The Soul Formation of Promotion

Finding a stable sense of self while putting creative work into the world.

I write to you from inside a blizzard of tasks. The last minute promotional activities for Fully Alive have hit like an avalanche, and it is as disorienting as being in a white out. I’m both exhausted and extremely grateful for it. Our attention is precious and finite, and the world of publishing both noisy and warped, as this recent viral essay Noone Buys Books explains. I was fully braced to spend years on this weird, vocational non-boxable book and be met at the end with what Virginia Woolf calls “the world’s notorious indifference.” The expectation that no-one might care means every podcast, every Op-Ed is a gift. It makes it more likely the words I wrote will reach the people I wrote them for, the people I think might need them.

And Yet. Grateful as I am to have publicity activities to be doing, I can sense the soul-danger. One of the key themes in the book is formation, the ways in which how we spend our time and our attention determines the kind of people we are becoming. I am only too aware of the irony: to get a book about formation into other people’s hands, I am spending my time and attention in ways which I suspect are forming me away from, not towards the kind of person the world needs right now.

I am acting as a small cog in a vast content machine, pumping my ideas (and parts of my own, highly personal story) into a reservoir which will in turn be firehosed into people’s faces via glowing rectangles. I cannot control the inevitable, attendant context collapse. There is no real way to make this process relational, to create a proper connection with the people I am trying to reach. That grates against my deepest values.

It is also excruciatingly vulnerable, this offering of my creative endeavour. I think it probably always is, for all of us who attempt it. It has required a complex internal negotiation about what it all means for my sense of self. This advice from Elizabeth Gilbert has been going round and round in my head:

Let people have their opinions. More than that--let people love their opinions, just as you and I are in love with ours…..And always remember that people's judgments about you are none of your business.

I want, of course, some of these opinions to be my business. The good ones. The kind judgements. I want external validation, but not external critique. Gilbert’s point is that we can choose both or neither, and neither is more likely to keep us sane.

In my chapter on Envy (From Status Anxiety to Belovedness) I spent a lot of time trying to work out where to root my sense of self, given the unavoidable need to bid for the attention of an audience.

Comparative, ranked human value is a poisoned chalice, a nonsense game we all want to dissent from and yet continue to play. It’s pragmatism, a way to get things done. You try getting a job, or completing a collaborative project, or finding a partner without indulging in some of the silent status- semaphore we all use. I’m worth your time, we signal. Look who I’m with. See my rosettes, my professional scout badges. Notice my medals, my brands, my broad shoulders, my wrinkle-free forehead.

Part of my soul work has been trying to really live some ideas from my tradition which run orthogonal to this. I want to let these statements form me: that humans are all equal, all the time, that we are made in the image of God, walking icons of the divine, and that if anything the lowest status have the highest honour and beauty. I have sought to believe and know myself to be beloved, in no need of earning my own value, but receiving it as a gift.

Promoting anything, especially anything creative and personal, can’t help but test those commitments. For now, I can tell myself that it is my business what other people think of me, or at least what they think of the book (and right now those things feel pretty similar). If I’m not careful I will let those opinions and judgments shape my sense of self, inflating it like a pool float or kicking out it’s foundations. Sometimes on the same day.

There is a running joke amongst people who preach that you are always set the theme or text your own soul needs. I have had to go back to what I was preaching to my soul a year ago, while drafting. I am in need especially of the least fluffy prescription I give for status anxiety, the fact that caring too much about the opinions of others is more than just foolishness. It’s idolotry:

Christianity doesn’t just offer me alternative frames for thinking about my value, it offers a warning against playing status games. It implies that seeking my worth in others is idolatry, and actively dangerous. Idolatry means worshipping things not worthy of our worship. One reading of the Hebrew Bible is that [God] is a jealous and petty lover, demanding our worship out of their own unstable sense of self. It is possible to assemble an argument for that. I think a better, truer read is that [God] warns against idolatry because [God] knows it will harm us.

You possibly don’t think of yourself as someone who worships. It might sound like an insult. It does sound a bit abject and degrading, at odds with our view of ourselves as post-Enlightenment creatures who have thrown off the shackles of superstition. Worship is not just singing praises like some dead-eyed cult member though. If we think of worship as the act of focusing on and seeking to move towards something (one translation of the Greek word for worship is ‘to come towards, to kiss’), we all end up doing it. It is a cousin of attention. As novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace writes: ‘In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.’ He goes on, unexpectedly, to argue that:

“the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.”

We will come back to some of these other idols elsewhere, but for now you can see how worshipping, or over-focusing on, the opinions of other people sets us up for misery. Wallace’s typically vivid phrase ‘eat you alive’ echoes the Hebrew Bible’s warnings that a person who worships idols ‘feeds on ashes; a deluded heart misleads him’. Wallace, and my scriptures, warn that whatever we focus our attention on and seek to move towards will shape us – we will eventually look like our idols.

I need bracing medicine like this today, or my ego is going to end up running this show. Other people’s opinions are not just not my business: caring too much about them will “eat me alive” and leave me “feeding on dust an ashes”.

Feel free to leave a compliment in the comments, though.

(I’m joking, mainly. I would love to hear how you navigate all this, as largely creative, trail blazing people trying to do strange work in the world. Feel free to preach to my soul, and you own.)

What else I have been up to

• The picture at the top is from a rich, deep, mentally exhausting conversation I had with cognitive scientist John Vervaeke on his YouTube channel.