John Green, the Universe, and the Power of Community
How to exist as a person in a time such as this
It has been TOO long! I haven’t written in a few weeks because my work schedule has been packed (turns out people tend to need a lot of extra support in these dreary winter months!), but also because much of my spare time has been devoted to avidly following the news as America falls into full-fledged kleptocratic authoritarianism faster than I had even pessimistically thought possible. (I’ll have a list of some of my favorite Substacker journalists and resources at the end!) Even now, as I put the finishing touches on this on Thursday night, it’s hard to feel like putting this post out there matters when everything in our country’s governmental system is on fire. But here I am, here we are, showing up. We gotta believe it matters.
Rays of hope: as a result of my last post (about the Baddest Bad Guys) a REAL LIVE GROUP of people here in my town got together to watch the film Join or Die together. The film is based on the research of Robert Putnam, a social scientist who has been studying democracies, the health of civil society, and the changes in group affiliation patterns for decades. His thesis is that the amount of people who join an organization (a “club,” broadly speaking, which could be anything from church to sports to volunteer groups… or even a meditation group, or Foods Not Bombs, or an LGBTQ+ support group, to put give examples that people here might resonate more with!) is directly related to that person’s individual health but also broader societal health and the strength of democracy.
Then, I almost hosted a bunch of people at my house for brunch (REAL LIVE PEOPLE! My religious trauma support group, which is a REAL LIVE GROUP!) until snow got in the way. But we’re rescheduling and it will happen! We are joining, not dying!
It feels more urgent than ever to be connecting with people in the community and figuring out how to support one another. And a lot of times, that support just means existing together, offering companionship and co-travelers on this road of life that’s been made especially difficult as of late. I’m incredibly grateful for the connections I’m finally making here and how much more enriched my life feels because of it.
A couple weeks ago I went back to my seminary in Indianapolis to hear author John Green (you know… The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down guy? THAT guy??) speak. At my seminary! 🤩 His talk was a one-hour perfect balm for my soul in that moment, and I have been eager to share about it with you ever since.
John Green, for the uninitiated, is an author of two young adult novels turned motion pictures, as well as several other novels and a nonfiction book about tuberculosis, and he co-hosts a very popular vlog with his brother Hank Green. John is an incredibly thoughtful human living with OCD and anxiety (listen to his Fresh Air episode about his experiences with OCD), and the way he speaks about existential questions goes STRAIGHT to my heart. I will do my best to convey the beauty of his talk!
The following thoughts are either directly from him or me reflecting on what he said:
“Apocalypse” often feels like the right word to describe what we’re currently about to go through, though in many ways a quick apocalypse that takes us all out would feel preferable to whatever slow process is about to happen. The unfortunate thing is that with the slow moving apocalypse, we are left with choice about what to do. It would be easier to not have to do anything.
He noted that “humans have the power to destroy ourselves, but not to save ourselves.” And by “saving” ourselves, he means in the ultimate sense: we are afraid of our mortality; of our personal non-existence but also our non-existence as an entire species. What/who will remember us when we are gone?
We are powerful, but not powerful enough. Why do we choose to use our power in such destructive ways?
John quoted Octavia Butler in saying, “the destiny of earthseed is to take root among the stars.” It does make you wonder — we are but a speck of dust in the vastness of the universe. What if the end of our story was not our human life here — less than a blink of an eye in the span of time — but we really were destined for something greater than we can comprehend — that we could be at home amongst the stars. We are literally made of atoms that were present at the beginning of time (I have also been listening to his “Crash Course” series on the universe.) That’s kind of incomprehensible and wild, you know?
I really appreciated what he had to say about his relationship with religion (he is Episcopalian). Given where and when he exists in the course of history, he says, he cannot believe in a god who is in control of everything. (same same). It’s almost a moot point whether g/God is real. We really need to know “how to live in the life that will come to an end.” And his lens on Christianity is that “Good news begins and ends with God’s liberation of the oppressed.” We are also called to keep hoping and keep working for the good of all: “If we are in a period of collapse, we are called to rebuild.”
Please share if this resonates with you, but sometimes I feel I am wildly swinging between pendulums of: my work with clients, where we are focused on the tiny details of their emotions, internal experiences, and traumas; the current socio-political realities of living in a country where our governmental system is dissolving in front of our eyes and the shock waves will be felt around the world; and our place in the universe, where we are infinitesimally small.
Maybe there are unlimited multiverses out there and we are embodying one aspect — one potentiality — of this experience. Maybe us observing the universe is just the universe observing itself. Maybe we are really part of everything in ways we don’t even understand, and we were always supposed to be here and it was always going to turn out this way. I don’t know, and it can be a little dizzying to sit with.
What I know is this: my life is better because of the people in it, and the more connections I make with them and the deeper those connections go, the more enriched my life becomes. And I am also very aware of (and obsessed with) our political situation, and believe most people don’t understand the seriousness of the problem. I also believe that the best antidote is to live my full life while also figuring out what is my role in the Resistance. To be the resistance just by being our complicated selves, but also to act as the resistance when we are called to.
And I also kind of believe, somehow, maybe, that all of these external things will ultimately turn out to be far less important than they feel right now. That years and years down the line human / spiritual evolution will take us to a place we can’t even comprehend right now, and these years will be a blip on the radar. Even if they are a cataclysmic event just like we look back at the asteroid and the dinosaurs. I am not in any way trying to be cavalier; I am just trying to zoom out wide enough to bring in more perspective.
Whew. That is a whole lot of existential question, ponderings, and curiosities for one post, so if you made it this far, thanks for sticking with me.
Now, those resources! Highly recommend:
(the “On Tyranny” guy who has a series of YouTubes about his booklet of that name; his Substack is EXCELLENT and informative. Historian with so much important perspective). is someone I’ve been really enjoying; former Secretary of Labor and has been calling what’s happening a coup for longer than most, which I appreciate the bluntness of. obviously for your daily dose of what happened today from a historian’s perspective. She writes to create an account we can look back at years from now and see the patterns unfolding in real-time.If you’re still on Facebook and have the stomach for stressful political content, I highly recommend following Alt National Park Service. They’re the real deal with the resistance work they are engaging in. And check out my new sticker I got in support!
That’s all for today, friends (I don’t know how long this post is but I know it’s long!!). Take care of yourselves and let’s take care of each other. You know I love to hear from you in the comments or as a reply to this email! ❤️
This post sparked such an explosion of thoughts for me. I spent about a decade (2012-2023ish) heavily involved with progressive communities – co-op schools, my local UU congregation, a co-op pagan family camp, informal co-housing, and a CSA – and one of the things they had in common was quasi-salvific rhetoric about the value of community. I still agree with it intellectually, except now whenever I hear communities touting the value of community, my emotional reaction is somewhere between an eye-roll and a danger response, like part of me thinks community is going to mug me if it finds me alone in a dark alley.
I’m used to thinking of this as a personal problem: burnout, alienation, and something that happens because I’m probably autistic – I say yes to work because it’s a more satisfying way of socializing than less structured group events are. I like working with other people, and a lot of the work I did is stuff I’m proud of and glad to have done. Maybe all the flowery rhetoric about the importance of community encouraged me to hope for too much, though? Too many testimonials about found-family and lifelong friends, too many promises of growing into the kind of person you want to be, too much spin about how great programs or events were, too many guarantees that everyone counts, and little of it mirrored my and my kids’ actual experiences. Some of the promises weren’t even things the communities said, just promises that this kind of rhetoric convinced me to make to myself. I wonder how common my experience is and what additional competencies or conditions someone like me would need to sustain a commitment to community.
But just now thinking about the problem with your blog’s frame of religious trauma in mind, something new occurred to me: what if my burnout / alienation isn’t just a personal problem -- what if it’s a potential inherent in the rhetoric? A likelihood even? Part of how progressive communities inspire support is by talking up the power of community, and I don’t think anyone I knew was doing it in bad faith or trying to take advantage of people, but the rhetoric was urgent and ungrounded in a way that maybe made it harder to work through problems and sustain long-term commitment, given that my family’s experiences mostly hadn’t been wonderful or transformative. If pro-community rhetoric overstates its case, what long term effects does that have?
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, and I’m not looking for you to have answers -- mostly I’m glad you wrote this post that got me thinking, and hope I haven't imposed too much by writing this lengthy of a comment. If you have good feelings about community, I don’t want to quash those, and I don’t want to stop you from talking about it, or from being motivated by pro-community values. I mean, I’m still trying to convince my tween that having more connections to people makes life richer and helps us come alive, and that when classmates at her new school ask if she wants to eat lunch together, she should say yes more often instead of reading a book.
Also, John Green! The tween and I watch his new episode of Crash Course: Religions together ever Tuesday after school, but it hadn’t occurred to me to explore what he’s done besides Crash Course.
I love John Green! Hank too - their podcast, vlog, and general work is/has been a touchstone of sanity and goodness for years. We even have a John Green “Pizza John” rug hanging on the wall that weirds people out.