The Book I Had to Write

The Story Behind The Practice of Being Alive

Over the past several months I have been releasing chapters from a new book to paid subscribers as they are written. Recently I published the introduction to Part III, and the response has reminded me that many readers have encountered individual chapters without knowing the larger story behind the project itself.

Some have followed my work on existential health. Others arrived through my writing on non-religious spirituality, religious deconstruction, reconstruction, meaning, identity, or the human condition. Many have been reading the book as it unfolds. Yet I have never really written about why this book exists, what problem it is attempting to address, or why it has gradually become the most important writing project of my life.

The book is titled The Practice of Being Alive: Modern Humans in Search of Ground in a Nihilistic Age. Although I only began writing it recently, the questions that gave rise to it have accompanied me for decades.

Why I Had to Write This Book

Looking back, I can see that much of my life has been shaped by a single persistent question, though it appeared in different forms at different stages of the journey. As a young theology student, I encountered it through religion. As a pastor, I encountered it through questions of faith, suffering, purpose, and belonging. During the long process of deconstruction and reconstruction, I encountered it through uncertainty, loss, and the collapse of familiar frameworks. Later I found myself pursuing it through psychology, philosophy, spirituality, human development, and contemplative practice. The language changed. The settings changed. The assumptions changed. The question remained remarkably consistent.

What does it mean to be fully human?

At first, I assumed this was primarily a religious question. Over time I came to suspect that religion was one of many ways human beings attempted to answer it. The deeper question existed prior to religion and remains after religion. It concerns how human beings relate to reality, meaning, uncertainty, freedom, belonging, suffering, and mortality. It concerns what allows a person not merely to function but to inhabit their life.

I became increasingly aware that many of the questions people brought to religion did not disappear when religion disappeared. The beliefs changed. The institutions changed. The frameworks changed. The needs remained. People still wrestled with meaning, belonging, suffering, mortality, identity, and the challenge of constructing a life that felt worth inhabiting. Leaving religion did not eliminate those questions. In many cases it exposed them more directly. I eventually realized I was looking at a domain of human development that neither religion nor psychology fully explained.

Over the years I met countless people who appeared successful by almost every conventional measure. They were intelligent, capable, productive, and outwardly functional. Yet many carried an unmistakable sense of disconnection. They felt estranged from themselves, uncertain of who they were, disconnected from meaningful forms of belonging, and unable to locate a stable place from which to engage their lives. I realized these experiences could not be explained adequately through existing categories alone. Something larger was happening beneath the surface.

Eventually I recognized that the book I wanted to write was not a book about religion, spirituality, or even meaning itself. It was a book about the conditions required for a human being to remain alive to reality in an age increasingly characterized by fragmentation, acceleration, uncertainty, and loss of shared orientation. It was a book about what happens after the old maps stop working.

In retrospect, I can see that many of the ideas I have explored over the years were circling the same territory from different directions. Whether I was writing about religious deconstruction, non-religious spirituality, belonging, identity, meaning, mortality, or existential health, I was wrestling with the same underlying concern. How does a human being remain grounded, present, and fully alive when certainty recedes and inherited structures no longer provide orientation? At some point I realized I was no longer writing separate essays about separate subjects. I was slowly writing this book.

My previous books were largely concerned with religious deconstruction, reconstruction, and what I have often described as transreligious or non-religious spirituality. They explored what happens when inherited belief systems lose their authority and individuals begin the difficult work of rebuilding meaning, identity, and spiritual life beyond traditional frameworks.

Those questions remain important to me, but over time I found myself becoming more interested in the deeper human realities beneath them. What capacities are required to navigate uncertainty? How do people remain grounded when familiar structures collapse? What enables a person not merely to survive profound change, but to inhabit life fully in its aftermath? In many ways, The Practice of Being Alive represents a movement beneath the questions that animated my earlier work.

Over time I began to realize that religious deconstruction was not the destination. It was one expression of a larger developmental challenge. The same struggles appeared among religious people, former religious people, spiritual seekers, secular professionals, academics, entrepreneurs, and people who had never cared about religion at all. Beneath the surface differences, I kept encountering the same underlying questions about reality, identity, belonging, uncertainty, and the capacity to inhabit a human life. Eventually I understood that the deeper issue was not religion. It was what it means to be a person under modern conditions.

The Problem That Forced This Book Into Existence

The central insight behind this book emerged gradually.

For years I found myself observing the same pattern in different domains of life. Technology was advancing rapidly. Information was expanding exponentially. Human beings were gaining unprecedented freedom, choice, and connectivity. Yet many forms of distress appeared to be expanding alongside them. The contradiction was difficult to ignore.

The conventional explanations never felt entirely sufficient. We were told that the problem was political polarization, social media, economic insecurity, declining religious participation, technological disruption, or mental health challenges. Each of these explanations contained part of the truth. None seemed capable of explaining the whole picture.

What eventually became clear to me was that modern life places unprecedented existential demands upon the individual while providing relatively few environments dedicated to cultivating the capacities required to meet those demands. The contemporary person is expected to construct identity, create meaning, navigate uncertainty, exercise freedom responsibly, sustain belonging, confront mortality, tolerate ambiguity, and adapt continuously to accelerating change. Previous generations often inherited structures that absorbed much of this burden. Increasingly, that responsibility now falls upon the individual.

This led me to a realization that eventually became foundational to my work on existential health. The defining challenge of our age may not be a crisis of information, technology, or belief. It may be a crisis of developmental capacity.

From that insight emerged the framework of existential health, a developmental approach I have been exploring through my writing, teaching, and recent academic work, including a forthcoming peer-reviewed journal article scheduled for publication in July.

Modernity has expanded the demands placed upon the individual faster than it has expanded the capacities required to meet those demands.

We have become extraordinarily skilled at producing capability. We educate, train, optimize, credential, and measure. We know how to develop competence. We know how to increase performance. We know how to expand technical expertise. What receives far less attention is the development of capacities such as reality contact, uncertainty tolerance, discernment, belonging, self-authorship, existential resilience, and the ability to remain present when familiar structures no longer provide stability.

This realization eventually gave rise to the framework of existential health. Physical health concerns the body’s capacity to function. Psychological health concerns the mind’s capacity to function. Existential health concerns the human person’s capacity to engage reality, freedom, uncertainty, meaning, belonging, responsibility, and mortality without becoming overwhelmed by them.

More than anything, this book is an attempt to name a problem that many people feel but cannot quite articulate. They sense that something is missing. They sense that modern life demands more from them than previous generations were required to carry. Information, achievement, freedom, and success often fail to resolve the underlying tension. What many people lack is not intelligence, opportunity, or motivation, but language for the condition itself. This book emerged from the conviction that before people can address a problem, they must first be able to name it.

I believe many contemporary struggles become easier to understand when viewed through this lens. The issue is often not simply a lack of information, resources, opportunity, or even resilience. The challenge is developmental. Modern life places unprecedented existential demands upon individuals while providing relatively few environments dedicated to cultivating the capacities required to meet those demands. What often appears as a personal failure may instead reflect a broader mismatch between the conditions of modern existence and the capacities required to navigate them. The problem is not merely what people know. It is what they are able to carry.

What Readers Will Find Inside

The Practice of Being Alive is my attempt to explore these questions as fully as I can. Although the book draws upon philosophy, psychology, spirituality, developmental theory, and cultural analysis, it is not primarily an academic work. Nor is it a self-help manual promising certainty, mastery, or transformation through a sequence of techniques.

At times as I wrote the book, I found myself drifting toward the familiar impulse to explain, resolve, or fix. Each time I returned to the same recognition: many of the deepest challenges of being human are not problems to solve. They are realities we must learn how to carry.

At its heart, it is an inquiry into what capacities modern human beings must develop if they are to remain grounded in reality while living within conditions that often encourage fragmentation, distraction, dependency, and avoidance.

The book begins with a recognition that many modern people feel strangely absent from their own lives. They function, achieve, perform, and adapt, yet often experience a subtle distance between themselves and their own existence. From there, the book follows the long movement from fragmentation toward participation, from certainty toward trust, from management toward inhabitation. It explores what happens when familiar structures collapse, what begins to return in their absence, and how a person gradually learns to stand within reality without requiring guarantees. Across its three parts, the book examines disconnection, belonging, self-authorship, uncertainty, relational ground, presence, and the developmental work required to become capable of carrying life as it actually is.

Throughout the book readers will encounter many of the themes that have shaped my writing for years: existential health, reality contact, symbolic sobriety, self-authorship, belonging, mortality, uncertainty, freedom, meaning, and the developmental work required to become capable of carrying life as it actually is. Beneath all of these themes lies a single concern. How do human beings learn to remain fully alive in a world that offers fewer certainties than the one our ancestors inherited?

In another sense, this is also my most personal book. Not because it is autobiographical in a conventional way, but because every major question explored in these pages emerged from lived experience. The book was shaped by my own encounters with certainty and uncertainty, faith and doubt, collapse and reconstruction, participation and withdrawal. It arose from discovering that maturity often requires relinquishing the demand for guarantees and learning how to stand within reality as it is.

An Invitation to Join the Journey Before Publication

One of the unexpected gifts of this project has been the opportunity to share it while it remains unfinished. Most books arrive after the conversation is already over. Readers encounter the completed artifact after the years of questioning, wrestling, revising, and discovery have largely concluded. This project has unfolded differently. Paid subscribers have been reading chapters as they emerge, engaging ideas while they remain alive and evolving, and participating in conversations that continue to shape the work itself. I am posting chapters in the Thinking in Draft section.

That process has transformed the experience of writing. What began as a solitary project has become a shared inquiry. Questions from readers have sharpened ideas. Conversations have revealed connections I might otherwise have missed. The manuscript continues to evolve in dialogue with a community of people who care deeply about the questions it seeks to explore.

Many of those conversations extend beyond the pages of the book itself through the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality, a community I founded to explore existential health, meaning, spiritual life beyond traditional religion, and the developmental challenges of modern existence. The questions explored in this manuscript continue to unfold there through courses, workshops, discussion groups, and ongoing dialogue.

If these themes resonate with you, I invite you to become a paid subscriber and join the journey before the book is complete. Subscribers receive access to every chapter released so far, future chapters as they are written, and more than four hundred essays exploring existential health, non-religious spirituality, religious deconstruction and reconstruction, meaning, identity, purpose, and the human condition.

Paid subscribers also receive a complimentary membership to the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality (CNRS), where many of these questions continue to be explored through workshops, discussion groups, support groups, live gatherings, and ongoing conversations about existential health, meaning, and spiritual life beyond traditional religious frameworks.

More importantly, they become participants in a conversation that extends beyond the pages of a single book.

The question at the heart of The Practice of Being Alive is ultimately larger than any individual author or project. As inherited structures continue to weaken and the responsibilities of self-authorship continue to expand, modern people increasingly find themselves confronting realities that previous generations were often protected from having to navigate alone.

The challenge before us is not merely how to think differently. It is how to become capable of carrying the conditions of existence with greater wisdom, honesty, courage, and presence.

In one sense, this book is about existential health. In another, it is about the human condition itself. It is about what remains after borrowed certainty falls away. It is about learning to participate in reality rather than merely defend ourselves against it. It is about developing the capacity to stand within life as it is, rather than waiting for life to become something else.

For decades I have pursued a single question through religion, philosophy, psychology, spirituality, human development, and lived experience. What does it mean to be fully human? The Practice of Being Alive is my most complete attempt to answer that question.

The question that ultimately animates this book is simple to state and difficult to answer: What capacities must a human being develop to remain fully alive in a world that offers no guarantees?

The Practice of Being Alive is the place where those streams finally converge.