What Should a Person Believe?

After God’s dead, no one’s watching

When I was younger I would announce that I was an atheist with a sharp, angular pride, like it was a Mensa membership; when I was younger than that I called myself a Mormon. The born and bred kind, a thousand formative afternoons wiled away in Sunday school learning The One Truth about God’s Plan, reading the same midnight-blue book over and over and over.

Nearly a decade of debauchery and millions of substance-sacrificed brain cells later, I said once, out loud, that the Internet would eventually replace religion. As soon as it left my mouth I wondered if that was hopelessly naive; but maybe just as naive, the idea that the future’s just going to be a higher-tech version of the present.

There’s something supernatural in the Mormon worldview, something kooky and extreme. It’s the Christian equivalent of believing in magic, and when you’ve got a hold of something that might be magical it can be hard to pry your fingers off. It’s difficult to overestimate the amount that some people want to know things. And to feel, theoretically, known.

When people talk about Jesus loving them, that’s all that I hear. Nobody will ever perfectly understand anybody, so you might as well assign the fulfillment of that desire to Him.

Mormons know the secret to living, and that secret might be remarkably similar to patriarchal-white-supremacy, but it’s still nice to feel like you’re in the know. And if you’re one of the really good ones, you can tell yourself that one day you’ll be a God who creates worlds. It’s a better pious-life reward than singing in some choir in the clouds.

But leaving Mormonism wasn’t particularly hard for me, at least not compared to half the inhabitants of this dry western state. One friend left suddenly, at age twenty-one, after going on a long road trip with her husband and having a movie-moment epiphany about the nature of truth; not long after, her devout husband threw her across a table and she entered the secular world as a twenty-two-year-old divorce. Dozens of the formerly-Mormon men I know went on missions, converting other people’s families to a tradition they would eventually reject.

In the sixth grade I was sitting in a “Young Women’s” meeting in church where we were going around our folding-chair circle sharing compliments. The matriarch in charge was doing her best to be spiritual about it; “spiritual gifts” was a phrase in vogue, but it turns out I didn’t have any. During my turn, she looked at me and said, slowly, “You are… so smart. What would it be like to be so smart, at twelve years old?”

I stared back and thought, are you saying I’m too smart to be here? She wasn’t, but I got a job that scheduled me to work on Sundays as soon as someone would give me minimum wage and never looked back. Now it seems like the strongest connection I ever made to my parents’ faith happened when I watched Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet as a doe-eyed prepubescent and interpreted it as a fairy tale about eternal temple marriage.

Supine on my roof, alone on LSD, life was exploding from every crack and crevice in my melting, bleeding sight. Pushing outward like a million pop-up ads, every living thing its own exploding star, while half the people on earth were staring at their feet. Downcast eyes, gazing in, forever inward.

The tree across from me, in July, held more vitality than most of the people I knew. I imagined it reaching out to me, its knotted branches clutching my face and violently shaking me. Rattling my brain, encased as it was, like all of them, in total solipsism, until I could see the expanding miracle that was every granular second of being alive.

Days later, flipping through a Cosmo magazine at a nail salon, I thought about exposure. Post-internet, there’s no reason to read anything that you don’t want to read, no reason to look at anything you’d rather not see.

I took a picture of one of the Cosmo headlines, written at about a second-grade level, and posted it to my Facebook wall. But the next day I deleted it — middle America breathes in enough noxious fumes without my status updates. In a place where a million Rush Limbaughs are always spewing poison at the top of their lungs, what kind of mental deep-space does a certain kind of smart person use up in expressing outrage at the obviously fucked?

What you are exposed to — your friends, the things you consume — is what you’ll begin to believe. The systems of thought that you’ll begin to take as a given. When I watch enough of any TV show, I start looking at my own life in terms of its episodes, mindlessly tapping my foot to the show’s specific rhythms. Are you a Marnie or a Jessa? Would you be as popular as Red in prison?

We’re all so ravenous for stories, and helpless to escape them. The number of people, based on my high school class alone, who would rather warp their lives, like burned bodies, to fit inside a narrative they know than not have a story to tell themselves … and the stories that we know — there are nowhere near enough of them. I want more.

Free and empty are just two sides of the same tarnished coin, that’s what they taught me in Sunday school. The godless flaming charred seductive doomed world will not set you free. And in a way, they’re right. After God’s dead, no one’s watching.

Self-proclaimed atheists will tell you that believing in nothing is the only thing that makes any reasonable, rational sense, except there’s nothing reasonable or rational about such a less-than-rudimentary understanding of human nature, us and our fragile little feelings and chaotically constructed meaning. I want to cup their faces in my hands and say, there’s an emotion inside every desire, even the one that makes you want reason.

I prefer the nu-hippies, the ones who use power crystals or tell you about their past lives or think of Karma as an omnipotent God-lite. I listen to the most ardent of them with an earnest curiosity bordering on envy; convincing yourself of whatever you want to be true seems like a valuable survival skill that I’m missing, an app I can’t install.

After a few years inside the whirring, purring, infuriatingly boring machine of adult life, it can be difficult, on a bad morning, to find any particular thing compelling enough to keep waking up for. To keep staying sober or away from awful people or whatever shade of self-destruction you prefer to cash in for the privilege of going on. For continuing to keep your hands outstretched, knuckles bloodied and burning, in the haphazard accumulation of accomplishments and people.

If “making things” is the best reason I can find to keep waking up, then “meaninglessness” is the only thing I can bring myself to believe about being awake at all.

Melancholy clings like an internal humidity. All the afternoons spent wandering my small city in a veiled torpor, parties I bookended by drifting to a corner and staring into space, the endless hours consuming other people’s lives through a rectangular screen. The books that I read like they could change everything, like the words could reveal a secret meaning in between the lines.

I always say that I read to escape my own head, but the best books are the ones that I find myself inside. Reading Nietzsche on the train and feeling self-conscious about it, I thought about how I could be reading anything at all, every philosopher who ever vomited onto paper or Sheila Heti or Stephanie Meyer and it wouldn’t change anything about the whirring landscape in the window, or where I was going. Until something shifts, everything’s noumenal; but that’s not nothing. We’re all trapped inside a skull, an entrance-less cave.

Still, any kind of “self-help” or “inspirational” writing seems impossible to get through, even when it’s just a paragraph posted like a paint splatter on social media. I always read a sentence and skip straight to imagining the person who posted it, wondering about whatever circumstances in their day prompted them to share something like “When you wake up every morning, always say to yourself…” with some nature-porn picture of a rising sun.

I picture David Foster Wallace huddled over his desk at 3 A.M., a single reading lamp burning a white hole in the night, furiously highlighting words from his impressive self-help library and dying too soon anyway.

Dying anyway.

People don’t change. Anything’s possible. Love yourself. There is no self. Other people can’t make you happy. People with friends live much longer, happier lives. When we die, our consciousness ceases to exist. When we die, it’s unlikely that “nothing” is what happens among a thousand different possibilities. No fate but what we make. Biology is destiny. Be a good person. What is good? What is a person? Are dolphins people?

Later, still lying on my roof, it would occur to me that every person’s life was their singular attempt at survival; the sum of their best efforts to remain alive. And the equations are always changing.