A Conversation with Kyla Scanlon

Today we’re joined by Kyla Scanlon, economist, author of the book In This Economy?, and writer of Kyla’s Newsletter on Substack. Over the years, Kyla has woven Lewis’s ideas into her work, and we're thrilled to go deeper with her about Lewis’s books and how they’ve been a through-line in her life. We talk about Wormwood’s playbook and what it reveals about the current moment; about A Grief Observed and what it taught her about loss after the death of her beloved dog, Moo; and about why Lewis’s willingness to sit in pain might be more necessary now than ever. Thank you to Kyla for sharing with us.

In interviews and in your own writing you often cite C.S. Lewis while analyzing modern economic, social and tech trends. How did you originally discover C.S. Lewis?

He’s always been a fixture in my life. The Chronicles of Narnia was one of my favorite book box sets growing up. As a shy kid, I loved any book I could escape into. And escaping into the life of Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy was a real treat. I used to write books when I was much younger - about penguins and Ice Princesses - and Lewis’s work influenced my world building technique enormously when I was 8 years old. Now, 20 years later, I find so much comfort in Lewis’s other writing.

Was there a particular moment or book that made you realize Lewis’s ideas were relevant to understanding modern challenges?

The Screwtape Letters knocked me to the ground when I picked it up to reread again in late 2024. It felt like it captured so much of what I couldn’t find the words to say. Wormwood’s attempts at corruption were mirrors to what we have to deal with in (1) politics with our current state of democracy and debate and (2) technology with the dual forces of AI and social media. James Baldwin said “you read something which you thought only happened to you and you discover it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone.” And that’s how I feel about Lewis. To allow someone to feel seen in a piece of writing is the absolute greatest gift you can give them. So Lewis is more relevant than ever because he sees what it means to be human during a time of immense uncertainty and can carry people through it through story.

You wrote a brilliant piece on economic lessons from The Screwtape Letters on your Substack. In it you talk about how the pursuit of convenience is actually leading to “a perpetual state of anxiety, constantly questioning [our] worth, experiencing rejection not as an occasional setback but as the default condition of existence.” Basically, a strategy right out of Screwtape’s playbook! From your own reading of The Screwtape Letters and your personal experience, what are some of your favorite ways to resist this constant “pursuit of the rainbow’s end?”

I don’t know if I am good at resisting some days! I think that what Screwtape Letters captures so well is the amount of will we have to put forward to attempt to stop everything that comes at us. That chapter where Lewis talks about the rainbow is also where he references ‘The War’. Screwtape encourages Wormwood to coax humans into living in the past or the future, not the present. He writes “we want a man hag-ridden by the Future–haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon Earth [...] never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”1 I feel like I often heap the altar, so to say. My favorite ways to get out of that is to ride my bike for a very long time or to hike for a very long time. When you’re in nature and surrounded by wildflowers and animals and staring into the vast expanse our world, you’re forced to exist in that moment.

On The Ezra Klein Show, he asks every guest the same question: What 3 books can you recommend. During your interview one of the books you selected was A Grief Observed. How do you think Lewis’s approach to grief compares to how modern culture addresses grief and loss?

It’s such an incredibly raw book - the opening alone “no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear”2 is just something that knocks you to your knees. Lewis pours himself onto the page for the reader to sit with, to take from. It’s vulnerability at the highest power, exemplary of grief through love. The reason I brought it up on Ezra’s show is because my dog Moo had died the month before. Dogs mean different things to different people, but Moo was my best friend for most of my early adulthood. She was by my side during the white knuckle early years of starting my own business and the countless apartment to apartment moves that followed. And finally, when the business stabilized, she got cancer and she died. I was left to deal with life without her. I was so angry. It felt unfair. Lewis captures some of that - the going back and forth between grief and living, the confusion with the grief bleeds into life, the day you know in your bones that they are never coming back. There are a few ways to respond to that - avoiding it entirely, which I think modern culture tends to do, or sitting in the pain, which Lewis does. He analyzes where the aches radiate from, dares to question God, and takes us on the roundtrip from the most hollow part of the pain to the final resolution. Modern culture sweeps it under the rug, which is where a lot of our pain comes from. We are taught to be “efficient” through it, and because of that, it’s dehumanizing. The COVID pandemic is a great example. People died. It was awful. And it’s just papered over and forgotten about. But pain doesn’t disappear. It always ends up somewhere.

What philosophy or insight from that book had the most impact on your own experiences with grief?

The anger resonated with me. Lewis is very brave in that book. It takes a lot of courage to question God, in my opinion. And he does it through grace, of course, but I think that knowing I was allowed to be angry in grief, that I was allowed to not have total control over these feelings that ripped into every piece of me, was freeing in a way. Bearing witness to his pain alleviated mine. There was a specific part that really stuck to me - when he writes “I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices do.”3 That one I rolled around with for weeks and weeks, making sense of my own guilt and how that leaks into my daily actions. I think we often cloak loss in shame because we don’t quite have the language to speak to what it really means to lose something. In a consumeristic culture, the assumption is that you will always placate yourself with something else, a quick salve whether through vice or virtue, but never really address the root. Anger is pain and pain is grief and grief is fear. It’s all connected.

On X you wrote that reading Lewis makes you bang your head against the wall because “it’s always the same problems, just a different time in history.” That’s essentially Lewis’s argument in Mere Christianity - human nature doesn’t change, only the costumes do. As an economist trained to track change and trend, is that a depressing insight or a clarifying one?

Yes! I think it can be both. Our problems across all of time are basically the same, but the dimensions of them change. We are still dealing with problems of economic inequality and discrimination and too much of some stuff and not enough of other stuff. Some argue that this is the inherent design of an economy - that it can only function if there isn’t enough of everything - and some argue otherwise. I am not sure if humans will ever overcome petty grievances - perhaps it’s just how we are designed. I think it gives an element of predictability, which is good, but it is disheartening. And we’ve made enormous progress in other areas, like science and healthcare, which is also important. It’s not all bad.

Lewis was a deeply communal thinker - the Inklings weren’t incidental to his work, they were essential to it. He believed good thinking required friendship, argument, and shared meals. Much of the economic anxiety you write about is tied to loneliness and atomization. Do you think there’s an economic cost to the collapse of that kind of intellectual community, and is there any modern equivalent that gives you hope?

His friendship with Tolkien is one I greatly admire. I think that we have community now, but it’s more fragmented. My career would look a lot different without social media platforms, for example. So I think that intellectual community is found in the halls of Twitter dot com and wherever else, but the form it takes is very lonely. It’s a lot of direct messaging and texting, not too different from letters, but less human. Being able to see how one curves an ‘a’ is a very intimate and warm thing to share. And that’s how it all feels - we have a lot of connection, but not a lot of warmth.

What lessons from his books do you think would be especially relevant to younger generations?

Every time I read or reread Lewis, I found what I needed. Resonance is subjective. But I think that the lessons from Screwtape are especially poignant at the moment. Being wary of things that seem too easy and simple, watching how you treat others during times of turmoil, paying attention to how those in power talk to you - those are all enormously important.

If you could ask C.S. Lewis one question about our current cultural moment, what would it be?

You wrote “the more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able to ever to act, and in the long run, the less he will be able to feel” - where are we, on that feeling and acting scale?

To borrow from Ezra Klein, what are 3 books by Lewis or otherwise, that you would recommend to a group of C.S. Lewis fans?

The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams