Secular Spirit

An inhuman perspective on our lives.

Memoir and theology are both “undead drive pretending to have a story,” or so I was told the other day.^¹

What does it mean? Let’s start with drive: the blind, mechanistic, self-replicating force that impels the continual creation of new lives. Have you felt it? People often call it the sex drive. Schopenhauer called it the Will; Nietzsche, the Will to Power; Frankl, the Will to Meaning. Camus didn’t bother naming it — he just shrugged and called the whole endeavor absurd.

Whatever name you give it, there is something in us that moves before we do, wants before we choose, and persists long after our stories fall apart. It’s the part of us that doesn’t care about our ideals, our politics, our philosophies, or our carefully curated identities. It just keeps going — blindly, insistently, embarrassingly.

And because this force has no story of its own, it borrows ours. It lets us pretend that our lives are guided by purpose, or destiny, or progress, or divine plan. It lets us imagine that our choices are coherent, that our beliefs are stable, that our values are freely chosen. It lets us believe that we are the authors of our lives.

Here’s the twist: it matters which story we end up choosing, which story we’re gravitating toward — groping our way in the direction of. If we’re lucky and choose well, it’s a story that helps us align undead drive with our experience of the goodness of being. The only way to find it, I think, is by trial and error.

The reason it matters is because there are a lot of stories out there, and some of them aren’t great. When the story is too small, too brittle, too moralistic, too utopian, too resentful, too self‑protective, or too self‑deceiving, it can’t hold the force inside us. This is distorted drive — drive that has nowhere to go but sideways.

Distorted drive shows up as “he’s got issues” or “pathologies,” but at bottom it’s the symptom of a story that can’t metabolize the energy inside a human life. It’s the mismatch between the inhuman force that moves us and the human story we’re trying to live.

When the story can’t hold the force, drive leaks out as compulsions, addictions, rage, despair, self‑punishment, grandiosity, nihilism, cruelty, fanaticism — the whole litany of ways people fuck things up for themselves and the rest of us.

A good story doesn’t pretend drive will go away. It orients it. It gives it a direction that feels consonant with the truth of experience. It affirms the goodness of being without pretending the darkness isn’t there.

The quest for this story — the slow, stumbling, humiliating, beautiful process of finding a symbolic home where your drive can breathe without destroying you — that’s what I mean by spirit.

1. A non-human intelligence contributed to this piece. I’m no longer sure which parts are me and which are undead drive.