About this episode
I was having my monthly “Should I go to grad school?” meltdown last week while at coffee with a friend. Faced with my midlife panic, V calmly asked, “What would you even go to grad school for?” So, I presented this month’s top five: teacher, social worker, nurse, therapist, or pastor. (And “nurse” is mostly because I’ve been watching The Pitt, not due to any natural aptitude.) Heretic Hereafter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.V, with her characteristic bluntness, said, “Basically those are all the same job. Therapists are just pastors for atheists.”And I laughed, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about it: are therapists just pastors for atheists? On the one hand, BAD CHRISTIAN COUNSELING. “Oh you’re depressed? Why? You have Jesus! Buck up!” Therapists certainly receive a lot more training and are (unlike most Christian counselors) actually qualified to recognize and treat serious mental illness.But serious illness aside, one of our primary existential tasks is finding meaning. Most humans, at some level, believe in fairness, that consequences should follow actions. People should be rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad. And yet, the universe often fails to comply to this neat directive. Billionaires get rich denying their workers bathroom breaks while schoolteachers have to take on second jobs. American religiosity has cratered in the last 20 years. But even as fewer of us identify as “religious” or attend weekly services, we still need meaning. Enter the gurus.I’m as susceptible to these gurus as the next chronically self-doubting midlife Millennial. I’ve read the self-help books and watched hours of Instagram reels by writer/influencers who seem to have life figured out. I eyed Bikram Yoga before that turned out to be a cult, and wondered about NXIVM before that turned out to be a cult, too. I felt mildly inspired by Glennon Doyle’s Untamed even as I noted the deception in how much she publicly presented a happy marriage while, behind-the-scenes, she was falling in love with someone else.And now it’s Elizabeth Gilbert’s turn. Her new memoir, All the Way to the River, reveals the dark side of her supposedly magical love story with her friend, Rayya. I heard about the story of Gilbert romantically sitting by Rayya’s bedside on NPR, which somehow failed to mention the years of enabling Gilbert did, including procuring and injecting heroin for her lover. In her review of the book (which releases 9/9) Jia Tolentino writes: If you’ve read any celebrity profiles about youngish female stars during the past decade or so, you may have noticed that each
