of the group. They also want to share their stories with a larger audience, and they’re working on a Children of Scientology website where Second Gens can describe their experiences and connect with other ex-Scientologists who’ve gone through similar things. The week of, they tell me, they still had no idea who would actually show up, and when I get there at noon, the group hasn’t gathered yet. “Can you come back in an hour?” Tristan Silverman, one of the event organizers, texts me. “People were up late last night.” But the real issue is that many of them were part of the Sea Org, and they aren’t interested in anyone telling them when or where to do something ever again. So Gordon and Silverman are playing it loose. When I get back to the house an hour later, people are drinking Chardonnay and smoking obsessively outside. “Technically, I stopped,” says a woman we’ll call Susan, the facilitator for the day, who asks me not to use her real name in order to protect her family members who are still inside the church. “But on a weekend like this?”
In one corner a middle-aged man wearing a shirt that says “Ideas Are Bulletproof” is talking loudly with another middle-aged man about his YouTube channel on cults. In the kitchen, a man with orange ringlets and a maroon suit is introduced to me as Hubbard’s great-grandson, Jamie DeWolf. DeWolf didn’t grow up in Scientology, and spends much of his time directing films, writing and performing spoken-word poetry. But he recognizes the long shadow Scientology cast on his own family, and the damage it’s done to others. “I’d love nothing more than to see Scientology end in my lifetime,” he says. Silverman — wearing a leather wallet holster, her hair cut short — is in the corner, giving everyone in arm’s reach a generous pour of wine. “We need this today,” she says to no one in particular, and tosses some back.
Finally, Susan gathers the group, being careful to not herd too hard. As soon as she starts speaking, a man starts moving toward the door. “I’m actually gonna sit this one out,” he says, meaning the rest of the day. “These sharing things just aren’t my style.” Susan nods, and he disappears out the door. She gets it, after all. Nobody here would say sharing is their style. But they’re here anyway, trying to learn how. So she starts them off easy. “Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves,” she says, and they begin.
The first few people follow the prompt, but then someone breaks down. A man in his 30s with a shaved head tells the group that his wife’s Scientologist parents refuse to see their children. Every few months, he says, he drops off photos in his in-laws’ mailbox. But he never hears back. A thin blond woman next to him nods. Her family was recruited into Scientology from Russia when she was little. On her own since she was 11, she’s been out for several years and is happily married, but things haven’t gotten easier. She had a stillbirth, and is raising a child with autism. “All the other moms are always telling me how proactive I am. But that’s just a coping mechanism. I’m just making it go right,” she says, using the Scientology phrase for taking charge of a bad situation. “I haven’t even grieved.” She’s trying to do that now, with the help of a therapist, but it’s hard. “As a Second Gen, it’s different than someone who joins later,” she says. “They have an identity to go back to. We’re trying to discover our identity in a vacuum.”
Dr. Cyndi Matthews, a cult expert and therapist, says SGAs from cults —what psychologists refer to as “high-demand groups” — often face these sorts of challenges. People who join and leave as adults have the luxury of connecting with their past selves, she says. “For them, it’s about reconnecting, rediscovering, re-everything. But SGAs don’t have that. Their identity is the cult.” And, since Second Gens’parents often choose the cult over them — during their childhoods and when they leave — they often develop severe attachment issues, fearing that everyone in their lives will hurt or leave them. This makes it harder to make friends, which makes it harder to transition out.
***
At the retreat, the intros are still going. DeWolf apologizes for what his family has done to everyone else. “My family owes other families,” he says, then commits to using his video-editing skills to help people share their stories on the Children of Scientology website. A woman reads an excerpt from a book about how adverse childhood experiences can lead to heart attacks, autoimmune disease, and early death. ‘Ideas Are Bulletproof’ guy introduces himself as Chris Shelton, a YouTube host and ex-Sea Org member who now spends his life examining the claims of Scientology and other cults. “I’m trying to teach a bit of critical thinking,” he says, but when the group razzes him he confesses. “OK, OK, I did used to believe in the prison planet,” he says, referring to Scientology’s origin story that an intergalactic leader, Xenu, exiled billions of his subjects to Earth (or Teegeeack) 75 million years ago. For a minute, people go down the rabbit hole of Scientology dogma. There is a brief but passionate discussion about whether being reincarnated into a cat’s body would be a promotion or demotion.
Then David Anthony brings them back. A Brooklynite, he’s come with a small stack of memorabilia. There’s a black-and-white picture that shows him walking on a beach with his mother, the Sea Org ship Apollo hulking in the background. There’s a typed letter that, he explains, is from Hubbard himself, asking an 11-year-old Anthony for his help with a vague but very important project. “I don’t know many of you,” he says to the group, “but I know about what you experienced, and you know what I experienced, so we know each other. The group is great because there are so few of us out there.” He starts to cry, and Gordon gives him a hug. “We get to have emotions now,” Anthony says. “And they’re really fucking important. It’s taken a while.”
Then it’s Nathan Rich’s turn. Serious, quiet and lanky, he’s spent the past hour staring at the ground. When he finally speaks, he tells us that he was first shipped off to the Mace-Kingsley Ranch — a now-defunct, church-affiliated organization for children run by two prominent Scientologists, which he describes as a reform camp — when he was eight, where he says they paddled him for disobedience. (Leah Remini has covered alleged abuses at Mace-Kingsley on her show, Scientology and the Aftermath, and Janet Reitman has described the camp’s culture of hard labor in Rolling Stone. However, the church claims that it was not in charge of ranch operations and has “no knowledge” of the disciplinary practices there. Ranch co-founder Carol Kingsley disagrees with the idea that the ranch was a reform camp. In an email responding to the allegations, Kingsley said the ranch was a school designed to help at-risk teens, and did not condone corporal punishment. She calls Rich’s allegations a “reflection of his personal unhappiness” and a “desire to attack those who tried to help him.”)
Though drug use at the ranch was prohibited, Rich says that’s where he got into drugs. After a brief attempt to straighten out — a Scientology job, Scientology girlfriend, and Scientology school in his spare time — he left home and lived on the streets, using and dealing drugs. At one point, early on, he called his mom, asking for forgiveness. He says she gave him a number to call to re-enter the church and told him not to call her again. It took Rich years of addiction and homelessness before he finally got sober and off the street. He’s been out of Scientology for nearly 20 years now, and though he was interviewed on Leah Remini’s show, this is the first time in decades he’s talked to people like him in an intimate setting.
Tristan Silverman in California, May 2019. Photograph by Justin Kaneps for Rolling Stone.
Rich currently lives in China, and he’s traveled halfway across the globe to be here. Like so many others in the room, Rich wants a place where he can process what happened to him in Scientology, among people who understand him. And he knows firsthand how hard it is to learn to feel after a lifetime of emotional stoicism. He tells the group about the first time he cried as an adult. It was late at night, he says, and he was watching It’s a Wonderful Life. “I didn’t even know I could do that anymore,” he says. But it gave him hope for the future.
Susan is nodding along with Rich’s story. “You were dealing LSD?” she says. “I probably got my drugs from you.” She says took MDMA for years because it was the only time she felt connected to other people. When she finally went to therapy, she spent the first few days crying, and the first few years figuring out what a feeling was. “It was like flashcards,” she says. “What is this feeling? Is this anger?”
Everyone is sharing their stories now, and the more people talk about Scientology, the more they talk in Scientologese, sentences stuffed with acronyms and corporate-sounding inspirational phrases. However much they might dislike Scientology, its jargon is their native tongue. Some even say it’s a relief to talk without code-switching, or worrying that they’re talking gibberish. There’s a reason why the language is so central to the belief system, and so hard to shake. According to psychiatrist and thought-reform expert Robert Jay Lifton, new lexicons are common in cults — and often essential. He calls the practice “loading the language,” and includes it as one of eight core features of high-demand groups. When the group breaks to smoke, I ask Shelton for a second opinion. Forget the question of emotional repression for a second. If there are words for these feelings already, why not use them? “It makes us feel special and unique,” he jokes. “If we used regular English words, then anyone could do this!” But he agrees with Lifton’s idea of cult idioms as thought-terminating cliches. “It gets people thinking in the cult leader’s system,” he says. “It literally makes it harder to think outside the box.”
Dr. Matthews agrees, pointing out that many high-demand groups have jargon around emotional repression. Some fundamentalist Christian cults use the phrase “keep sweet,” she says, meaning “stop whining, stop complaining.” She adds, “Jargon like that rewires the brain.”
***
Silverman thinks a lot about the power of words — especially after Gordon recruited her to gather people’s stories for Children of Scientology’s new website. It’s now Silverman’s job to help people unearth years of silenced stories and emotions, with the hope that this will help them and also help others who are struggling outside of Scientology. Luckily, putting words to things is something that Silverman knows a lot about. She was born into Scientology, and writing was her one refuge, even before she could read. “I would spend hours at a desk just tracing letters I didn’t even understand from the book to a page,” Silverman says. “It was like a secret treasure map that you’d unlock it and get all this info.”
And Silverman needed that map. As a kid, she struggled with mental health, and often had periods where she’d dissociate, leaving her brain and come back minutes or hours later, having partially or completely forgotten what had happened. She just knew that people thought she was bad, and she worried they were right. Scientology didn’t help. Whenever she got sad, or “griefy,” she followed church protocol and did Training Routines. According to the church, the exercises are “drills” to improve communication skills. In one, Silverman explains, two people are supposed to face each other for hours without moving or reacting. In another, she says, a person attempts to sit, calmly, while their partner yells things at them to make them react. According to Silverman, their purpose isn’t to create calm auditors or clear communicators. The goal of some TRs is to “exteriorize,” to have the soul leave the body and watch it from the outside. “And what is that?” she asks. “That’s dissociation. That’s building the muscle to dissociate at will.” Silverman knows that she would have had mental-health issues regardless of her upbringing, but she also believes that a good doctor would have helped. Since Scientology is opposed to psychiatry — viewing it as a cover for “human-rights abuses,” and “an elaborate and deadly hoax,” according to a representative for the church — Silverman never got that good doctor. She now suffers with diagnosed D.I.D., or dissociative identity disorder, and says that when she comes back from an episode she is sometimes sitting up straight, hands on knees, in the TR position.
When Silverman tries to understand her life, there are huge holes missing. She compares herself to Claire Danes on Homeland, with her wall of clues and connected dots. “A lot of my life I’ve been collecting pieces of information [about what happened to me],” she says. “But I don’t know how to connect the dots.” Honestly, she tells me, she doesn’t know if she ever will.
In the meantime, she’s trying make it, and she’s trying to help others make it, as well. That’s why she convinced her old ex-Scientology friend, who we’ll call Abigail, to come to the retreat. (Abigail’s name has been changed because she fears that talking openly about her opinions could harm her relationships with family and friends, and trigger backlash from the church.) At the retreat, Abigail jokes that she’s been involved in wacky religious ceremonies since she was in utero, when a man blessed her mom’s womb with a peacock feather. But an early life as hippie seekers was not exactly on the Scientology track. A pair of leftist activists, Abigail’s parents met protesting Vietnam, and Abigail remembers putting up campaign posters for a progressive city mayor when she was barely seven. When her mom got into Scientology through a business consultant she hired, though, she went all the way. And for Abigail, everything changed.
Abigail’s been out of Scientology for 11 years now, but has stayed neutral to protect her mom, who’s still inside. But in the fall of 2019, she is starting a master’s in liberal studies looking at the cultural, economic and social institutions that led to Scientology, and she feels like it’s time to face her intense past. No casual believer, 37-year-old Abigail spent seven years in the Sea Org, rising through the ranks until she was traveling the world, promoting Hubbard’s ideas.
But when she started to doubt — inspired, she says, by a lunch with some skeptical D.C. nonprofits, a clash with Scientology authorities, and a late-night philosophy conversation with a street-corner pimp — she doubted hard. “I had never thought, ‘Do I want to leave?’” she says. “The words just fell out of my mouth.” At one of Scientology’s international management offices in L.A., she began to cry. “I’m done, I’m done,” she said to her boss. But she wasn’t. As part of the process of leaving, Abigail had to do six months of hard labor in the Sea Org “galley,” Scientology’s naval-inspired euphemism for the worst work assignments. She says her old friends would pass her in the hallways, but now they looked past and through her, or averted their eyes altogether. (The church claims that a Sea Org member can leave at any time, and denies that hard labor is part of the leaving process.)
One subject who did not wish to reveal their identity, photographed in California, May 2019. Photograph by Justin Kaneps for Rolling Stone.
Abigail’s fall from Scientology was long and difficult. When she got a job at her mom’s secular healthcare company, she used Hubbard’s business principles to whip the employees into shape, banning water-cooler chat, instating a uniform policy and riding people to keep their productivity “stats” up. Unsurprisingly, she made few friends, and her efforts didn’t work. In her relationships, things weren’t much better. Believing the Scientology notion that all miscommunication is based on some sort of transgression, she’d try to resolve fights by getting boyfriends to confess their sins to her. Meanwhile, Abigail was beginning to wonder if Scientology had a handle on how to live in the first place. “All of a sudden I was like, ‘Why the fuck can’t I feel any emotions?’” she says. “Why am I so shut down?” On a bus, six months after she left, the big questions hit her. “Am I a fucking eternal spiritual being that’s going to be reincarnated again and again or am I just a bunch of cells?” she said. She’d thought she’d have a million lives. Now she was scared she’d only have one.
Abigail has tried to fill the void left by Scientology, but it hasn’t been easy. She’s been exploring her Jewish ancestry, but was freaked out when, on a Birthright trip to Israel, she saw orthodox men shielding their eyes from her. It reminded her of being on the decks at the Sea Org. As a progressive, she’s gotten in arguments with other Jews about Israel and Palestine, and she chafes against language about sin, or the idea of an angry God. Despite all that, though, she longs to find a belief system she can put her faith in, and a group where she can belong. She never practiced Judaism growing up, but her mother’s Jewish and so according to tradition, she’s Jewish, too — at least by blood. And for Abigail, that’s something to hold onto. It’s one of the few things that she was before she was a Scientologist — in spite of being Scientologist. It’s a way to connect to a past, a family and a meaning beyond herself. And so she keeps trying, cobbling together a self-styled faith that rejects dogmatism, guilt and authority and embraces ritual and compassion. She doesn’t know what she’s doing, she tells me. All she knows is that she feels a kinship with other Jewish people — as if her body remembers some other way of being and belonging and is giving her clues.
***
It’s the second night of the retreat, and everyone who’s still up is gathered around Nathan Rich , the lanky ex-addict, at the kitchen table. He’s in his chair, his fingers pressed into his eyeballs, breathing hard. Moments before, while another group member was telling a story about reconnecting with their mom after years of separation, Rich had crumpled like a worn-out doll, putting his head on the table until Gordon noticed. When she comes to him, he chokes it out. “I will never have that with my mom, ever,” he says. The last time he talked to his mom, he wrote her a letter saying he hated her. Now, he wants to tell her that he understands her more, that he’s ready to make peace. But he can’t. She died in 2010. Gordon cries with him. Silverman is there, too. She hasn’t spoken to her mom in a decade.
No one knows quite what to do, or how to comfort him. They can’t exactly tell him he’s wrong. So they hug him. They suggest talking to a therapist. At this, Rich rears up. “Why?” he says, his face once again an impassive mask. “Tell me why, after everything that has happened to me, I should trust anyone else?” The group talks until past midnight, trying to answer his question. When they’re done, he’s still not convinced. “I just don’t know why I’d do it,” he says to me as I am tying my shoes at the door. “How could it be worth the cost?”
Earlier that evening, Abigail went into the bathroom and wrapped her head in a scarf and grabbed a couple of crackers from the kitchen. Then she slid out the front door, not wanting to attract attention. She’d recently read up on Rosh Hashanah, and discovered a Jewish new year’s ritual: throwing bread into running water to renounce transgression. But Abigail didn’t like the idea of transgression. It felt too much like Scientology. So she decided to do the ritual her way. She decided to walk to the Brooklyn Bridge and drop some crackers in the water, not as a symbol of sin but a metaphor for anything that comes between her and God. The crackers would stand for letting go.
She walked out into the night, into the drizzle and wind and fog of a stormy Brooklyn evening. She headed toward the bridge, half expecting to see a train of other Jews when she got there. No one was there, but it helped to know that there were others, around the city, participating in the ritual. When she got to the bridge, she didn’t know what to do. So she stood for a moment, then got on her knees and dropped her crackers through the slats, watching them hit the water below. When she looked up, she saw the Statue of Liberty looming up out of the mist, and was surprised to find herself moved. She thought of her Jewish ancestors fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe, sailing into this harbor to see the same statue as she sees now. She thought of her mother, still in Scientology, and all the long years it’s taken to get to the bridge where she is standing now. Then she turned around and walked back to the group.
This article was originally published on June 24, 2019, by Rolling Stone, and is republished here with permission.
Despite reflecting on the good life for more than 2,500 years, philosophers have not had much to say about middle age. For me, approaching 40 was a time of stereotypical crisis. Having jumped the hurdles of the academic career track, I knew I was lucky to be a tenured professor of philosophy. Yet stepping back from the busyness of life, the rush of things to do, I found myself wondering, what now? I felt a sense of repetition and futility, of projects completed just to be replaced by more. I would finish this article, teach this class, and then I would do it all again. It was not that everything seemed worthless. Even at my lowest ebb, I didn’t feel there was no point in what I was doing. Yet somehow the succession of activities, each one rational in itself, fell short.
I am not alone. Perhaps you have felt, too, an emptiness in the pursuit of worthy goals. This is one form of midlife crisis, at once familiar and philosophically puzzling. The paradox is that success can seem like failure. Like any paradox, it calls for philosophical treatment. What is the emptiness of the midlife crisis if not the unqualified emptiness in which one sees no value in anything? What was wrong with my life?
In search of an answer, I turned to the 19th-century pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is notorious for preaching the futility of desire. That getting what you want could fail to make you happy would not have surprised him at all. On the other hand, not having it is just as bad. For Schopenhauer, you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you get what you want, your pursuit is over. You are aimless, flooded with a ‘fearful emptiness and boredom’, as he put it in The World as Will and Representation (1818). Life needs direction: desires, projects, goals that are so far unachieved. And yet this, too, is fatal. Because wanting what you do not have is suffering. In staving off the void by finding things to do, you have condemned yourself to misery. Life ‘swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents’.
Schopenhauer’s picture of human life might seem unduly bleak. Often enough, midlife brings with it failure or success in cherished projects: you have the job you worked for many years to get, the partner you hoped to meet, the family you meant to start – or else you don’t. Either way, you look for new directions. But the answer to achieving your goals, or giving them up, feels obvious: you simply make new ones. Nor is the pursuit of what you want pure agony. Revamping your ambitions can be fun.
Still, I think there is something right in Schopenhauer’s dismal conception of our relationship with our ends, and that it can illuminate the darkness of midlife. Taking up new projects, after all, simply obscures the problem. When you aim at a future goal, satisfaction is deferred: success has yet to come. But the moment you succeed, your achievement is in the past. Meanwhile, your engagement with projects subverts itself. In pursuing a goal, you either fail or, in succeeding, end its power to guide your life. No doubt you can formulate other plans. The problem is not that you will run out of projects (the aimless state of Schopenhauer’s boredom), it’s that your way of engaging with the ones that matter most to you is by trying to complete them and thus expel them from your life. When you pursue a goal, you exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.
Hence one common figure of the midlife crisis: the striving high-achiever, obsessed with getting things done, who is haunted by the hollowness of everyday life. When you are obsessed with projects, ceaselessly replacing old with new, satisfaction is always in the future. Or the past. It is mortgaged, then archived, but never possessed. In pursuing goals, you aim at outcomes that preclude the possibility of that pursuit, extinguishing the sparks of meaning in your life.
The question is what to do about this. For Schopenhauer, there is no way out: what I am calling a midlife crisis is simply the human condition. But Schopenhauer was wrong. In order to see his mistake, we need to draw distinctions among the activities we value: between ones that aim at completion, and ones that don’t.
Adapting terminology from linguistics, we can say that ‘telic’ activities – from ‘telos’, the Greek word for purpose – are ones that aim at terminal states of completion and exhaustion. You teach a class, get married, start a family, earn a raise. Not all activities are like this, however. Others are ‘atelic’: there is no point of termination at which they aim, or final state in which they have been achieved and there is no more to do. Think of listening to music, parenting, or spending time with friends. They are things you can stop doing, but you cannot finish or complete them. Their temporality is not that of a project with an ultimate goal, but of a limitless process.
If the crisis diagnosed by Schopenhauer turns on excessive investment in projects, then the solution is to invest more fully in the process, giving meaning to your life through activities that have no terminal point: since they cannot be completed, your engagement with them is not exhaustive. It will not subvert itself. Nor does it invite the sense of frustration that Schopenhauer scorns in unsatisfied desire – the sense of being at a distance from one’s goal, so that fulfilment is always in the future or the past.
We should not give up on our worthwhile goals. Their achievement matters. But we should meditate, too, on the value of the process. It is no accident that the young and the old are generally more satisfied with life than those in middle age. Young adults have not embarked on life-defining projects; the aged have such accomplishments behind them. That makes it more natural for them to live in the present: to find value in atelic activities that are not exhausted by engagement or deferred to the future, but realised here and now. It is hard to resist the tyranny of projects in midlife, to find a balance between the telic and atelic. But if we hope to overcome the midlife crisis, to escape the gloom of emptiness and self-defeat, that is what we have to do.
Rush Limbaugh (L) and US First Lady Melania Trump look on as they attend the State of the Union address at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2020. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)
WASHINGTON—Saying his initial enthusiasm had faded after learning about the award’s history, conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh conceded Wednesday that receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom was less of an honor knowing it had been bestowed upon Rosa Parks and Maya Angelou, too. “While I understand this medal represents the highest civilian honor possible, I was a bit disconcerted to discover this morning that I share this distinction with both a civil rights icon and a poet who gave a voice to black Americans,” said Limbaugh, who explained that he hopes people don’t doubt his integrity as he joins the ranks of the award’s previous recipients, especially Cicely Tyson, Ralph Ellison, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Stevie Wonder, and Willie Mays. “I almost sent it back. But instead I have decided to keep my Medal of Freedom and let it stand as a testament to my willingness to tolerate others. I hope my acceptance of it will go some way toward reclaiming this honor from the Martin Luther Kings and Nelson Mandelas of the world.” At press time, Limbaugh confirmed he felt more confident that the award meant something after learning it had also been given to Henry Kissinger and Strom Thurmond.
Pattern recognition is the process of recognizing patterns by using machine learning algorithm. Pattern recognition can be defined as the classification of data based on knowledge already gained or on statistical information extracted from patterns and/or their representation. (geeksforgeeks.org)
Is That Art I read to you Book I from Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations”. In Book I, Marcus addresses where he felt he learnt many lessons of life. Expressing reverence for many of our favorite Roman figures, including Epictetus, Sextus, Diognetus, Verus and many more! This is recorded as a Meditation in itself, going through each book word by word, then editing out all the breath-strokes and finally creating some visuals to go along side has brought me much closer to understanding the material. I will continue doing videos like this as long as I am able to! Thanks for sharing and subscribing! -Is That Art?
For most of his life, P. Carl lived as a girl and a queer woman, building a career, a life, and a loving marriage, yet still waiting to realize himself in full.
After fifty years, P. Carl embarked on his gender transition amid the rise of the Trump administration and the #MeToo movement—a transition point in America’s own story, a time when transphobia and toxic masculinity are under increasing scrutiny even as they thrive in the highest halls of power. P. Carl’s quest to become himself and to reckon with his masculinity mirrors, in many ways, the challenge before the country as a whole, to imagine a society where every member can have a vibrant, livable life.
His latest book, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition takes us inside the complex shifts and questions that arise throughout—the alternating moments of arrival and estrangement. In this intimate memoir, he shares the journey of his transition, which reconfigured both his own inner experience and his closest bonds—from his twenty-year relationship with his wife, Lynette, to his already tumultuous relationships with his parents, and seemingly solid friendships that were subtly altered, often painfully and wordlessly.
Join CIIS Professor and Chair of the Human Sexuality Program Michelle Marzullo for a conversation with P. Carl about his personal journey, as well as gender, power, and inequality in America.
Copies of P. Carl’s book, Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition, will be available for sale at this event.
P. Carl is a Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Emerson College in Boston and was awarded a 2017 Art of Change Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, the Berlin Prize fellowship from the American Academy for the Fall of 2018, the Andrew W. Mellon Creative Research Residency at the University of Washington, and the Anschutz Fellowship at Princeton for spring of 2020. P. Carl made theater for twenty years and now writes, teaches, travels, mountain climbs, and swims. P. Carl resides in Boston and lives with his wife of twenty-two years, the writer Lynette D’Amico. Becoming a Man is P. Carl’s first book.
It tends to be common knowledge that Albert Einstein was bad at school, but less known is that he was also bad in school. Einstein not only received failing grades—a problem for which he was often summoned to the headmaster’s office—but he also had a bad attitude. He sat in the back of the class smirking at the teacher; he was disrespectful and disruptive; he questioned everything; and, when he was faced with the ultimatum to straighten up or drop out, he dropped out. That’s right: Albert Einstein was a dropout. And yet, he grew up to become one of the greatest thinkers in human history.
One can write off Einstein’s accomplishments as an exception to the rule; they can reason that his behavior was actually a symptom of being so smart that school didn’t challenge him, which is probably somewhat true. But what if what made Einstein a change agent was his rebellious nature rather than his intelligence? After all, the world is full of brilliant people who accomplish very little compared to Einstein.
I have a student like this in my class. He is a brilliant creative writer. I give him highly intellectual books, articles, and authors to read on his own because he often asks me highly intellectual questions that I can’t quite answer, but for which I know he will find answers in those texts. He typically brings the book back to me in a few days, having read it cover to cover and dog-eared most of its pages.
He is failing two classes but stays up all night long to write short stories and comes to school overtired and irritable. He rolls his eyes at anything he deems as busy work, comes into class and intentionally sits with his back to me, and continues to chat with friends long after I have started the lesson. He barely completes most assignments, if at all, and I have to constantly nag him to focus and stop distracting other students.
He is, in short, a huge pain. But when his parent came in to have a conference with me last fall, I found myself looking a worried adult in the eye and telling him what I believe to be the truth: His son is going to be okay. In fact, I told him that his son will someday stand out from the others; he will find a career he loves because he is passionate, intense, brilliant, and fiercely independent. Even though this student is a pain to teach, he is someone I will likely respect when he matures into an adult.
Throughout my years as an educator, the colleagues I admire the most tend to fit the same description. My favorite colleagues ask tough questions of school leadership, are impatient with the status quo, and often intentionally break rules if it means a better education for the students in their classrooms. What tends to be expected of students in schools is the opposite of what many people admire in adults. And yet, students who raise their hands, sit quietly, do their work without question, and generally have figured out how to “do school” are the ones who tend to benefit most from the system and the ones who seem to have the strongest “work ethic” in the classroom. In a study of teacher expectations and perceptions on student behavior, most teachers noted that self-control and cooperation were the most important indicators of school success.
I can attest that students who are self-disciplined, quiet when asked to be quiet, and generally do what they are told in a cooperative manner tend to be easier to teach. Like many teachers, I have validated these behaviors through extrinsic rewards and praise. But I have also found that sometimes the students who are uncooperative, undisciplined, and even rude tend to be strong leaders. In fact, in a recent study, children who were found to be defiant rule-breakers tended to grow up to be academic over-achievers and high-earning adults. Other students seem to gravitate toward these types of students. This is why people often speak admirably of the “class clown”—there is something intriguing about a rebel, even if the rebel’s behavior is destructive.
I recently heard on the radio a state legislator speaking of the importance of developing “soft skills” for the workforce. He elaborated on the merits of understanding the importance of a firm handshake, showing up 10 minutes early, and being a “team player.” As I listened to him, I thought these were admirable traits—traits that my own father tried desperately to instill in me, which I generally ignored—but they were mostly values held by an older generation. And he isn’t incorrect; research shows that “conscientious” and “agreeable” people are often more successful in the workplace. But maybe the problem is with the various definitions of success, rather than with individuals who do not fit the profile of an agreeable worker. After dropping out of school, many would have believed Einstein to be unsuccessful, but I doubt many people would say that now.
If the definition of success can change according to perception, so too can the definition of work ethic. Millennials tend to have a vastly different definition of work ethic than traditional business employers do. For example, 9 percent of college students define preparedness as “work ethic,” compared to 23 percent of business leaders and 18 percent of recruiters. And while the definitions of work ethic and success are already evolving given the Silicon Valley mentality that rebellious youth can be valuable disrupters, the general, traditional perception is that the employers have it right, while the millennials need to be whipped into shape considering they are “often the last hired and first fired.” But maybe it’s employers who need to adapt to a new generation of thinkers and not the other way around.
In his book Originals, Adam Grant gives example after example of original thinkers like Einstein who changed the world by rebelling against the status quo. He notes that procrastination, consistent tardiness, and a tendency to upset authority figures are actually important characteristics for original thinkers. I’m sure the state legislator on the radio would have been infuriated by a young Einstein with a bad attitude. But the rebels in the world are often the ones who change it the most.
A few years ago, I taught a student who, like the aforementioned one I currently teach, was awful in class. He was rude, disrespectful, disengaged, and spent every ounce of his energy trying to entertain his peers regardless of the frustration it caused me as the teacher. He didn’t care about getting into trouble—detentions, suspensions, and daily visits to the principal’s office were utterly ineffective in managing his behavior. I would love to say that through hard work, persistence, and a few heart-to-heart talks, he was suddenly a great student who made straight As, but that isn’t what happened. He was a difficult student from the start to the end of the school year, and for the rest of his high-school career, as my colleagues often shared.
But this former student recently found me on social media and wrote to explain that he had matured after high school, enrolled in college, and started acting in the plays produced by his college’s drama department. He got his degree and now manages a drama camp for teens. This didn’t surprise me: As the drama director back then, I saw a difference in him on stage versus sitting at a desk. He even had some pretty good days in class if we did skits or readers’ theater. He wasn’t a bad kid; he was a performer. Yet I worried about his future—in fact, I wished desperately for him to switch schools—because he just couldn’t seem to “get it together” and often made my job much more difficult.
Now I see that he wasn’t the problem at all—rather, it was the traditional expectations of school behavior and subsequent definition of success. The influence that traditional thinking had on me as an educator affected how I viewed him.
Granted, teaching is difficult enough without expecting individual teachers to encourage defiant and difficult behavior in the hopes that it will lead to children who grow into original thinkers as adults, but there are ways for teachers to encourage and set boundaries for such behavior. Teachers can create strengths-focused classrooms that help students like the class clowns and the rebels see the value in their gifts and reframe them positively, rather than seeking negative attention. As with my former student, this isn’t always possible on a day-to-day basis, but because I found ways to integrate dramatic arts into my lessons and offer him opportunities to perform inside and outside the classroom, I do think I was able to guide him to a positive outlet for his natural talents and instincts.
And there is no denying that rebels can be dangerous, both inside and outside the classroom. There is inherently a destructive nature to rebellion. A disruptive student can utterly destroy a positive learning environment for him or herself, the other students, and the teacher. And embracing dangerous rebels can also have negative impacts elsewhere. Yet, his continued brand as a rebel outsider bringing in his friends does gain support from many. It occurs to me that by providing opportunities for young rebels to find positive outlets for rebellion as my current student has with writing and my former one did with drama, they could become assets to society’s institutions, rather than a liability.
Even though the class clown, the snarky kid in the back, and the D-student may create problems for teachers and the school, they often have skills that can’t always be taught. They tend to be courageous, outspoken, persistent, and creative people—kids who may not make great students or become the kind of employees with a “really strong handshake,” but who instead become the kind of people who lead and forge new paths for others. As a teacher and a parent, I want to help create those kind of people. I want to help mold people who don’t just learn to show up on time, but bring something positive and original to the table when they get there.Ashley Lamb-Sinclair is a high-school instructional coach. She is the 2016 Kentucky Teacher of the Year and the founder and CEO of Curio Learning.
This article was originally published on May 3, 2017, by The Atlantic, and is republished here with permission.
Black history taught in US schools is often watered-down, riddled with inaccuracies and stripped of its context and rich, full-bodied historical figures. Equipped with the real story of Rosa Parks, professor David Ikard highlights how making the realities of race more benign and digestible harms us all — and emphasizes the power and importance of historical accuracy.
This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxNashville, an independent event. TED’s editors chose to feature it for you.
