Seculosity by David Zahl How Modern Life Became Our New Religion
What's it about?
Seculosity (2019) takes aim at our futile quest for perfection in every aspect of our lives. It suggests that performance-obsessed striving makes us anxious, cruel, and miserable. So why do we continue chasing this mirage? It makes a compelling argument that perfectionism fills the hole left by the decline of capital-R religion: our human need for “enoughness.”
David Zahl, Seculosity, how career, parenting, technology, food, politics and romance became our new religion and what to do about it. Do you ever feel that no matter how much you achieve, it's simply not enough? Well, you're not alone. Employees consistently draw attention to the contemporary pressure to perform and how it's making us miserable.
We're told and tell ourselves that we have to be perfect parents, stellar employees and impeccable partners. Even the minutiae of our lives are fair game. What we eat, where we holiday, how often we go to the gym, it's all subject to a compulsive search for perfection. Why do we hold ourselves and others to such impossible standards? David Zahl's concept of Seculosity, which combines the words secular and religiosity, promises an answer. He suggests the reason we perfect our diets or optimize our time with such, well, religious zeal is because these are religious behaviors.
As capital R religion has declined, we've found secular equivalents that answer a deep-seated human need. These activities provide us with a sense of righteousness and belonging, aiming to fulfill our craving for hope, purpose, and most crucially, a feeling of enoughness. As a result, secular domains of our lives have become platforms where we seek salvation and self-justification. The problem isn't only that this quest is making us neurotic, it's that these stand-ins simply don't answer our need for completeness.
Simply put, we're looking in the wrong place. So, where should we be looking? What's the big question we'll be trying to answer in this lesson?
Religiosity isn't in decline, but it has changed its face. A while back, a meme featuring Cruella DeVille, her eyes wild and hair disheveled as she clutches her car's wheel, circulated on social media. It was captioned with the overwhelming daily tasks of modern life, excelling in work, maintaining social ties, and staying healthy. Underneath the picture, users from all walks of life wrote, Every day, and other affirmations like Amen and Yep.
It was a good snapshot of the seemingly universal struggle with the relentless pace of today's existence. In other words, we're all overwhelmed by busyness. But is this constant busyness actually fulfilling? In our society, being busy is often equated with being important. It's as if our worth and even our salvation depend on our productivity and how much we can juggle at once. This relentless hustle has morphed into a new form of religiosity, a secular one driven not by traditional spiritual beliefs, but by the everyday rituals of busyness.
This shift doesn't mean that the religious impulse has diminished, rather it's transformed and found new expressions. Many assume that as church attendance declines, people are drifting away from religious beliefs. But this isn't the whole story. Instead of disappearing, religious impulses are being redirected into secular pursuits. This new religion of busyness carries its own set of beliefs and rituals, embedding itself deeply into our lives. It's not something we do, it's who we become, influencing how we perceive ourselves and our value in the world.
The definition of religion itself may need reconsideration. If we take religion to mean the overarching stories that guide our lives and shape our values, what some call small-r religion, then it's evident that traditional religious practices aren't the only ways we seek meaning in our lives. From this perspective, anything that consumes our energy and dictates how we organize our lives can become a form of religion. This includes our careers, social interactions, personal goals, and even the technology we use. The real shift isn't away from religiosity, then, but toward a new kind of religious experience, one that might not be recognized as such because it doesn't fit traditional molds. Our modern-day rituals, be they checking our phones, curating our social media profiles, or optimizing our routines, all serve a similar function to the religious practices of old.
They provide structure and offer a narrative by which we make sense of our lives and our world. In essence, while our society may appear more secular, the human quest for meaning, purpose, and community remains as strong as ever. It's just that now, these elements are often pursued through secular avenues. Understanding this can help us manage the pressures of modern life, perhaps easing the relentless strive for busyness by recognizing its true nature as a secular pursuit for what used to be sought in the pews.
The secular search for completeness answers a religious need. The chase for enough dominates our daily lives, manifesting in our desires to be successful, happy, fit, wealthy, influential, and accepted. This pursuit, driven by an unending societal pressure to achieve, creates widespread anxiety and loneliness, but also reveals a deeper, innate aspect of human nature. Our obsession with righteousness, which in theological context denotes self-justification.
This drive for righteousness, as moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind, is a fundamental human condition, deeply embedded in our DNA. It's not merely a product of religious adherence, often labeled with a capital R, but a basic aspect of what it means to be human. This inherent longing to feel justified or sufficient is essential for social cohesion and the survival of our species, as it influences group formation and collaborative survival strategies. But the quest for righteousness has significant downsides. It perpetuates a cycle where individuals never quite feel enough, despite their achievements. This phenomenon is evident across various aspects of life.
A colleague may equate endless busyness with self-worth, or a friend might consistently seek the perfect partner to feel complete. On a personal level, a person might endlessly scroll through social media, seeking validation through likes and comments to bolster self-esteem. This obsession with being enough drives much of our behavior, subtly shaping how we interact with the world and with others. It influences our self-presentation, our relationships, and our daily decisions, often overshadowing opportunities for genuine contentment and connection. The constant striving for approval and validation can prevent us from experiencing true satisfaction, always leaving us wanting more, never feeling fully fulfilled. Recognizing this ingrained pursuit of enoughness can be enlightening.
It helps you understand why you act the way you do, why you're perpetually busy, and why you struggle with feelings of inadequacy despite considerable successes. More importantly, acknowledging the illusion of enough can lead to a significant shift in perspective. It can encourage you to step away from the relentless chase for external validation and toward a life that prioritizes authentic experiences and meaningful connections.
Enoughness can divide us and make us cruel. The irony of enoughness is that while it unites us in a common human desire across diverse boundaries, such as politics, nationality, gender, race, and age, it simultaneously divides. This yearning can solidify in-groups, fostering a strong sense of community and altruism. Yet it also sharply defines out-groups, creating rifts and fostering judgments that can dehumanize.
The desire for enoughness or righteousness often escalates into moral showdowns, where differences in perspective can quickly transform into battles between good and evil. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr captures the essence of this dichotomy by highlighting the cruelty that can emerge from the pursuit of righteousness, a concept known as Pharisaism within religious contexts. This refers to an adherence to the letter of the law so rigid that it contradicts its spirit, often leading to a superficial display of virtue that masks deeper moral failings. The relentless pursuit of righteousness doesn't just apply to traditional religious contexts, but also to secular replacement religions, where self-justification climbs an ever-lengthening ladder, making each step toward self-approval harder to reach. This drive can lead individuals to feel an intensified pressure to succeed, and for those who achieve high levels of success or beauty, their perceived flaws can become even more pronounced. In the past, traditional capital-R religion offered a sanctuary for guilt and shame, a place to seek forgiveness and unburden the soul.
But as societal norms shift and traditional religious affiliations decline, these needs don't disappear. They are instead redirected. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche envisioned a post-religious society where humanity, unshackled from divine law, would embrace reality without guilt, entering a new era of liberation and flourishing. But the contemporary cultural landscape suggests otherwise.
The human needs for hope, purpose, connection, and justification, traditionally addressed by religion, remain as potent as ever. As churches shut up shop, the existential quests and anxieties once housed within their walls don't simply vanish. They find new expressions and outlets. This transition challenges us to reconsider how we address these perennial human concerns in a world where traditional structures no longer suffice.
Our obsession with status is making us sick. As we've seen, the pursuit of righteousness has taken on new forms, infiltrating aspects of daily life from the kitchen to the gym, the computer screen to the bedroom. With traditional altars becoming less central, modern life has crafted its own sites of worship where every choice, whether it's where we send our children to school or who we choose to date, feels fraught with the pressure to choose correctly or risk falling behind. This phenomenon, termed the Nova Effect by philosopher Charles Taylor, describes the explosion of options that mimic religious fervor, offering a pluralism of pursuits that all demand our devotion.
These modern religions, be it fitness, food, or romance, demand constant attention and adherence to their rituals, but unlike the traditional religions of the past, they often lack the element of mercy. The allure of these pursuits lies in their promise of salvation through achievement or status, but turning these everyday elements into ultimate goals transforms them from positive aspects of life into sources of stress and toxicity. The consequences are significant. For example, busyness, often revered as a badge of honor in our culture, has been linked to chronic stress, heart disease, sleeplessness, and a host of other health issues. Despite these risks, busyness persists as a popular status symbol because it serves a dual purpose. It keeps us from confronting the more uncomfortable realities of life, such as doubt, uncertainty, and mortality, while also helping us feel like we're achieving and earning validation.
The constant bid to outdo and outschedule others is seen as a way to accrue points in the enoughness column, validating our existence and value. This relentless drive feeds a cycle where individuals wear their exhaustion as a symbol of their dedication and importance, a contemporary version of the humblebrag. It marks a stark contrast from past societies where leisure was a status symbol. Today, the demonstration of busyness signifies belonging to the harried elite who can afford the luxury of being perpetually engaged.
The implications of this shift are profound. Living in the 21st century often means grappling with the fear of what happens when you stop maintaining this exhausting pace. As people increasingly question how long they can keep feeding this beast of busyness and achievement without collapsing, it becomes clear that the quest for enoughness through modern-day righteousness is not only unsustainable, but also potentially harmful.
True self-worth is forged in the acceptance of others' love. Acceptance shapes our self-worth. It operates under the unspoken assumption that our identity is directly tied to our accomplishments. In this view, our resumes are synonymous with ourselves, and our value is measured by our performance in various arenas of life.
If we aren't excelling or achieving at a high level, we perceive ourselves as less valuable than those who are killing it. This perspective turns everyday life into a relentless competition or a problem that must be solved, rather than a journey to be enjoyed or a series of moments to be savored. Tasks, even the mundane, are laden with existential weight, transforming simple activities into metrics of self-worth. The language of what is called performanceism is unforgiving, a constant scorekeeping that, when intensified by technology, heightens anxiety, loneliness, and even mortality. The impact is especially severe among young people, particularly in high-achieving communities within the U.S. In areas like Palo Alto, California, and Fairfield County, Connecticut, there are alarming rates of youth suicide, significantly higher than the national average.
These are communities where the pressure to achieve academic and athletic excellence is immense, leaving those prone to self-criticism even more vulnerable and isolated. The digital age exacerbates this, as mistakes and youthful missteps become permanent fixtures on the Internet, visible to an audience of millions. Religion once offered a sanctuary. Churches provided spaces of quiet and contemplation, opportunities to be absolved of shortcomings, a place where we could be valued simply for being, rather than for achieving. This respite is becoming ever rarer. A poignant narrative that illuminates the stark contrast between performanceism and fundamental human needs can be found in American poet Mary Carr's memoir, Cherry.
Carr recounts a harrowing experience from her adolescence. At the age of 14, amidst a backdrop of severe emotional turmoil, she attempted suicide by swallowing a handful of pills while her parents were away. Unsuccessful, she became violently ill, and her parents, upon returning, mistook her condition for food poisoning. Concerned, her father asked if there was anything she felt she could eat, to which she responded that only plums might be palatable, despite them being out of season. That night, her father drove from Texas to Arkansas to find her a bushel of plums. The next morning, he presented them to Mary, who, overwhelmed by this act of loving generosity, experienced a transformative realization.
As she ate the warm, sun-ripened fruit, she snapped out of her despair. It was an epiphany that no achievement or failure could define her worth. Rather, it was the unearned and freely given acts of love and kindness that held true value. This moment marked a pivotal shift in Carr's thinking.
She suddenly grasped that her performance was secondary. What really mattered was her appreciation of life's simple, genuine moments of connection. Her father's act wasn't just a gesture of parental love, but a repudiation of the performanceism that nearly drove her to death.
In this lesson to Seculosity by David Zoll, you've learned that modern society often conflates busyness and performance with personal value, leading to a relentless pursuit of enoughness that impacts identities, relationships, and societies. This pursuit, driven by social pressures to achieve, creates widespread anxiety and isolation, particularly among young people in competitive environments. What we really need to experience contentment isn't worldly success. It's human connection and unconditional acceptance that ultimately matter.
Okay, that's it for this lesson. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating. We always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next lesson.
Seculosity (2019) takes aim at our futile quest for perfection in every aspect of our lives. It suggests that performance-obsessed striving makes us anxious, cruel, and miserable. So why do we continue chasing this mirage? It makes a compelling argument that perfectionism fills the hole left by the decline of capital-R religion: our human need for “enoughness.”
David Zahl, Seculosity, how career, parenting, technology, food, politics and romance became our new religion and what to do about it. Do you ever feel that no matter how much you achieve, it's simply not enough? Well, you're not alone. Employees consistently draw attention to the contemporary pressure to perform and how it's making us miserable.
We're told and tell ourselves that we have to be perfect parents, stellar employees and impeccable partners. Even the minutiae of our lives are fair game. What we eat, where we holiday, how often we go to the gym, it's all subject to a compulsive search for perfection. Why do we hold ourselves and others to such impossible standards? David Zahl's concept of Seculosity, which combines the words secular and religiosity, promises an answer. He suggests the reason we perfect our diets or optimize our time with such, well, religious zeal is because these are religious behaviors.
As capital R religion has declined, we've found secular equivalents that answer a deep-seated human need. These activities provide us with a sense of righteousness and belonging, aiming to fulfill our craving for hope, purpose, and most crucially, a feeling of enoughness. As a result, secular domains of our lives have become platforms where we seek salvation and self-justification. The problem isn't only that this quest is making us neurotic, it's that these stand-ins simply don't answer our need for completeness.
Simply put, we're looking in the wrong place. So, where should we be looking? What's the big question we'll be trying to answer in this lesson?
Religiosity isn't in decline, but it has changed its face. A while back, a meme featuring Cruella DeVille, her eyes wild and hair disheveled as she clutches her car's wheel, circulated on social media. It was captioned with the overwhelming daily tasks of modern life, excelling in work, maintaining social ties, and staying healthy. Underneath the picture, users from all walks of life wrote, Every day, and other affirmations like Amen and Yep.
It was a good snapshot of the seemingly universal struggle with the relentless pace of today's existence. In other words, we're all overwhelmed by busyness. But is this constant busyness actually fulfilling? In our society, being busy is often equated with being important. It's as if our worth and even our salvation depend on our productivity and how much we can juggle at once. This relentless hustle has morphed into a new form of religiosity, a secular one driven not by traditional spiritual beliefs, but by the everyday rituals of busyness.
This shift doesn't mean that the religious impulse has diminished, rather it's transformed and found new expressions. Many assume that as church attendance declines, people are drifting away from religious beliefs. But this isn't the whole story. Instead of disappearing, religious impulses are being redirected into secular pursuits. This new religion of busyness carries its own set of beliefs and rituals, embedding itself deeply into our lives. It's not something we do, it's who we become, influencing how we perceive ourselves and our value in the world.
The definition of religion itself may need reconsideration. If we take religion to mean the overarching stories that guide our lives and shape our values, what some call small-r religion, then it's evident that traditional religious practices aren't the only ways we seek meaning in our lives. From this perspective, anything that consumes our energy and dictates how we organize our lives can become a form of religion. This includes our careers, social interactions, personal goals, and even the technology we use. The real shift isn't away from religiosity, then, but toward a new kind of religious experience, one that might not be recognized as such because it doesn't fit traditional molds. Our modern-day rituals, be they checking our phones, curating our social media profiles, or optimizing our routines, all serve a similar function to the religious practices of old.
They provide structure and offer a narrative by which we make sense of our lives and our world. In essence, while our society may appear more secular, the human quest for meaning, purpose, and community remains as strong as ever. It's just that now, these elements are often pursued through secular avenues. Understanding this can help us manage the pressures of modern life, perhaps easing the relentless strive for busyness by recognizing its true nature as a secular pursuit for what used to be sought in the pews.
The secular search for completeness answers a religious need. The chase for enough dominates our daily lives, manifesting in our desires to be successful, happy, fit, wealthy, influential, and accepted. This pursuit, driven by an unending societal pressure to achieve, creates widespread anxiety and loneliness, but also reveals a deeper, innate aspect of human nature. Our obsession with righteousness, which in theological context denotes self-justification.
This drive for righteousness, as moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind, is a fundamental human condition, deeply embedded in our DNA. It's not merely a product of religious adherence, often labeled with a capital R, but a basic aspect of what it means to be human. This inherent longing to feel justified or sufficient is essential for social cohesion and the survival of our species, as it influences group formation and collaborative survival strategies. But the quest for righteousness has significant downsides. It perpetuates a cycle where individuals never quite feel enough, despite their achievements. This phenomenon is evident across various aspects of life.
A colleague may equate endless busyness with self-worth, or a friend might consistently seek the perfect partner to feel complete. On a personal level, a person might endlessly scroll through social media, seeking validation through likes and comments to bolster self-esteem. This obsession with being enough drives much of our behavior, subtly shaping how we interact with the world and with others. It influences our self-presentation, our relationships, and our daily decisions, often overshadowing opportunities for genuine contentment and connection. The constant striving for approval and validation can prevent us from experiencing true satisfaction, always leaving us wanting more, never feeling fully fulfilled. Recognizing this ingrained pursuit of enoughness can be enlightening.
It helps you understand why you act the way you do, why you're perpetually busy, and why you struggle with feelings of inadequacy despite considerable successes. More importantly, acknowledging the illusion of enough can lead to a significant shift in perspective. It can encourage you to step away from the relentless chase for external validation and toward a life that prioritizes authentic experiences and meaningful connections.
Enoughness can divide us and make us cruel. The irony of enoughness is that while it unites us in a common human desire across diverse boundaries, such as politics, nationality, gender, race, and age, it simultaneously divides. This yearning can solidify in-groups, fostering a strong sense of community and altruism. Yet it also sharply defines out-groups, creating rifts and fostering judgments that can dehumanize.
The desire for enoughness or righteousness often escalates into moral showdowns, where differences in perspective can quickly transform into battles between good and evil. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr captures the essence of this dichotomy by highlighting the cruelty that can emerge from the pursuit of righteousness, a concept known as Pharisaism within religious contexts. This refers to an adherence to the letter of the law so rigid that it contradicts its spirit, often leading to a superficial display of virtue that masks deeper moral failings. The relentless pursuit of righteousness doesn't just apply to traditional religious contexts, but also to secular replacement religions, where self-justification climbs an ever-lengthening ladder, making each step toward self-approval harder to reach. This drive can lead individuals to feel an intensified pressure to succeed, and for those who achieve high levels of success or beauty, their perceived flaws can become even more pronounced. In the past, traditional capital-R religion offered a sanctuary for guilt and shame, a place to seek forgiveness and unburden the soul.
But as societal norms shift and traditional religious affiliations decline, these needs don't disappear. They are instead redirected. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche envisioned a post-religious society where humanity, unshackled from divine law, would embrace reality without guilt, entering a new era of liberation and flourishing. But the contemporary cultural landscape suggests otherwise.
The human needs for hope, purpose, connection, and justification, traditionally addressed by religion, remain as potent as ever. As churches shut up shop, the existential quests and anxieties once housed within their walls don't simply vanish. They find new expressions and outlets. This transition challenges us to reconsider how we address these perennial human concerns in a world where traditional structures no longer suffice.
Our obsession with status is making us sick. As we've seen, the pursuit of righteousness has taken on new forms, infiltrating aspects of daily life from the kitchen to the gym, the computer screen to the bedroom. With traditional altars becoming less central, modern life has crafted its own sites of worship where every choice, whether it's where we send our children to school or who we choose to date, feels fraught with the pressure to choose correctly or risk falling behind. This phenomenon, termed the Nova Effect by philosopher Charles Taylor, describes the explosion of options that mimic religious fervor, offering a pluralism of pursuits that all demand our devotion.
These modern religions, be it fitness, food, or romance, demand constant attention and adherence to their rituals, but unlike the traditional religions of the past, they often lack the element of mercy. The allure of these pursuits lies in their promise of salvation through achievement or status, but turning these everyday elements into ultimate goals transforms them from positive aspects of life into sources of stress and toxicity. The consequences are significant. For example, busyness, often revered as a badge of honor in our culture, has been linked to chronic stress, heart disease, sleeplessness, and a host of other health issues. Despite these risks, busyness persists as a popular status symbol because it serves a dual purpose. It keeps us from confronting the more uncomfortable realities of life, such as doubt, uncertainty, and mortality, while also helping us feel like we're achieving and earning validation.
The constant bid to outdo and outschedule others is seen as a way to accrue points in the enoughness column, validating our existence and value. This relentless drive feeds a cycle where individuals wear their exhaustion as a symbol of their dedication and importance, a contemporary version of the humblebrag. It marks a stark contrast from past societies where leisure was a status symbol. Today, the demonstration of busyness signifies belonging to the harried elite who can afford the luxury of being perpetually engaged.
The implications of this shift are profound. Living in the 21st century often means grappling with the fear of what happens when you stop maintaining this exhausting pace. As people increasingly question how long they can keep feeding this beast of busyness and achievement without collapsing, it becomes clear that the quest for enoughness through modern-day righteousness is not only unsustainable, but also potentially harmful.
True self-worth is forged in the acceptance of others' love. Acceptance shapes our self-worth. It operates under the unspoken assumption that our identity is directly tied to our accomplishments. In this view, our resumes are synonymous with ourselves, and our value is measured by our performance in various arenas of life.
If we aren't excelling or achieving at a high level, we perceive ourselves as less valuable than those who are killing it. This perspective turns everyday life into a relentless competition or a problem that must be solved, rather than a journey to be enjoyed or a series of moments to be savored. Tasks, even the mundane, are laden with existential weight, transforming simple activities into metrics of self-worth. The language of what is called performanceism is unforgiving, a constant scorekeeping that, when intensified by technology, heightens anxiety, loneliness, and even mortality. The impact is especially severe among young people, particularly in high-achieving communities within the U.S. In areas like Palo Alto, California, and Fairfield County, Connecticut, there are alarming rates of youth suicide, significantly higher than the national average.
These are communities where the pressure to achieve academic and athletic excellence is immense, leaving those prone to self-criticism even more vulnerable and isolated. The digital age exacerbates this, as mistakes and youthful missteps become permanent fixtures on the Internet, visible to an audience of millions. Religion once offered a sanctuary. Churches provided spaces of quiet and contemplation, opportunities to be absolved of shortcomings, a place where we could be valued simply for being, rather than for achieving. This respite is becoming ever rarer. A poignant narrative that illuminates the stark contrast between performanceism and fundamental human needs can be found in American poet Mary Carr's memoir, Cherry.
Carr recounts a harrowing experience from her adolescence. At the age of 14, amidst a backdrop of severe emotional turmoil, she attempted suicide by swallowing a handful of pills while her parents were away. Unsuccessful, she became violently ill, and her parents, upon returning, mistook her condition for food poisoning. Concerned, her father asked if there was anything she felt she could eat, to which she responded that only plums might be palatable, despite them being out of season. That night, her father drove from Texas to Arkansas to find her a bushel of plums. The next morning, he presented them to Mary, who, overwhelmed by this act of loving generosity, experienced a transformative realization.
As she ate the warm, sun-ripened fruit, she snapped out of her despair. It was an epiphany that no achievement or failure could define her worth. Rather, it was the unearned and freely given acts of love and kindness that held true value. This moment marked a pivotal shift in Carr's thinking.
She suddenly grasped that her performance was secondary. What really mattered was her appreciation of life's simple, genuine moments of connection. Her father's act wasn't just a gesture of parental love, but a repudiation of the performanceism that nearly drove her to death.
In this lesson to Seculosity by David Zoll, you've learned that modern society often conflates busyness and performance with personal value, leading to a relentless pursuit of enoughness that impacts identities, relationships, and societies. This pursuit, driven by social pressures to achieve, creates widespread anxiety and isolation, particularly among young people in competitive environments. What we really need to experience contentment isn't worldly success. It's human connection and unconditional acceptance that ultimately matter.
Okay, that's it for this lesson. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating. We always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next lesson.
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