#126 | You Are Not Your Own Pt. 1 | Alan Noble

I'm not sure that we'll be able to weather modernity or secularization if we can't really internalize the truth that we belong to God.

It's watering time, everybody. It's time for Apollos Watered, a podcast.

To saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ.

My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today in our show, we're having.

Another one of our deep conversations. Do you ever feel like life is too much? Like it's just an.

It just takes everything in your power to get out of bed in the morning, like, oh, no, another day.

You see these other podcasts and you may be read some books or find some articles, and it talks about 5 ways of self improvement, 6 ways for a better marriage, 10 ways to raise better kids, 489 ways to pet your dog. I mean, I don't know, there's just all of these different things that seem inevitably to come up to talk about a better way forward.

Now, I don't want to put all those in the same box, because we do need steps, we do need structures, and we do need to know the best way of going about stuff. However, what if our constant obsession with getting better is actually part of the problem?

Now you might say to me, travis, aren't we supposed to get better? Yeah, but what if we become so obsessed with it that it dictates everything of who we are?

What if all of these different five step plans actually end up causing us more stress in the process?

What if we start going to church and we don't look at church as a means of connecting with God any longer, but simply as a means to an end to have a better marriage, to find more peace, to find more purpose, to raise better moral kids. I got into this discussion with a Muslim guy one time. He said, there's no difference between you and me.

We both have a faith that helps us have morality. I said, well, if that's what you're going for, then we really are very, very different. Because my faith is a whole lot more than just morality.

You know, I think in our current cultural moment, we have this huge pressure to be better all the time.

We're obsessed with identity and defining ourselves and improving ourselves and be the best version of ourselves, and on and on and on and on and on, and it creates a huge frustration.

And I think that one of the reasons why we're so frustrated is that we actually have a distorted view of who we are, who we're supposed to be and what we're to pursue. I mean, today a lot of parents that I talk to want to get their kids into the best college and get the best job, and for what?

Or they want to be the best athlete. They want to be the best at whatever they are, and it's great.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't have dreams and we shouldn't go out to stuff and we're supposed to do the best of our ability, right? We're to do it for the glory of God.

But what if our pursuits are actually just really seriously misplaced aspirations and really incorrect values, desires, you know? Today on Apollos Watered, we're talking to O. Alan Noble. He's a professor of literature at Oklahoma Baptist University.

And his really, quite frankly, an insightful book, you Are not yout Own, takes a hard look at how a society that has created so many creaturely comforts to help us enjoy and flourish as humans. Humans has actually done the opposite and made us very, almost inhuman. Maybe we need a different perspective. And that's where Alan comes in.

He's like a companion on a journey.

He points out some of the accidental values and aspirations that we've stumbled into, but he also tries to help point a path forward that enables us to find some true freedom and rest from the constant stress of our modern world. It's not perfect. He's not given five steps, but he is trying to kind of point out a direction.

That's what we're going to be talking about today on Apollos Watered. Happy listening.

Alan Noble. Welcome to Apollo Swattered.

I'm so excited to be here. I say that on every podcast just to listen, but I am excited to be here. But I just wanted to be honest.

Let's try it again. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited to be here.

I'm excited to be here.

Are you ready? I don't think I've ever started laughing before. I've even got to do the greeting part. Okay, Alan Noble, are you ready for the fast five?

Yeah. You could do six, but I'll do five.

You're from the high desert of California, correct?

Yes.

But now you're in Oklahoma. So, high desert or open prairie?

High desert. I miss home. Not to jump to my book, but when you're young, part of being in a place, it imprints things upon you.

And so, for example, I used to drive by these onion fields when I was a kid. Thousands of times. Right. Driving from our sort of rural home into town, we would call it. And it was very dry.

And so whenever they water these onion fields, there's this smell of onions that are. It's imprinted on my mind. And so it's things like that that'll always be stuck in my mind that I. That I miss.

Even though it was very dry and very, very hot, there were a lot of, you know, kind of awful things about it, but it'll always be home to me. So there are some. There are very nice things about Oklahoma, but that' always be home.

I understand that. I grew up in the country, too, so driving by fields, being out at open areas, you can't ever get away from that. It's just part of who you are.

It's part of who you are. Okay. TV show that I am binging right now is Seinfeld.

My wife and I are rewatching Seinfeld. It's kind of a comfort watch.

You know, it was interesting. They. Lisa Kudrow was getting interviewed the other day and she was telling a story about.

I think that's friends.

Well, but she's getting interviewed and she was. She was talking about Jerry Seinfeld, seeing him at a party, and he just walks up to her and says, you're welcome because.

Because it was his show that really got them a nice audience to start because they appeared after Seinfeld. Interesting, Interesting.

There you go. Yeah.

Okay. Now you're also an English professor and here's. Here's your question. If I were a character from a classic novel, I would be blank and why.

Holden Caulfield? There you go. Boy, that sounds awful. Inner angst, thinking, overthinking. That's what it is, overthinking. Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye.

I tend to overthink things. Be in my head too much. And that's Holden Caulfield. He tends to be in his head too much.

Well, it's good though, if you're a thinker and you're also writing books, because those two have a tendency to go together.

That's fair. That's fair.

Here we go. And your professor. So funniest moment teaching in class is.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. So I'm just. This is like my first semester teaching, my first one of my first classes teaching. And somebody brings a bird to class.

What kind of bird? They brought a bird. For real?

Yeah. So it's like a three hour class. I'm teaching at a community college in the high desert and somebody finds like this injured sparrow.

Apparently not that injured as you will find out. So it's a three hour class. They take a break, they go outside and they come back in.

And I see this kind of disturbance, like somebody's doing something with their backpack or something. And I'm trying to teach them, like, what are they doing? Because they're fiddling around and there's some, like, movement with their backpack.

And I realized they have something alive in their backpack. Now I'm. I don't have. I'm a really. I'm. I'm really young. I'm maybe in my early 20s. I'm working on my master's degree.

So I'm kind of like a TA basically teaching this composition class. So I don't quite have the authority to say, you're not allowed to have a bird inside my classroom.

I don't know why I don't realize that I have this authority. I don't.

Right.

So I. Worst mistake of my life. And so not in my life. It was bad. So I don't say anything, right? And then the bird decides to be a bird.

And it gets up and it starts flying around the classroom and it slams into a window where this other student is sitting. And this other student just says, I think I just crap myself. And in my mind, I think she's literal. She's being honest.

This just happened and I'm fired. This is how I lose my job and my career is over. She's gonna report me to the dean that I didn't kick out the student with a bird.

And you weren't ready for this. I wasn't ready for this. You'd never be ready for this. Right. I don't know how the bird got removed.

I don't know how I survived that, but it wasn't literal. It was just a figurative defecation. And I kept my job. Nobody reported me that I'm aware of, and here I am today. So nobody prepares you for that.

There's no. In the training, there's no, like, if they bring in a wild animal. So that was the worst.

What happened to the bird? Did the bird die?

No, no, the bird was just dazed and continued flying, as I recall. And somehow. And I told the kid who brought it in, like, you know, you need to get your bird out of here.

At that point, I was mad, but I was just sort. I was scared. And as I said, I thought I lost my job.

So.

So we. The good news is it was sort of like everything's been downhill since then.

Nothing weirder has happened or really honestly could happen in that Moment.

That's good. All right, question number five. If I were a fashion style, I would be blank. And why?

The fedora, like, the suit and everything. Like, the zoot suits.

Just not a zoot suit. Just like businessmen. Like, in my opinion, society, Western society, declined when men stopped wearing hats and dressing properly.

He's got on, like, a green news voice. You even got a pocket square. I love it. You have got the professor thing down.

Am I a professor so I can pull off dressing like that? Maybe.

Do you have the patches? Do you have the patches? Are you, like, 80s professor?

I do have one sports coat that has the patches I would like more, but they're expensive.

What was the reason behind those? Like, when did those come to be? I really want to know. Like, when did the patches come out?

When you put your elbows on the table?

Why would I know this? I teach literature, not jacket patches. But that's legitimate.

They wear out.

Those things cost a lot of money. I bet they wore out and then they put the patches on. That's what it is. The patches came after.

Well, it's like when our grandparents, my kids, came home the other day and they. They had, like, their new school clothes, Right? And it has all the holes in it because that's that.

And that's been popular since we were kids because I think we're about around the same age. We grew up in the 80s. And I remember coming to the family farm, and I was showing off.

We had just gone shopping at, like, JCPenney, and I had my jeans, and they had holes in them on. My grandfather looks at me, and he was a farmer, and he's like, we got patches inside. We can iron those on, right?

Iron on patches. Yes.

Okay, here's my next question. This is the question number six, even though there's only a fast five, because I see that it's. Your name is O. Alan Noble. Oh, is it just for.

Oh, Alan Noble. Is that what you were going for?

Sounds like, doesn't it? Oh, Alan. Oh, Alan. This is what I say to myself when a bird gets released in my classroom. Oh, Alan. You want to guess? Because you couldn't.

You couldn't. So it's Orval, but it's spelled weird. It's O, R, V, A, L. Like Orval.

Oh, like Marvel. Almost like that sounds like a Marvel hero character. Or Val.

So when I was at a student at a community college, so, you know, when you have a weird first name, you have the pain of being called. So I would go by Alan. And then, of course, you know, Roll call. Orville. Right.

And so then what I started doing is saying, actually it's pronounced or Val. And then. And saying it's French, right? As this thing.

And so then I meet this guy who's, like, really into beers, and he's like, well, actually, these Trappist monks make this beer called Orval Turkey beer in this place called Golden Valley. Or the Greek meaning golden and vals meaning valley. And so there's like this beer. And so I actually.

So I was making this joke, but I was actually basically right at the time. I had no idea. The story I was told is that Grandpa didn't know how to spell his name. And that may be accurate. I don't. I really.

I have no idea what's going on at this point. Did you.

Did you name your. No. You didn't name any of your kids that, did you?

I don't want to do that to him. I don't want to do that to him. No, no. You have to be a good parent. I don't do that. Just build character. But there are other ways.

What the worst is, is when you're.

That when you have an unusual name is the worst part is when you go on vacation and you're like at those gas stations in Florida where they have all of the different keychains with names on it, and your name is never there, and you. You always feel bad.

Is that really the worst?

Well, not the worst.

Are you really in Florida looking for your name? I don't. I've never. I don't think I've ever done that.

That's.

That is actually. That's actually the least. Get back in the car. Get back in the car. You gotta. You gotta go for looking up your name in a keychain.

You're waiting for somebody to get out of the bathroom, maybe family member.

Oh, my goodness. All right. We have to talk about the book.

Let's talk about the book. Let's talk about the book.

Let's talk about the book. First of all. All right. You are not your own and belonging to God. And in human world, you got some pretty good. You got Tim Keller riffing on your.

Your giving you some promotion there. And there's like, even. I've seen some people doing some serious notes. I did a lot of notes here.

Holy cow.

Yeah, I totally read the Book.

Dude, that's beautiful. Mind level notes. I'm a little worried.

I read the book.

There was so much in here because you're interacting with so many people, philosophers, and yet it still goes back to one really biblical idea that you're not your own and you're bought at a price. What was the impetus? Why this book? Why did you write this book? And why did you write it now?

So a number of years ago, my past. So I'm Presbyterian, and so we read a creed, or, excuse me, a catechism, one of the catechisms every Sunday.

And we were reading the first question answer in the Heidelberg Catechism. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

And the first part of which is that I'm not my own, but belong body and soul, both in life and death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. And so that was sort of echoing in my head, which is part of the point of these catechisms.

And I was watching various arguments happen among evangelicals and people outside of the church about, you know, some culture war issues and other political issues, social issues. And it just struck me that a lot of them sort of hinged on this question of to whom we belong.

And it seemed to me that there was this stark divide between people who believe that we belong to ourselves and then people who believe that we, or who ought to believe that we belong to God. And as long as there was that divide, it was going to be difficult for people to talk across the aisle.

And I wanted to write a book that wasn't going to directly address those issues, because while those issues are important, it seemed to me that until we talk about that base issue to whom we belong and make an argument for that, those other issues, which matter a whole lot, aren't going to. We're not going to make any ground.

And it also seemed to me that within the church itself, there are a lot of people who maybe vocally will say, yes, I believe. I totally believe that I belong to God, but maybe don't actually functionally believe that.

And so I thought to myself, I'm not sure that we'll be able to weather modernity or secularization or the growth of technology and these sorts of things, if we can't really internalize the truth that we belong to God. And so that's what started this book process.

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So really, this is a book about our anthropology, like who we are as human beings. And as you've developed the book, you've gone through the book, I mean, you hit so many different philosophers.

You delve into modernity in ways that I haven't seen too many authors wrestle with it. And really though, the part where you said, I am not my own, that part grabbed me because you've really rooted it in the scriptures. What I.

What I thought was a very theological truth and one that I'd not thought of before, frankly, when you had mentioned it, the way that you had brought it out in that way. And I want to talk for a moment. The pressure of being our own here for a moment, which is what seems that modernity has created.

Secularization tells us you are who you want to be. It's the Disney dream. Follow your heart. Why is that so such a. I don't want to say a thing that we're dealing with because we know that it's there.

But you've really tried to name it.

By saying, this is where we are.

We have tried to be our own. And it's a pressure that we can't handle because it's a huge stressor. And I'm sure you see this more than anyone else.

Being a college professor and seeing young people come in all the time, which are really at the front lines of these cultural thought processes because they're in social media, they're receiving this stuff more than anybody else. What are the things that you saw that made you pull back and go, we are not our own? Because you saw the pressure.

What were the initial things that you saw that really people were trying to develop themselves, if you will.

You know, as you said, being in the front lines, meeting with college students so often, as I just mentioned earlier, I wanted to do a project that sort of flattened the. The way we understand this, because there are kinds of books that sort of say, the problem is out there.

The world out there really has a lot of problems. And let's talk about, let's diagnose the problems with the world out there.

And it seemed to me that while there are a lot of problems out there, the church has, in many ways, without knowing it, bought into a lot of these things.

And so this book, what I like to tell people is if you read this book and you don't feel any conviction, if you don't see yourself in the problems that I describe in this book, then you're probably not reading it carefully enough.

And so, for example, with a lot of the students that I work with who are, they're raised in the church, they're taught in the church, they know the Bible.

And yet, for example, when they get to the point where they're about to graduate, they feel tremendous pressure to choose the one right career path that will validate their lives. It's not just, I need to be circumspect and wise in the career that I choose is that their.

Their career is going to define their identity, is that that career is going to be what gives them worth and purpose and value and makes them who they are.

I also see young people who are obsessed with social media, who get caught up with the algorithm, with posting, who are desperate to know who they can be and who, through their fashion, through their clothing, through their activities, are trying to be someone significant. And of course, it's not just young people, right? I mean, and it's not just social media. So a part of this is what I.

What not just I, but some philosophers, specifically Charles Taylor and some other, call expressive individualism. So it's this idea that in order to have an identity, you have to do two things.

On the one hand, you have to express that identity, and on the other hand, you have to discover that identity. And you can't do just one or the other. You can't just find out who you are and then keep it hidden to yourself.

Like, you've got to find that identity and then announce it to the world. And part of the problem is you can never stop announcing it. You've got to be projecting it constantly and constantly and constantly.

And one of the things you mentioned before is it's an un. Human burden. It's this burden of being your own. Well, that's that identity burden.

If you're constantly having, having to project yourself and express yourself, that's a lot to carry and it's going to overwhelm your. It's going to overwhelm you. And my students, I certainly see that in my students. But you can see this in a middle aged person too, right?

So totally hypothetically, you could be someone who, let's say, really loves fishing. And you might be somebody who thinks I'm unlike young people, right. I'm not really on social media. I don't care about my fashion.

I'm just wearing my old, old Bass Pro Shop, you know, hat and shirt that's all tattered. But you know, whenever I meet someone, you know, I feel this compulsion. I've got to talk about my fishing. I've got to talk.

You know, I've got to, I've got to announce to them, right? This is what I'm really into, right? And that's still fundamentally about this expressive individualism.

There's this craving for, to announce yourself to other people. And if you don't announce what you're into, you kind of feel like you don't exist.

What I think of is that, that, that scene in Back to the future where Marty McFly's siblings start to disappear, right? That's what I think identity is for people, is if they're not constantly expressing themselves, they feel like they're disappearing.

So that's one of the ways that, that I found this sort of pressure presence in both my students and broader society that, that sort of woke me up to these, what I call in the book responsibilities of self belonging. And there are many others that I think are that create these inhuman burdens that we're all carrying around.

I ran all the way here, but now I can't see the reasons. Who am I doing bring this for?

You mention time and time again throughout the book. We create something that's inhuman. We've created a world that is inhuman.

And time and time again we create things that end up being really bad for us. They seem really good, but in the long run they seem very bad.

And you and I both know that modernity is not going to be going anywhere anytime soon and we have to learn how to survive in it. Which is why I appreciated your approach.

Because you're saying, all right, we're not getting rid of it, but we have to rethink our perspective on who it is that we belong to. Because there's an immense freedom that occurs when we understand that we are God's and not our own.

And the difficulty that I'm finding, as we are still living in this society, and I'm still trying to digest your book, because there's a lot you. You were a writer that I feel is compact in that you. You don't waste sentences.

I used to have a coach when I was in basketball, and he said, if you dribble, make sure you don't just stand there.

You.

You take it someplace. You use that to move you. And I feel like that's what you do with sentences. You're. You're moving.

You're always moving to another part of it, and it requires you. You can't read. You just passively.

At least that's my impression, because I found myself having to concentrate, having to wrestle with these things that we're all dealing with. And you've named that, I do find to be helpful, to be enlightening. And I'm still trying to figure out, though, when I understand that I am God's.

I mean, yes, we can all give that theological awareness of it, but that doesn't remove us from the pressure of being online, of being within our society, of being removed from the relationships that have traditionally dictated who we are. So how do we help people to even see this and where it connects with the word of God?

As you said, a lot of these young people are growing up in church, but they're feeling this pressure. And I don't know of any church.

That I can think of off the.

Top of my head. I could be wrong. That's dealing with what you're talking about. But it seems to me this is exactly where people are. So how do you recommend people?

I mean, first of all, you'd say, read my book. Right?

Right.

Get the book.

But sure, yes.

Was that the end of the question? Okay, that's gonna be the end of my question. Here's what I would say. Not everybody needs to read the book.

I would encourage pastors to take the basic structure of the book. And I tried to think through this strategically. What is. How do you invite people to consider the alternative?

And the structure of the book is an invitation to see an alternative. And I do think I teach Dante's Inferno and the Divine Comedy.

And I do think the basic structure of the Divine Comedy is the way that we move towards sanctification. And that is we have to descend before we can ascend.

When we see cultural problems, we have to look at them squarely in the face, in My experience, a lot of people are ready. You said that. One of the things my book does is name things. People are feeling these things. They need language to name them.

And so what I would encourage is churches to put labels on things. You don't have to use what I, you know, I use this, the language of the responsibilities of self belonging.

If society is saying you have to belong to yourself and they're putting these burdens on our shoulders, I think responsibilities of self belonging is useful language. You can come up with your own language. But the point is giving people language to see and helping reveal these things. I think that's useful.

It's painful though. That's why I'm describing it as a descent because they're not going to want to see these things.

It's a painful process and as I said, they're feeling these things already. But there are a lot of things that we feel that we don't want to deal with.

I talk at length in the book about our coping mechanisms, the way that we sort of suppress these things because that's easier than acknowledging the inhuman burden that society is putting on our shoulders. I think that the first step is for churches to help people look squarely in the face at the inhuman burden that society is putting on them.

The burden to be their own, to belong to themselves. And once you've done that, then people are hungry for an alternative. They see this does not work. I am. You're right. I am not satisfied. I am tired.

I am burnt out. I am overwhelmed. Give me something else. I am thirsty. I need water. What can you offer me?

And that is when the gospel and fundamentally belonging to God is the gospel. And so that is when you offer that and that's the encouragement. So that's what I would say. Let us peace.

You mentioned though, as the society has progressed, it really has failed us as we've created this inhuman society. And you mentioned two responses if I, and forgive me if I get it wrong, but you mentioned the affirmation and resignation.

Describe those a bit because I think people do drift between. And you actually mentioned that drifting between two poles is how you describe that. Bring that out for a second.

Because I don't think a lot of our people, they do know something's wrong. They don't know what it is. They're just kind of carried along as we were talking in the pre show walkthrough like the eac.

They're just carried along in these currents of thought and don't even realize it. But they do know that they're tired of the ride. And there's two responses that you talk about describe what these two are.

So society makes us this promise. It says to us, if you will accept this burden of belonging to yourself, then you will live a full and satisfying life.

But it never fulfills its promise. CS Lewis makes this argument that demons or false idols never fulfill their promises. And it's true. So the false gods don't fulfill their promises.

Society fails us and inevitably we turn that on ourselves and we have to cope in some way. And I think there are two primary ways we cope. There are some who look at this promise and say, okay, what I need to do is I need to work harder.

And that's the people who turn to affirmation and we say, you know what, the system basically works. And so it's really a matter of my will. And these tend to be people who are high achieving.

They tend to be people who are maybe from good families or who are what we would call privileged or who are just in a good position in life, who have been successful, who are highly intelligent or who are gifted athletically. And they say, you know what, if I do my part, actually I think the promise is going to work.

Maybe it hasn't worked in the past, but, but I think if I keep trying, it'll work this time. I just need to put in more effort, I need to put in more time. And so I'm going to turn to a life coach.

Nothing necessarily against life coaches, but I'm just going to put in more into that. I'm going to work out harder, I'm going to get up earlier, I'm going to pour myself and discipline my will.

I'm going to find more techniques, I'm going to do more and eventually it's going to pay off and I will get the payout of a fulfilling and satisfying life that society has promised me if I accept the burden of belonging to myself. Then there are those who are resigned who basically look at that promise and say, no, it's rigged. The game is absolutely rigged.

The promise is flawed. It's fundamentally flawed. The only people who are successful are the people who are who are privileged.

And I cannot compete because society is hyper competitive. And I can't compete in a hyper competitive society because I was not gifted with wealth or athleticism or beauty or whatever.

And so I'm going to check out and contemporary society is a very interesting society from a historical perspective because it's easy to, at least in the west, you can check out and live a very highly entertaining and fairly affluent, comfortable life. So, for example, in the past, if you checked out of society, if you no longer strove, if you didn't try to advance and keep up, you would starve.

Right. But today you can keep. You can work a very menial job, provide for yourself and get high quality.

As long as you can afford Internet access and you've got a phone. Right. You've got access to YouTube and video games and you can. And pornography, and you can keep yourself entertained.

You can connect to an online community and you can essentially check out of society and say, I'm not going to play the game anymore. And there are ways of. There are lots of ways that that can turn out. I mean, I think of the most extreme ways.

There are sort of violent extremism for young men in less extreme ways just look like giving up. Just look like binge watching Netflix for hours.

And I think in my experience, a lot of people who are what I call affirming, who basically say, this system works, society works. I just need to accept this burden and try to create my identity and meaning and purpose and value and all these things, eventually they hit a wall.

And I see this all the time with people. They think they can keep going and then they hit a wall. They realize that they're not actually. They can't actually compete.

Then they crumble, and then they become resigned. They find themselves binge watching Netflix. And that's why I describe that sort of drifting between two poles.

My sense is that a lot of contemporary people end up drifting eventually towards a kind of resignation over time, which.

Is why you bring out the Bell Jar. I'm not familiar. I was not familiar. I had to go look up Sylvia Plath because I hadn't been familiar.

Tell us a bit about this story and where it comes to be within this, within your book. Because you use her as a kind of.

As a. I don't want to say.

A test case, but as an example of where this kind of lifestyle leads.

Yeah. So in my opinion, Sylvia Plath, the Bell Jar. She's got this main character, Esther Greenwood, and she's a great example of this.

Esther Greenwood is actually modeled after Sylvia Plath, who is this brilliant woman. And Esther, at the beginning of the novel is a, I believe, a junior in college.

And she's just got this amazing internship at a women's magazine in New York City. Now, Esther knows that if she excels at this internship, she's got a chance at being an editor at a major magazine.

She's also going to meet some poets and so she wants to be a poet herself. So she makes connections. She knows, hey, that's going to open the door there. She knows also that she makes good connections. She is impressive.

She can get some letters of recommendation. So she's very excited about this opportunity. She also is interested in men.

So she's excited about the possibility of meeting young men while she's in New York City because she's from this small town. So this is her big opportunity. I'm going to go to New York City. All these things are going to happen. She's super excited.

It's a highly sought after internship. Nationwide search. Only 13 young women are chosen for this guest editorship. And she goes to New York City and she buckles under the pressure.

She finds herself bored, depressed, anxious. And at one point, the editor in chief of the magazine calls her into the office because she sort of senses that something is off.

And she asks Esther, what do you want to do with your life? And Esther realizes as soon as she asked that that she has no idea. Now, by the way, asking a college student, what do you want to do with your life?

Is a terrible idea because it almost always fills them with anxiety. They rarely know. And that's okay. That's okay. They can discover that. And so Esther just makes something up.

In my experience, that's a lot of the times what college students end up doing is they just make something up to please authority figures. And so she says, oh, I want to be an editor. And so the editor in chief says, cool, okay, if you want to do that, go learn five foreign languages.

And I think Russian was one of them, right? So like this incredibly difficult language. And Esther just thinks to herself, there's no way with my course load I can do this.

I'm not, in other words, I'm not smart enough. I don't have enough time. I can't compete. And so she goes back and she has this to her room and she has this dream of a fig tree.

And she's at the bottom of the fig tree. And each fig represents a possible career choice. And one is sleeping with and having romantic affairs with lots of young men.

And one is being a poet, one is being a college professor, one is a wife and having lots of kids. And one is being an editor in magazine. And one is being like an archaeologist, one is being a crew chief. And it goes on and on.

Actually goes to infinity. She can't actually see the end of it. And her crisis is that she can't choose any of them.

There are so many amazing Choices that she can't choose any of them and she starves to death in her dream. So by the way, at the end of the novel she gets access to contraceptives. And for Sylvia Plath, this is the resolution to Esther Greenwood's problem.

But the argument I make is that this doesn't actually solve the problem because it allows Esther to choose the romantic affairs with young men and one other choice because she's not going to have unwanted pregnancies. But that still leaves an infinite number of career choices because infinity minus one is still infinity because that's how math works.

Says the English professor.

I'm married to a math professor, so that's how.

There you go.

We got it covered. We got all our bases covered. Yeah. So it's a fascinating study. So she's crippled by this spirit of resignation.

She starts off with affirmation, but once she hits a, a wall, she's crippled and she moves to a spirit of resignation. She realizes society is too competitive for her to keep up. But part of what moves her to resignation is choice paralysis. The challenge.

Part of the challenge of the modern world is that we have limitless freedom. Now freedom itself is good, but limitless freedom is crippling.

We know this when we go into the supermarket and there is an endless number of, of cereals available, boxes of cereal. And we just want to be like, can there just be one or two? Because I need to know what do I choose and how do I choose?

Well, and this actually explains some of the crisis. And when I teach this, this explains the crises my students are going to.

They resonate with this novel so well, resonate with this novel so well because they feel this acutely.

That's why students, college students feel so much of a panic when you ask them what going to do with their lives, what career they're going to choose. Because it feels like there's an infinite number of choices available to them and everything.

For Esther, it's not just what good thing can I choose to do? It's if I don't choose the one right thing, my life is meaningless. So then everything hinges upon choosing the right fig.

And that's a terrifying, that's a terrifying thing.

We are not our own. It sounds simple, it is simple, but it is 180 degrees off of what we've been taught to think about ourselves.

If we can just discover and express our, quote, true self. And express it, and express it and express it well, you get the idea.

See, the truth is, is that this thing that promises true freedom actually causes us to become slaves. That's your deep thought for the day. Slaves to ourselves, to society, to the overwhelming paralysis of choice.

That was the tragedy of Esther Greenwood in the Bell Jar. The double tragedy really, because she didn't even realize that she hadn't even solved her problem.

The book of Genesis tells us that we are created in the image of God. We owe our very existence to Him. But it goes deeper than that. We were made to be reflections of Him.

I love the language that Noble has given us to name the thing that we all face. The burden of self justification. I never thought of that before. The burden of self justification.

This is just the first part of what was, as I think you can tell, a really fun conversation. But it was more than just fun for me. Me, it was really, really important.

In fact, this conversation and the next one that will come out in a few weeks really provide language and footings for some important things that you're going to be hearing about in the very near future. About our intentional approach to living the Christian life. I highly recommend you get this book next week.

We continue the conversation, taking on topics like self medication, our addiction to efficiency, doing the hard work of being the church together, and why a five step plan isn't really needed. Don't throw stones at me. I want to leave you with this thought that comes from the Heidelberg confession.

What is your only comfort in life and in death? That's the question. Here's the answer. That I am not my own, but belong body and soul in life and in death to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven.

In fact, all things must work together for my salvation because I belong to Him. Christ by His Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for Him. Oh, such good truth.

Before I conclude today, I want to take a moment to welcome to the Apollos Water team Saajid Chohan and Wayne Stender. Saajid is our YouTube producer. Yes, we have YouTube.

We finally have our YouTube channel up and running and he will be running that for us where you can watch almost all of our deep conversations. And Wayne will be producing our podcast. Saajid is a math teacher at a Christian school in Chicago and a dear old friend. Welcome Saj to the team.

Welcome Wayne and feel free to check out both Saajid and Wayne's bios on our website ApolloSwatered.org I'm amazed at how God continues to grow our team, but this is where we need your help. Without your financial support this show would not be possible and as we grow, so too do our expenses.

We have a wonderful team who believe in this ministry and sacrificially give their time from their jobs and their families because they believe in what God is doing through Apollo's Watered and we want to bless them for their support and our vision is to have all of our team be fully funded in order that we might fully embrace God's calling upon our lives. Go to ApolloSweater.org and hit the Support us button in the upper right hand corner. You will be glad you did.

I want to thank our Apollos water team of Kevin, Melissa, Eliana, Rebecca, Wayne and Saajid. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollos Watered. Stay watered everybody.

Roll.