I've been reading my new friend Tara Isabella Burton's book, *Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World*, which was published in 2020. It looks back on the culture of the 2010s with, I think, the correct thesis that almost every major secular cultural trend is really, in some ways, connected to a collective desire to replace a God-shaped hole in our lives.
Last night, as we were sitting on the deck overlooking the water, S and I were alone after her family, who had been at the house (it's her family's house) for a few days, had left. I reflected, I guess bitterly or with a bitter nostalgia, on my life six to eight years ago—that strange phase from 2015 to 2020. With the advantage of hindsight, I have a better idea of why during that whole time I was really running scared and insecure, making bad decisions.
I was disconnected from the vast cultural transformations that were underway because I was basically offline. I didn't learn the speech codes and the behavioral codes that had become necessary for success and flourishing, at least in a liberal northeastern city like New York. I wasn't based. I wasn't woke. I wasn't an incel. I wasn't a socialist. I wasn't a vegan. I wasn't a carnivore. I wasn't into astrology. I didn't cry when Trump was elected, or celebrate.
I was a Quixote, a knight on a withered horse, with ideas about literature and romance. Completely ill-equipped to perform the strange rites of the not only godless but soulless, supposedly progressive culture of that decade. I wasn’t very happy.
I passively believed that some combination of self-care, a Tinder-accelerated sex life, and blandly normatively liberal politics would be good enough to build a whole life on. I didn't have a theory of myself at that time, and in fact, I think I behaved very unconsciously and very reactively in my personal life because I didn't have a theory of the world I was in.
I've been thinking about the general concept of new religions—syncretic, modern, invented, pastiche religions. In theory, the impulse to combine, to synthesize, to make the equation of the divine more efficient and to combine terms is not unappealing. Our own canonical monotheistic religions themselves, in terms of their tropes, their ethics, their eschatology, bear the traces of older and in some cases forgotten religions—religions which lie largely buried in the sands of time. Religion is syncretism, in other words. You can't have one without the other. But that's just in theory.