The Ground Beneath Our Lives

Some weeks of writing begin with a clear theme; others reveal their coherence only after the work accumulates. This week moved across work, nihilism, mortality, religion, theology, deconstruction, healthcare, and practitioner formation. Yet each explored the same underlying concern: how human beings find their bearings when the structures that once organized meaning, identity, authority, and belonging no longer seem adequate to the lives we are living.

This question has become central to my work in existential health. Many institutions and narratives that once provided stable answers about who we are, what matters, where we belong, and how we should live have lost some of their authority. Our need for meaning and orientation remains, but more of us must navigate these questions without predetermined answers. This week’s writing explored what that transition looks like across different areas of human life.

What became clear to me as the week unfolded was that I was not simply publishing a series of articles. I was watching the architecture of a field take shape. Questions I have carried for years about authority, meaning, mortality, religion, suffering, and what it means to inhabit a life, were beginning to connect with one another in ways I could see more clearly.

I began the week with What Is Work Doing to Us? Why the Future of Work Requires More Than Employee Wellbeing, an article that examines the limitations of our current conversation about workplace wellbeing. Organizations have become increasingly attentive to mental health, burnout, resilience, flexibility, and employee wellness, and there is much about this development worth welcoming. Yet these efforts can remain strangely incomplete when they focus primarily on helping people cope with working conditions without examining what those conditions are doing to the people who inhabit them.

Work occupies an enormous portion of adult life and reaches far beyond the tasks for which someone receives a paycheck. It shapes our experience of time, identity, agency, belonging, purpose, relationships, and personal worth. A workplace can strengthen these dimensions of life, but it can also erode them.

The question for the future of work is not simply how organizations can make employees feel better. It is whether the structures and cultures of work allow people to remain recognizably human within them. Employee wellbeing matters, but existential health asks us to examine the environment producing the need for so much wellbeing intervention in the first place.

The question of meaning appeared in a different form in The New Religion of Nihilism: Why “Nothing Matters” Became a Creed and Why We Need to Move Beyond It.

I have become increasingly interested in the way nihilism can emerge after the collapse of inherited certainty. For people who have escaped religious, ideological, or cultural systems that claimed to possess absolute truth, skepticism can represent an important form of liberation. The ability to question what was once unquestionable is part of recovering intellectual and personal agency.

The difficulty begins when skepticism hardens into another comprehensive worldview. The conviction that meaning was once imposed upon us does not require the conclusion that meaning itself is an illusion. Yet phrases such as “nothing matters,” “everything is made up,” and “nobody really knows anything” can acquire their own kind of doctrinal authority.

The article explores the possibility of moving beyond the false choice between externally imposed meaning and no meaning at all. Human beings are capable of participating in the creation and discovery of meaning without pretending that it arrives fully formed from somewhere outside the human experience.

Questions about meaning inevitably bring us into conversation with mortality, which led to Thanatocentrism: Why We Keep Asking Death to Tell Us What Life Means.

This article introduces the concept of thanatocentrism to describe the tendency to make death the interpretive center of life. We are frequently told that life matters because it is short, that moments are precious because they will disappear, and that mortality gives urgency and significance to our choices. There is wisdom in allowing an awareness of death to deepen our attention to life, but I began wondering whether we have asked mortality to carry more philosophical weight than it should.

A life does not necessarily become meaningful because it ends. Love does not matter only because we will someday lose the people we love, and an ordinary afternoon does not require the prospect of death to possess value. The larger question is whether life might have significance from within the experience of living itself.

Mortality certainly belongs within an existential understanding of human life, but it does not have to become the source from which everything else derives its meaning. We can take death seriously without asking it to explain why being alive matters.

Two publications this week gathered together bodies of work I have been developing around religious deconstruction and post-religious life. decon(Recon)U: The Complete Series: Seven Lessons in Unlearning Authority, Reclaiming Knowledge, Making Meaning, and Rebuilding a Life from the Ground Up brings the entire seven-part series together as a single journey through the deeper dimensions of deconstruction.

Religious deconstruction involves more than changing beliefs or leaving an institution. Religious systems can shape truth, authority, self-trust, meaning, and belonging. When they collapse, people must reconstruct not only their theology but how they know, choose, trust, relate, and inhabit themselves.

That same territory is explored on a broader scale in What Comes After Religion? Essays on Losing Your Religion, Reclaiming Your Authority, and Learning to Inhabit Your Life, which gathers my writing about what happens beyond the initial experience of leaving religion. The end of religious belief does not bring an end to the questions religion was attempting to answer. People continue to wrestle with meaning, mortality, belonging, transcendence, identity, suffering, love, and the mystery of being alive.

Our choices are not limited to returning to institutional religion or abandoning spiritual and existential questions. Between them lies a vast human landscape requiring forms of spirituality and meaning-making that do not demand surrendering authority over one’s life.

That exploration led naturally into Your God Is More Human Than You Think: Feuerbach and the Problem Hiding Inside Every Theology, which revisits Ludwig Feuerbach’s argument that human beings project their own qualities, ideals, fears, and desires onto God. Feuerbach remains provocative because his critique raises a question that theology can never entirely escape: how much of what human beings say about God is actually a reflection of themselves?

Across history, gods have reflected the hierarchies, norms, loyalties, and prejudices of the people describing them. This neither settles whether God exists nor reduces every religious experience to projection, but it warrants suspicion when theological claims are used to govern other people’s lives. Sometimes a theology reveals less about God than about the people who imagined God that way.

After spending much of the week thinking about large systems of meaning, I found myself returning to something much more intimate in You Don’t Need to Figure Out Your Life: What if being alive is not a problem you are supposed to solve? Modern life places an extraordinary interpretive burden upon us. We are encouraged to identify our purpose, discover our calling, heal our past, optimize our future, become our best selves, and develop a coherent explanation for why our lives have unfolded as they have.

Reflection can deepen a life, but the search for understanding can also postpone our participation in the life already happening. A life does not need to be completely understood to be fully inhabited. Existential health does not offer a philosophy that explains our lives; it cultivates the agency, presence, coherence, and self-trust needed to live them.

This week also marked an important development in the practical formation of the field with Building a Field. Forming Its Practitioners. Meet the Team Behind the Fall Existential Health Practitioner Training and Certification Course. I wanted to introduce the people who will be contributing to the formation of our next cohort, but I also wanted the article to communicate something about what it actually means to build an emerging field.

Ideas become fields through practitioners who translate them into ethical, disciplined forms of human accompaniment. Existential Health Practitioners accompany people through disruptions of meaning, identity, belonging, mortality, grief, religious deconstruction, life transition, and self-trust—not by supplying answers, but by honoring the complexity of their experience.

The Fall training team brings together diverse forms of expertise because existential life does not arrive divided into professional categories. Forming practitioners capable of meeting the whole person is essential to building the field.

The week culminated with the publication of Existential Health White Papers: Volume Two — Applied Domains of Existential Health, White Paper No. 12: Existential Healthcare.

Volume One established the conceptual foundations of existential health by defining the field, articulating its domains, developing its assessment and practice frameworks, and outlining a research agenda. Volume Two begins the next stage of that work by exploring how existential health applies within particular domains of human life and social institutions.

Healthcare is an important place to begin because illness rarely remains confined to the body. A diagnosis can alter a person’s experience of time, identity, agency, relationships, mortality, and the future. Medicine treats disease, psychological care addresses emotional and psychiatric suffering, and chaplaincy provides spiritual support. Yet another dimension requires recognition: the person learning to inhabit the reality illness has created. Existential healthcare takes this experience seriously without automatically medicalizing, psychologizing, or religiously interpreting it.

This white paper moves existential health into applied and institutional territory, asking what human systems might become if existential health informed how they understood flourishing and suffering.

This week, I could feel individual pieces becoming part of something larger. I am trying to develop language for experiences people already live but often cannot name: the loss of inherited ground, the recovery of personal authority, meaning without certainty, and care that does not reduce every struggle to theology or pathology.

Across everything I published, I kept returning to what happens when religious, organizational, philosophical, medical, or cultural structures no longer provide sufficient ground for human life. This does not mean they have nothing to offer, but it requires greater discernment about the authority we grant them and the realities they can hold.

Existential health is my language for what is needed in that space: the capacity to live with uncertainty, face mortality without making death the explanation for life, participate in work without disappearing into productivity, move beyond religion without abandoning spiritual questions, and care for suffering without turning every difficult experience into a diagnosis.

Religion offered revelation. Philosophy offered systems. Institutions offered identities. Medicine offered diagnoses. Work offered achievement. Each can illuminate something about being human, but none can relieve us of the responsibility of living our own lives.

I am becoming less interested in final answers and more interested in the capacities we need when no final answer is coming. How do we make meaning without surrendering authority and inhabit a life without first solving it?

Where is this question appearing in your life? What no longer provides the ground it once did—and what capacities are you discovering you need in its place?

That is the territory existential health is trying to understand. In the coming weeks, I will explore what education, leadership, community, spirituality, organizational life, and public culture might become if they supported our capacity not merely to function, but to inhabit our lives.

The future will belong not to those who possess the most convincing answers, but to those who have developed the capacities to live fully when no final answer is coming.

This week, I returned to Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, first published in 1841. Feuerbach’s central claim is that theology is often anthropology in disguised form: human beings take their deepest qualities, longings, fears, and ideals, project them beyond themselves, and then encounter them as attributes of God. Divine love, wisdom, justice, and power may therefore tell us as much about what human beings desire, admire, or feel they lack as they do about the nature of the divine.

What makes Feuerbach valuable is not simply his critique of religion, but the interpretive discipline his work invites. If our gods reflect something about us, then theology becomes a way of examining the communities and cultures that produce it. A punitive God may reveal a culture organized around punishment. A hierarchical God may sanctify existing arrangements of power. A God preoccupied with obedience may disclose the needs of institutions that depend upon compliance. Theology does not merely describe ultimate reality; it can also legitimize distinctly human interests while concealing their human origins.

This connects with a question running through much of my work: what becomes possible when we recognize that the structures we inherited are neither neutral nor inevitable? Feuerbach does not settle the question of whether God exists, but he makes it more difficult to speak about God without also asking what our God-language reveals about ourselves. That question matters whenever theological claims are used not only to interpret reality, but to determine whose lives, identities, desires, and experiences are permitted to count.

This week, I watched Murder 101, a three-part documentary series following Tennessee sociology teacher Alex Campbell and his high school students as they investigate the decades-old “Redhead Murders”—the killings of women whose lives and deaths had largely receded from public attention. What begins as an unusual classroom project becomes something far more consequential: an education in evidence, empathy, perseverance, and the responsibility to take seriously the lives others have forgotten. Prime Video

I found the documentary deeply impactful, not primarily because of the true-crime investigation, but because of what it reveals about education and human possibility. Campbell does not treat his students as empty vessels waiting to receive information. He entrusts them with meaningful work, asks them to think rigorously, and allows their intelligence and moral imagination to matter beyond the classroom. They are not completing an assignment for a grade. They are learning that their attention can restore dignity, their questions can reopen possibilities, and their participation can have consequences in the world.

The documentary also confronts the ease with which some human beings become socially invisible. Many of the victims were marginalized women whose stories had been reduced to case files, patterns, and labels. The students’ work becomes an act of remembrance—an insistence that these women were not merely bodies discovered beside highways, but people who had names, relationships, histories, and lives that mattered.

Murder 101 stayed with me because it demonstrates what can happen when education becomes more than the transmission of knowledge. At its best, education enlarges a person’s sense of agency, awakens moral responsibility, and helps young people discover that they are capable of contributing to something larger than themselves. These students were not simply learning sociology. They were learning what it means to pay attention to another human life—and what can become possible when we refuse to let that life disappear.

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