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Gordzilla's avatar

My family was lower middle class growing up and my parents chose to live in ways that were deliberately different, which, in combination with the restrictions of the conservative Christian culture of the eighties made me feel like an outcast among my peers. I was at the bottom of the social pecking order and felt like I literally had nothing going for me (I was terrible at sports and was always one of the ones picked last, I had hand me down clothes from a friend who attended a very conservative Christian school, I wasn't allowed to listen to the radio, had no facility with the opposite sex, etc.) and I very much resented it.

One of the things that saved me as a teen was discovering Christian rock music, which was a lifeline for me that allowed me to connect the world I had to inhabit at public school with the world I had to inhabit at home and church in a way that made it possible not to feel like total outsider to everything. Even then, many of the people who surrounded me at church were critical of the Christian music I liked, which felt like they were trying to pull me back into the status of total social outcast. I fought that relentlessly, but it was hard and I was often filled with conflict and doubt. I still struggle with the effects of all of the above to this day, especially feeling like I never fit in anywhere, and I'm in my early 50s.

I don't know what the best way forward is in light of the above that Aaron shared about lifestyle markers, but I wanted to share my own experience as an example of how difficult it can be to go against the grain of expectation, especially when it's unchosen, as it was for me as a kid.

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Mark Melias's avatar

"Happiness is reality minus expectations" is one of those deceptively simple phrases that seems to explain everything.

The fundamental difference between Christianity and Buddhism? There are two ways to happiness. You can improve your reality, or reduce your expectations. All successful religions offer sound advice which can improve your life (no sex before marriage, etc.), and a cosmology that provides hope and meaning. In other words, religion improves your lived reality, as well as your perception of unseen reality.

Successful religions also tell you to curb your desires. I.E., reduce your expectations. Typically, they focus on ratcheting material desires: The kind of desire that is not fundamental to human existence, and which in the long run just sets an arbitrary new baseline below which you are not happy*.

Buddhism differs from other religions in its rejection of all desire, not just intrinsically harmful ones. Buddhism teaches that the path to salvation is by setting the "expectations" dial to 0.

Christianity is radically different. Of course, it tells us to set the "expectations" dial much lower than secular society would. But it also sets the "reality" dial to infinity: You will live in a perfect world, in perfect happiness, forever (if you follow Christ). Even in concentration camps or in the moment of painful martyrdom, Christians can be filled with radiant joy. Not just because we hope for salvation, but because we can see the reflection of that perfect world in the fallen world around us. Even when those healthy desires which we are not told to reject (food, shelter, family, etc.) are unfulfilled, a correct Christian perception of reality always leaves the equation of happiness in the positive (granted, internalizing the correct Christian perception of reality is much of the hard work of being a Christian).

*"H = R - E" also provides a strong critique of the Industrial Revolution. The unprecedented technology and wealth of the last 250 years have done a lot to fulfill our needs and irreducible desires. Unnecessary pain and early death are bad; modern medicine has reduced it. Shelter is another fundamental need; there are (almost) no shanty towns in developed countries. Starvation is bad; modern agriculture eliminates famine.

But you can go to very poor countries these days, and find these problems solved. A GDP per capita of less than $10,000 seems sufficient to give everyone a livable house or apartment, food on the table, and sufficient medical care to banish the specter of infant mortality and common death by infectious disease. The US reached $10,000 per capita GDP by 1913.

Every dollar past that point is just driving the ratchet up. Think about it: To the extent that they were not starving or living in a shoebox, are we actually happier than our grandparents? Our great-grandparents? Americans living in the 19th century? The Amish? Ratcheting desires don't actually make us happier. In the most important sense, they do not make our lives better.

And in order to fulfill these ratcheting desires, we have radically restructured our society in a manner hostile to fulfilling human needs: I.E. the things that actually do make life better. If all the computers in the world vanished tomorrow, we would be lost and confused for a few weeks... and then we would get used to it. We'd probably be happier. But we all yearn for love, for community, for a sense of meaning in life, no matter our wealth, or where or when we live, not even if our whole culture is telling us that the hedonic treadmill is enough.

I grew up in a copy-paste American suburb. We weren't particularly close with our neighbors, but I remember the last block parties in my early childhood (mid-late 90s). We moved, and then moved again, and so did most of our other new neighbors. How can you have community under these circumstances?

I had no idea how to be a man (our culture certainly didn't teach me), and have only started learning in the past few years. The result: My teens and twenties were spent entirely alone. Many women in my cohort are facing the opposite problem: A very exciting youth, and loneliness thereafter.

I was a depressed materialist until a few years ago, too, after a childhood of nominal Catholicism and a few fervent teenage years. Not because I wanted to be, but because I found it impossible to believe. Eventually, life experience showed me the truth in what society convinced me was false, and I rediscovered my faith (albeit via Orthodoxy, not the Catholic Church). It's my greatest source of strength as I put my life back together.

This is not an atypical story.

We can blame a lot of this on de-Christianization. But most of it is industrial modernity. The society that malforms us is not just a culture, but a material organization hostile to human flourishing. East Asia was never Christian, and it has most of the same problems: Decaying community, decaying sexual morality and family formation, all-around decline in spiritual and mental wellbeing... and all as society grows wealthier. What's the point? The lifestyle ratchet is attached to a vice press, and it's crushing us.

Yes, it's difficult to de-ratchet on your own. But Christians are already starting to realize that we need to build intentional communities and parallel social networks. I think we should take even more from the Amish, and ask ourselves: How much of the decline we're escaping from is an inevitable outgrowth of industrial society? How much do we have to throw out to form stable Christian communities?

The Amish are a proven success story. They threw out almost everything but modern medicine. It works. Maybe we don't have to go that far. But when you have a community around you, any decline in happiness from turning down the ratchet is temporary. The happiness from healthy communities, healthy families, and healthy faith is more permanent. These are the greatest gifts we can give to the next generation. And if we build a system that works, it could be the key to evangelism in the 21st century. People my age and younger are increasingly questioning the ratchet. Show them a way out, and a lot of them will take it.

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