Look Inside

And I have a colleague named Lisa Miller at Columbia University, and she says we’re suffering from “diseases of disenchantment.” And she counts depression, anxiety, suicidality, many other things—addictions—as part of these diseases of despair.
And so I also think that that despair partly comes from the lack of sort of consensus-based rites of passage. Where in many Indigenous societies, these people were asked to do a pilgrimage or even a two-year walk—you know, those kind in the Basque territory. Or, a more recent version is in the Mormon tradition—they might be in the Polynesian Islands asked to swim to a very distant rock and swim back.
And so in these, there were always sort of a little bit of danger. Maybe a vision quest, where you’re not eating or drinking for several days. And the societies were able to tolerate that danger in favor of assuring that people came back with some sense of, “Oh—this is what I’m here to do.”
And so many people have had transformative experiences—either because of something amazing and wonderful, or because of a deep deconstruction. But these were almost engineered transformative experiences. And I think we need to have more of those in our society, because they at least plant the seed of perspective: What am I really here for? What am I here to do?