Good Life Project - Carolyn Chen | When Work Becomes Religion (and how it preys on us)

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

You may not think of your work as your religion, but for many, it’s trying to become exactly that! Without us even realizing it. Question is - is that a good thing? A bad thing? Or just a thing? Today's guest, sociologist, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, Carolyn Chen, has a lot to say about this silent, yet deeply impactful, phenomenon. She spent years studying workplace culture, with a focus on the near-religious cultures of Silicon Valley. As home to startups, major tech companies, and some of the world's most innovative and, arguably, faithful entrepreneurs and professionals, she noticed the lines between doing meaningful work and religion have not only been blurred, but work has, in many ways, squeezed out and even become employees’ religion. Problem is - the goal is not personal and societal betterment, but rather in service of one central purpose: working harder and smarter, and generating innovation and profit.Her latest book, Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, is an account and exploration of her time spent interviewing the best and the brightest in the tech world to unfold how tech giants are reshaping spirituality to serve their religion of peak productivity. In our conversation, we explore big questions like why are so many people leaving traditional religion? How do religion and spirituality meet our needs in the first place, and what are the ways big tech or corporations are filling those gaps? What does it look like for us to choose what we want to worship and find meaning and belonging in healthy, nontraditional spaces? And, is this conversion of work into faith, actually a societally destructive phenomenon, even while organizations benefit from it? And, by the way, these topics and questions are on display in tech but don’t think, for a moment, that a wide range of companies aren’t exploring them, and along the way, bringing us “into the fold,” sometimes wittingly, other times, maybe not.You can find Carolyn at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Lisa Miller, Ph.D. about the science of spirituality.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For a Complete List of Vanity URLs & Discount Codes.ClickUp: 15% OFF ClickUp's massive Unlimited Plan for a year. Sign up today at ClickUp.com and use code GOODLIFE.Talkspace: $100 OFF of your first month with Talkspace when you use the code GOOD. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

we end up with an impoverished sense of self, an impoverished sense of society, and an impoverished sense of a flourishing life when we let companies be our temples and our churches and our mosques that define who we are as people. Because in the end, in these companies, the spirituality, your self-actualization, your wholeness is in service to productivity. So your value is always defined by your productive worth. So you may not think of your work as your religion, but for many, it is trying to become exactly that without us even realizing it. Question is, is that a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing? Today's guest, sociologist, associate professor of ethics studies at UC Berkeley and co-director of the Berkeley

Center for the Study of Religion, Carolyn Chen, has a lot to say about this silent yet deeply impactful phenomenon. She spent five years studying workplace culture with a focus on the near-religious cultures of Silicon Valley. As home to startups, major tech companies, and some of the world's most innovative and arguably faithful entrepreneurs and professionals, she noticed the lines between doing meaningful work and religion have not only been blurred, but work has in many ways squeezed out and even become employees' religion. The problem is, the goal is not personal and societal betterment here, but rather in service of one central purpose, working harder and smarter and making more money. Carolyn is the author of Getting Saved in America,

Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience, and the co-editor of Sustaining Faith Traditions, Religion, Race, and Ethnicity Among the Latino and Asian American Second Generation, and her latest book, Work, Pray, Code, When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley, is a fascinating account and exploration of her time spent interviewing the best and the brightest in the tech world to unfold how tech giants are reshaping spirituality to serve the religion of peak productivity. In our conversation, we explore big questions like why are so many people leaving traditional religion? How do religion and spirituality meet our needs in the first place? And what are the ways big tech or corporations in general are filling those gaps? What does it look like for us to choose what we want to worship and find meaning and belonging in healthy, non-traditional spaces? And is this conversion of work into faith actually a societally destructive phenomenon, even while organizations might benefit from it?

And by the way, these topics and questions are on display in tech, but don't think for a moment that a wide range of organizations aren't exploring them as well. And along the way, bringing us into the fold, sometimes wittingly, other times, maybe not. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. We'll be right back. You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. You know, I think an interesting place for us to jump in is a conversation that I have been having in various different ways with various

different people from founders to leaders of faith to just everyday folks who are in my world, which is what's happening to our needs as human beings. And in particular, what needs do we have and how do they interact with the domains of faith and spirituality? I've been fascinated with the role that faith and spirituality have played in people's lives for many, many different years. What physiological, what psychological, what emotional needs do these things fill? And I know this sounds like a bit of a starting point in your process of inquiry. So I'd love your take on this.

That's a great question, Jonathan, and no one has ever asked me that yet. So I'm glad that you're asking me this opportunity to explore this with you. I think that when we look at religion, and I'm going to separate here religion and spirituality. We need to talk about them as two separate things. And here I'm going to define spirituality as a personal thing. And it's something like it's an individual connection with the divine. It's having a sense of, you know, maybe meaning or purpose. This is something that you can pursue individually.

I think when we talk about religion, it is something that is collective. It's a collective enterprise. It is social. It's a social institution. And so sometimes religion meets our spiritual needs, and sometimes it doesn't. A lot in my book, I talk about what are the social needs that religion fulfills and other organizations fulfill. And I think that when we look at least contemporary American religious history, we look at the role of religious institutions and faith communities. I think they've played a really strong social role in meeting our social needs as human beings. So these are our needs to feel a sense of belonging in community and identity. And we've, throughout the last, I'd say 60 years, but really more dramatically in the last 30 years, we've experienced a decline in religious participation

and religious affiliation. And that also maps onto a larger long-term decline in civic participation in the United States. So that sense of social belonging. And I think that we see that need really being not met today, I would say, for many people. we currently are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, and that loneliness is most extreme among younger Americans, so Gen Z and younger millennials. And we don't see the loneliness experienced among older Americans who tend to still have that practice, that habit of belonging to social organizations, civic institutions, which may be faith community or otherwise. So I think that religion has for a long time fulfilled this very important social need. It has also fulfilled a spiritual need, a spiritual need

for connection to the divine, for having a sense of meaning in one's life. But it hasn't always fulfilled that, I would say, adequately. And I think that what we've found, as I mentioned earlier, again, is this decline in religious participation that many Americans are moving away from formal religious organizations and they're pursuing a sense of spirituality. You know, spirituality is no longer tied to belonging or to community anymore. It might be, they get it through oftentimes the marketplace, actually attending a retreat, which you pay for, right. Or going to yoga classes, buying a book, attending a seminar, or it could be participant, you know, just walking in nature. But I think

that there's still this dimension of that social belonging, which I think is still a really important need that people I think are getting fulfilled in different ways. And in my book, I talk about how people are getting that need fulfilled actually through the workplace. It's fascinating, right? I remember reading a number of years ago, Robert Putnam's book, Bowling Alone, and how he was really talking about this shift where we look to all these local community associations very often, whether it was a local league or the Chamber of Commerce or the Lions Club or your congregation to satisfy this need for belonging and how a lot of these things were falling away and no longer providing that need. At the same time, we have just as human beings who are

looking to flourish, a psychological and physiological need to belong. And it's creating this chasm that we experience as suffering, but we can't quite place our finger on where it's coming from. And this question of like, what do we do at that point? Where do we turn to? I'm fascinated also by what you shared about the phenomenon of, I didn't know this, of loneliness actually being in this or the highest representation in younger generations, in Gen Z. Because I had always seen earlier research, I said, which kind of placed it in older generations very often. So to see that shift in what sounds like a fairly short window of time, that feels

dramatic. Yeah, I think that it does feel dramatic. And I think that there's other factors here too that are involved is that we get the approximation of community and belonging now through social media, right? Like how many friends do you have on Facebook or, or how many followers, which I think is also weird as a scholar of religion, you know, and, and it gives us this approximation of belonging, of community, of friendship, but it's simply not the real thing, right? I think that when you think about, and if I take community a bit further to kinship, you know, an even more intimate form of social belonging, you don't have to present your best self. Do you know, which is what we do through social media? You know, if you look at social

media, everyone's having the time of their lives. They're always on vacation, eating the most amazing meals, you know, have the best like outfits on whatever. But I think that there is this, this element of performance that we perform for social media, that we have this, again, this approximation for community. And if I could just on a slightly unattended, but I think very related to this is one of the biggest ironies I find is this obsession with authenticity, which we have in this day and age. I mean, I heard it

all over the workplace, you know, authenticity, bring your authentic self to work. And I often thought like, this isn't a place I would want to bring my authentic self to, but this desire for authenticity, it's also in our spirituality. It's, our spirituality. It's in our organizations. It's really so much a part of, I think, what our youth want as well. And I think it's so ironic because our forms of social media actually, they don't cultivate authenticity at all. They are exactly the opposite of authenticity. It is so interesting, right? And yet I feel like I'm seeing a little bit of a pendulum swing backwards in the other direction. So I think of two folks that we've actually had on the podcast in the past,

Mari Andrew and Morgan Harper Nichols, and they both have very substantial followings. And I agree with you. I think that word is strange. But what they do is they both share their inner dialogue, which often includes trauma, neurosis, anxiety, depression, melancholy. And they don't offer solutions. They don't offer a path to self-actualization. They simply share their struggles, their humanity. And both of those people have developed these huge followings on multiple platforms and almost following the counter narrative, what you're expected to do or told you're supposed to do. And Susan Cain's

wonderful recent book, Bittersweet, really talks about the power of melancholy and how it is stunning in its capability to bring us together and give us a sense of belonging. I wonder if people are getting not? I feel like that this is just simply human. You know, this is just simply human. And I think that honestly, we have a desire, all of us have a desire to be loved unconditionally, but it takes a certain amount of courage and trust and confidence to be able to reveal our authentic selves. And when you are getting rated and judged with a thumbs up, thumbs down, that's simply not an environment where we can do that. Yeah. No, I totally see that. It's interesting the way that you sort of, as you were describing belonging and also the other things that we yearn for or the needs that we get satisfied through more of what you would classify as spirituality, it almost seemed like you were navigating a spectrum between religion

and spirituality that moved us through Maslow's hierarchy. Whereas religion is more around the middle, like the belonging and the security needs and that sense of certainty. And then as we rise up, it goes more into what you would classify as spirituality. Does that resonate? It does resonate. And I think that differentiating the two helps us understand that we might turn to different things to actually meet those needs. Yeah, that makes sense to me. You also described the rise of what I've heard classified as the nuns. So all these people who identify as, quote, spiritual yet are making their way from organized religion. And I think often inadvertently making their way away from one of the primary mechanisms that satisfy these needs, because we need to have it satisfied.

Either we linger in suffering, there's a void that just kind of is perpetually there. But at some point it feels like we start to look towards something else to satisfy that need. So the question is, what are they turning to? It sounds like this became a big focus for you that led you actually to spend a chunk of time in Silicon Valley. You know, the study that looked at, you know, 2013, 2019, what was the thing that motivated you to say, let me dive deeper into this to sort of see where are people going and are they going to work? And is that actually

giving them something? And then why Silicon Valley of all places? So I'm a sociologist of religion and most scholars of religion, we study religious things. So people, institutions, communities, practices, texts that identify with religious traditions such as Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, etc. But I think that any of us who are living in these coastal cities these days, or in Boulder, Colorado, as you do, we see that religion doesn't have the same kind of social influence or social power that it used to have, in that there are a rising number of folks who don't affiliate religiously. They are these so-called religious nuns. For me, I was really curious about how do we still continue to study religion? What is the place of religion in secular society and among these group

of people? So I actually first started my research by studying yoga. Yoga studios are sort of a religious space. They have often Hindu icons, some practices, the chanting, but they are considered secular spaces, right? And so I conducted interviews among some yoga practitioners because I'm always interested in their spiritual and religious biography. I talked to them and I asked them, I really wanted to understand how and when and why they practice yoga. And as I asked them, the theme of work just capped on coming up. So they would say things like, well, I practice yoga after a long day of work to unwind, de-stress. And when I do this, it helps me become a better X. And here you could fill in the blank. It might be a nurse. It might be an engineer. It might be a

lawyer. So they thought about their work very directly, their yoga practice in relationship to their work. And they would talk about how because of their work, they suffered headaches, lack of sleep, stress. And so it became clear to me that, wait, I was looking for the sacred by looking at Hinduism or yoga. Yoga is a Hindu-inspired religious practice. But in fact, what was sacred here was really the work. They were willing to sacrifice and surrender to their work. They were willing to undergo all these deprivations for their work. And when they even thought of yoga, they thought about it as a self-improvement practice to make them better workers. So it became clear to me that, hey, if I'm really looking at what is religion in secular society, what is sacred? What is that

which we set aside and that we're willing to surrender, to submit to, sacrifice to? Well, it's work. It's actually work. And so that led me to look at the workplace and then why Silicon Valley? It was actually, it's actually just serendipitous because my husband and I were on sabbatical at Stanford for the year. And there we were in Palo Alto in the belly of the beast in Silicon Valley and what better place? So it was, it was just perfect. Yeah. That's so interesting that you started in the yoga world. It's a space I have some experience in also. In the early 2000s, I actually owned a yoga studio in New York City. And it was interesting to see how and why people would come to the practice, what they were looking to contribute to it and what they were looking to get out of it. We happened to have a space

that was in this 115-year-old building that was in Hell's Kitchen in New York City, around the corner from the theater district. So our studio was packed with all of these singers and dancers and performers, many of them aspiring to be the best that they could. They would come to us after hours and hours and hours of go-sees and auditions all day long. And I was similarly curious. I was like, what are you looking for after you've been through a day like that and then you're coming to us? And for them, which is a very different population than the population you studied, of course, a lot of them were just looking for space.

They were looking for a place to be able to move and breathe and not be on display. So I think it's so interesting how different people come to these different practices from different places with different intentions and different desires to sort of like, what do I want to give to it and then get from it? So what makes you sort of like then say, okay, I want to actually devote a substantial amount of my time and energy to a deeper study of this population to really understand like in this context, what's happening with this seeming overlap between work and spiritual tradition or religious tradition? Well, a lot of it was really intellectual curiosity, you know, as a sociologist of a religion. And for me, I felt like I was onto something where people hadn't talked about this before. People hadn't understood, here we have all these scholars studying religion, but what is really religion? You know, what is really operating as religion today in places like Silicon Valley or all other knowledge industry hubs? How do we think of religion and spirituality outside of the box? And I felt like, so here is me, a scholar of religion in a corporate space. And it was,

honestly, it was just like, oh my gosh, so eyeopening. I mean, everywhere I saw religion, I didn't even have to look very hard. It was just all there in Silicon Valley, right? Things like angel investors, you know, they call people chief spiritual officers in Silicon Valley. So it was, I didn't have to look very hard, actually. As I started conducting interviews, I very clearly saw a pattern. And the pattern was that people who, what I noticed is that people who were religious before, that when they started working in Silicon Valley, they lost their religion. Because essentially, the workplace, the company took over, started to fulfill all the needs that they had once met, that were once met in their faith communities. So that was where they got their primary sense of identity, belonging, community through all the social events there. Their meaning and purpose was supplied for by the corporation, by the company mission. The company taught them spiritual practices like meditation and mindfulness.

And you might say like, well, meditation and mindfulness, those are also health practices, that's just about de-stressing. But wait, what about when you start to associate the place where you go for wellness and well-being to be your workplace? Well, then you start to develop a certain kind of attachment. And so what I saw very clearly was that people started to develop not only social and not only material attachments to the workplace, but also spiritual attachments to the workplace. And that makes you want to spend all your time at work and work really hard. So I think that one of the things that this is in many ways, my book, one could read it like,

okay, wow, there's this wizard of Oz and this guy on puppet string. You know, these people are, are basically on puppet springs and they're being manipulated by HR or management. of them were very much interested in bringing wholeness to the workplace and helping people bring out and to really discover their authentic selves in the workplace. They were very genuine about helping people on their spiritual quests. And I think that it met a real need for the people who were in the workplaces, for the tech workers as well. Yeah. And whether that's a good thing, a bad thing, yes to all of the above or none of the above. I think that's something we'll explore a little bit, but it's interesting to see the phenomenon happen. You write, really grabbed me, right? In the past, immigrants found community and immortality by building churches, synagogues, temples,

and communes. The tech migrants of the 21st century, however, meet these religious needs by starting companies. And I think a lot of us, there is this mythology in particular around the world of startup and tech in Silicon Valley, around founders, around cultures, around these scions who have risen up and hundreds of thousands of people to be their quote followers slash employees, and then hundreds of millions to be their disciples slash customers, even external to the organization itself. So the analogy, at least in that space, you can literally, I think I would imagine kind of go down a list of what are the traditional pieces of the puzzle of an organized religion?

What are the checkboxes that you have for functional ones that have sustained over time and probably find analogs in these types of organizations? Yes. And I would say that this is no longer just a Silicon Valley thing, but in most Fortune 500 companies, they have a mission, they have a distinct ethics, they have an origin story or myth, and they have a charismatic founder. They have things like, say, if you're a Christian, you wear a cross. Well, if you work at Facebook, you wear a, or now meta, you wear a meta t-shirt. there's ways that you signify and you identify to others. And it's very of sort of at the top of the food chain. So, so many of the elements that you're absolutely right, the social, and I would also argue,

spiritual elements of religion are now really being provided for by companies. And, you know, this is by design. It's not, it is not, it is not a random thing. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

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You actually, you share the story of someone named John. I have no idea if that's a real identity or not. I'm kind of assuming it's probably not. Walk me through that a little bit because I think it's a really interesting sort of story that shares this transition over time. Yeah. So John was an engineer, an entrepreneur from Georgia. So he came from the Bible Belt and was really very religious, grew up going to church and was the president of his Christian fraternity. After he graduated, he worked as a programmer at

a bank where he had a pretty easy job working from nine to six. And he was really involved in his church. He was, you know, in the band. And then he also had this side gig where he was, you know, he was someone who liked to tinker a lot. He was in like many of the people that I interviewed, they're inventors really. So he ended up creating this program, basically kind of a work social networking program. It got interest from a company in Silicon Valley. And so he moved from Georgia to the Bay Area, to San Francisco. Let me just back up, sorry, to just say that he was someone who told me, I said that he was the president of his Christian fraternity, and he talked about how his faith had given him a sense of mission and a really strong sense of purpose and how he would spend his spring breaks going to building orphanages in Mexico. And so he had that very, very strong sense of identity that his faith gave him.

And that's very also a regional story of, you know, in the Bible Belt in Georgia, where religion and particularly Christianity is very strong. This is the social institution that grounds you. And he talked about that, how his church grounded him. And I was curious, like, well, what grounds him in Silicon Valley? Well, it was really clear that it was a startup that grounded him. When he started at his startup, their company is called Harmonize. So they took on the identity as Harmonizers, which is a lot of startups and companies do that. They give themselves these nicknames. They had a very strong company culture. Basically, he ate all three meals there. Also, all of his social activities were basically with the other tech brothers that he had. And the work was so demanding, really, that there's this way that the work took all of his time and energy from him. So he really couldn't look outside of the workplace anymore. He didn't

really have any friends outside of the workplace. He had to give everything to the workplace. But here's the other part of the story is that work also gave back to him. It gave him his whole social group, his whole friendship. It provided for him physically by feeding him. It provided for him socially, again, with his friendship group. It provided for him materially by paying for him, by giving him a very good salary. But it also gave to him spiritually because it gave him this really strong sense of meaning and purpose. And he kept on saying to me during the course of the interview, just have this burden to change the world. We just have this burden. And he was using that Christian language, kind of the missionary language. We have this burden to change this, to do this. But he now had just like transposed it onto the work of his tech company. There was also this element of faith with him too, which I found not just with him, but with so many other tech workers, particularly entrepreneurs where in a startup, you know, nine out of 10 fail. And yet we are working these 70 hour weeks, right? You're giving

so much, you're sacrificing so much. And one person just said like, well, you know, and what he just said to me is like, well, you just have to believe you're going to be one, the one in the 10, or, you know, why the hell would you do this? And so there was this element of faith, which I saw that he had now transferred this faith that he had in this God who is unseen now into this promise, you know, that his company would be the one in 10 to succeed. There were other things like they had the weekly hands-on meeting, which had that similar kind of inspirational rush as he had experienced with his band and the church service back home in Georgia. So many of these elements. And when I asked him, because as you

can see, he was a very, he was a very fervent Christian before. And I said, well, why didn't you look for a church? Like what happened? And, you know, this interesting thing is like, he couldn't really explain what happened. And I, I think this is really important because we often as Americans, because of the Protestant cultural tradition that we have, we think of religion as something you have to believe in. But for him, it wasn't a matter of belief. He had no crisis of faith. In fact, if you asked him, do you still believe in Jesus? He probably would say yes. He still believed in God, but here's the thing is that he did not belong anymore. And this is where I feel like when we talk again about religion, there is this element that it's a community.

And very often in my earlier studies that I've done in religious conversion as well, is that the most important thing is having a sense of belonging. And it's who we belong to that really defines who we are, what we will seek to be our meaning and purpose in life. And so it's really, so I talk about startups and tech companies as being the new faith communities and the new economy. Yeah, it is so fascinating the way that you lay it out and his experience. I have certainly heard similar stories or similar pieces of that story so many times. You could just as easily swap in ashram for startup. Yes. Yes, you absolutely could. And disciple or student or participant or devotee for employee and check really similar boxes. I think ashram in particular, because so often it becomes this residential thing that provides for

all of your social and physical needs in a way that certain other traditions or structures, at least in the US, don't necessarily. But it really is, It's such a similar thing, which really does bring us to, I think, some of the bigger ethical questions around this. You write, and I thought this line just kind of stopped me dead in my tracks. Effectively, you've got a scenario where the company is providing for all of your needs, And then you in turn end up spending all of your time there. As you write, when the company takes care of the whole person, it gets the whole person. So it begs the question, what are the trade-offs?

What are we giving up in the name of this? And actually, is it different in the context of... Because we asked that same question in the context of faith, of religion, like what is our sacrifice? And is it different when we are sacrificing in the name of getting all these needs met with the ultimate goal of helping the corporation versus actually helping a faith-based organization and whatever that mission is that's wrapped around it and potentially our own self-actualization wrapped up in it also. I think there is something different here. So in the corporation, in the tech company, people in wellness and health and human resources, executive coaches, they all might have an individual desire to help you become a more whole person,

but they have to work within the system of a company, which is a for-profit institution, which is essentially operates by the bottom line. When you talk about what is, when they explore with you, like, what is your purpose in life? What is your mission? It ultimately has to benefit the company and it has to align with the company. And so in the end, to me, I feel like we end up with an impoverished sense of self, an impoverished sense of society, and an impoverished sense of a flourishing life when we let companies be our temples and our churches and our mosques that define who we are as people. Because in the end, in these companies, the spirituality, your self-actualization, your wholeness is in service to productivity. So your value is always

defined by your productive worth. And I think that that was very clear. People accepted that. And the other thing that's different with the corporation is that it offers this sense of mission and purpose that is coming from down from this organization. And it's definitely, you have at a place like Google, you have a whole army of human resources, people who are massaging it and making it sound, you know, to make sure that you're going to get, you know, full compliance and not just compliance, but, you know, exuberance and, you know, an embracement by all of the employees. I think that what happens was what's different in a faith community is that it's a community of people who can come together to determine what their own vision is of a flourishing life and a good society. That's a little bit different from a corporation, I think. The other thing that's different in a faith community versus a corporation is your value is not judged by your productivity.

There is a space for the practice of forgiveness, grace, unconditional love. There's no room for that in a corporation. They like to appropriate the language of the family and religion by talking about authenticity, by talking about love and joy and purpose, passion. But the truth is that they cannot deliver on that. You're really not a family member there. You're not loved unconditionally. You still have to prove yourself. You're still going to be reviewed every six months. And if you don't meet it, you're going to be fired. So on one hand, this language and kind of this culture, but underneath it all, it doesn't offer the same kind of grace and unconditional love that maybe

a family can offer or that a really wonderful faith community can offer or spiritual community can offer. Yeah. No, that resonates so deeply with me. I have heard in a number of different industries, the line, you're only as good as your last successful ex. Could have been a deal, could have been a product, could have been a client launch or a campaign. And the minute you stop delivering on that success, you're out. You are ostracized from the congregation. And it's interesting because if you look at religion and if you sort of say broadly that it's about the betterment of the human condition, the betterment of society, the betterment of the individual as the fundamental unit of effort and contribution, like the idea. And then you look at the typical, either a startup or a larger public enterprise.

Like a startup, and everyone knows this, especially if you're VC backed, if you're venture capital backed, if you've taken other people's money, which certainly in Silicon Valley and the tech world most do, as much as you may lay a mission statement over whatever it is that you're doing, fundamentally at the end of the day, you need to first and foremost return the capital that your investors gave you. And then second, beyond that, give them a really healthy return. And then everything else comes into play. And everybody knows that if you talk about the fundamental thing, that's what's really going on. And then even if you reach a size where you're in a larger organization, a public entity, you are now legally beholden to quote, maximize shareholder value. And it's interesting because

you now see these special vehicles for business being created like a benefit corporation, where part of your legal responsibility is actually to elevate the individuals and the environment and the ecosystem around you. And you can literally point to that as something where you're making decisions about, but that is still very, very nascent in the business space. Here's what's going through my head around this. I wonder if part of the reason that the, quote, nuns started growing so quickly, the people who are fleeing organized religion, is because similar to what we're seeing, this sort of double messaging in the corporate world, people started to sense that that was happening in

organized religion too. And they weren't buying in to the reason that they were told that this thing exists anymore. And they were starting to see we're being sold one thing, but there's actually something else happening here. I think that you're absolutely right about that. I think that when we look at organized religion in the United States, we really see the first sort of, I guess you could say, earthquake, you know, kind of transformation happening as a result of the 60s and 70s and the counterculture and what happens there. And then there is this generational effect that when people tend to be religious when they have been socialized in a religious way. So if you grew up in a religious family, you're more likely to be religious, right? So if you have already people leaving because of the 60s and 70s, and sort of what you're talking about, right? They're sort of

saying like, wait, there's a lot of hypocrisy here, particularly in certain sectors of Christianity, where you have the rise of the religious right, where there's all this now emphasis on personal morality and family values, which ended up creating boundaries and ostracizing and alienating many people. Sure, I think that you're absolutely right that this is also part of the rise of the nuns. There was a study actually that was done. So the number of nuns actually since the mid-20th century had been stable at about 70% until the 1990s. It's in the 1990s that it doubled to 14% and ever since has been rising. And so we've seen the hypocrisy in organized religion before the 1990s, but what happened in the 1990s?

And one study talks about essentially it was the rise of the religious right, that people who were more moderate and liberal politically and who identified as Christian just simply disaffiliated. So anyways, that kind of gets perhaps a little too technical for you. But yes, I think that that is part of it, that there is also hypocrisy in organized religion. And certainly, you know, we've seen things like the child sex abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church. I mean, that is a big reason for a lot of people leaving, and rightly so. hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him! We need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. I've always been curious when you see any organization where you have these powerful individuals that rise up as figureheads and leaders, at what point do you transition from being in service of others to being more in service of self? And look, we all have ego. There's no way to annihilate. As long as we have pulses, it's there for all of us. But very often, I think we have these wildly charismatic people who command the attention of so many others and bring them in and then at some point fall. And I feel like similarly, we see that happening in the world of business,

especially in the world of ultra fast growth startups that people are willing to surrender almost the entirety of their humanity in the name of following one of these individuals who at some point reveals their humanity, sometimes very destructive, self-destructive nature or other destructive nature of their humanity, and everything crumbles along with it. So I almost feel like there's an oscillation back and forth between people trying to figure out like, well, I bought into this and it gave me this for so long, and now I'm not feeling it anymore. Let me try this on for size. And now corporations kind of

saw that and they're like, oh, I just got past the baton. There is a business benefit to running with this for a while. But I almost wonder if people are starting to get that same sensation with business now. And if in no small part, especially given the last couple of years, and really it's giving them the distance to say, huh, I'm back in that place of wondering what's really going on here. I think so. Yeah. I mean, I wrote this book before the pandemic. I did all my research before the pandemic, but I think so the conversations that I've had with people and what I'm reading about is that being away from work, just doing work remotely has literally made work more remote. And in a way, people are getting burnt out because they still have the same demands from work,

but work is not able to deliver on the social and spiritual benefits that it used to because we are not in person. You don't feel sort of the immediacy of the mission and that sort of, you know, the rush that comes with being with others and fulfilling that mission together. So I think that some of the glow of work has, or the shine of work, you know, has been revealed. And I think people are thinking twice about it, for sure. And absolutely. I think that, you know, if I can go back to some of your earlier comments and then try to segue into just addressing this earlier one, is that I quote the late poet and writer David Foster Wallace in my book where he writes, there are no such things as atheists. We all worship something. The only difference is that we get to choose what we worship. And I think that this quote, I really like it because I think that it really sums up the quandary for the person of faith today or the seeker for today. And I think that he's right, that we all worship something. I think that there is a human desire to, when we sacrifice for something, when we surrender for something, when we submit

to something, this is, we like to give, we want to give. There is a feeling of transcendence when we do that. We lose ourself, right, when we surrender and we submit to something bigger than ourselves. I think this is a very human tendency. The question, though, is that in a place like Silicon Valley, and I call it a tectopia, a tectopia is a society where work is the highest form of fulfillment. And in a tectopia, essentially, it's a creation of an ecosystem where we worship work because all of the social, material, and spiritual benefits are concentrated into the institution of work. And so, you know, here's where I disagree with David Foster Wallace is that when we live in a particular ecosystem, oftentimes we don't get to choose what we worship

because we are just simply assimilating. We're just led to worship that one thing because this institution fulfills us the most deeply. And that's what I think is happening in Silicon Valley and in the case of work. And I think that in the 1950s, there was an ecosystem where you had multiple civic institutions and the religious institution was probably the most important one that offered the most sort of articulated and pronounced sort of, you know, sense of meaning and purpose and practices. So that was an ecosystem that supported religion, you know, worship, formal religious traditions. But I think that the question for us today is, you know, what are we going to choose to worship? And I think that here, you know, when I make this distinction between religion and spirituality is that religion is a collective enterprise, and so is worship. We get our sense of meaning and identity from who we belong to. Like, where are you from? Who are you? Who are you part of? Who's your tribe? Who are your people? These are the people who define

who we are. What is good to us? What is our vision of a flourishing life? And so I think that the question for us as people at this particular moment is how do we create these new houses of worship? This is a collective enterprise. This is about creating new social institutions that we can choose what we see as being a flourishing life. How do we then shape our societies? How do we create a different kind of ecosystem? And I think that that's the question that we need to be asking. The pandemic gave us a moment to help us see that, okay, maybe work is just work.

Work, labor in its most basic form is essentially labor in exchange for wages. You know, and so we need to kind of take away some of the shine of work. That's what it is. So that's what it is. So then how do we create, again, not a different kind of workplace, because I don't believe that companies are going to save us from work. They're not going to. It's in their interest to make us work harder and better for them, right? The question then is how do we create a different kind of ecosystem? How do we create those different kinds of houses of worship? And they might be religious in the sense that they

might be organized religion, but they might not be. How do we create those new houses of worship that we're going to want to submit and surrender to, that we're going to want to commit our time, energy, and devotion? It is such a fascinating question. And I agree. I think so many of us are at that moment now where we've been through a cycle of devotion and commitment and gotten certain needs satisfied in exchange for that. And a bargain was struck. And then we kind of realized that that's not the bargain that we want to keep moving forward in no small part, because we've also probably realized that maybe it actually hasn't given us as much of our humanity back as we thought it was. We've just been so immersed in doing the work that we haven't had the space to notice. And now we do. And now we're realizing

that we're actually not okay. The question for me is, if we were to reimagine this new container that would give us those things that we not only yearn for, but actually literally need to survive, the belonging, the sense of identity and purpose and values and some sort of ethical core, how do we step into that? And maybe this is so like going into your broader experience in the domain of scholarship around religion, like how do we create a source or a container that gives us that in a way that is more likely to travel with us no matter where we go in life. This is like health insurance, right? It's like, how do we take it away from the organization as the provider and

install it in us? So no matter where we might wander, no matter how we might age, no matter what happens, we can still feel like we are part of that. And it's dissociated from necessarily being provided or connected to some external thing, which depends upon us showing up in a very particular way that's not just meaningful to us, but appropriate for their needs. at it. You know, when I think about religious traditions and religion, and just as a scholar of religion, I'm going to just talk about organized religion and faith communities and what they do. And I think that what they, at their very best, what they do is they offer us a story, a narrative that we can step into to help understand our lives and to guide our lives. And, you know, if you go deeply into any religious tradition, they're so rich and deep that there is so much room to explore, to go deeply. And I think that this is, I'm not sure if I'm really answering your

question, Jonathan, but I think that at the best, that this is something that it can do for us that I simply don't think a corporate mission can do, for instance. And that one of the things that religions do is that they do offer us a story, a set of practices from really your birth to your death, right? To help you make sense of your life through all the kind of valleys, peaks, whatever that you go through. And I think that at its best, this is part of what religion can help us do. Does that kind of get at your question? Yeah, I think so. It almost makes me wonder whether, because something that I've heard a lot lately is that people are, they're actually religious, but they are devoted to the core ideas and ideals rather than the trappings and the translations and the edicts that are second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth generation, quote, interpretations of what somebody else says is the right translation and then execution of these ideas. And I feel like the nuns are less about running from the fundamental ideas and teachings of a lot of religious traditions, many of which when you really, really, really get down to the core are quite similar, but it's more a running from the structures that have been built around them and the layers and layers of translation that tell

them what is and what isn't not an appropriate or okay or acceptable way to live into these ideas. And that just doesn't resonate. I agree. And let me back up here and say that any healthy faith community or religious tradition, I mean, religious traditions are living things. They live and breathe, they stretch, they die. I mean, this is at least from the Christian tradition, what's so fundamental to the Christian tradition is a story of change. It's of death and rebirth. And that includes the church.

And that includes the community. So I think that a healthy community needs to make room for death, for change, for rebirth, to be stretched. That's the only way that it can stay alive, right? So anyways, to just get back to your question too about how do we build those kinds of institutions? Well, how do we build institutions that have that kind of resilience, that have that kind of grace, that have that kind of trust and, you know, borrowing from the Buddhist sense of imperman much as the thing that's brought us to this moment has been painful in a lot of ways, we are in a moment where there's a level of questioning and re-imagining that I think, I hope at least, will yield some healthier futures and just lenses in the way that we step into our lives, our worlds, our containers for all the needs that

religion and elements of spirituality have provided. And as you're sort of alluding to, maybe it's less about imagining or creating something entirely new, and maybe it's looking back at what has existed and sort of saying, how do we make these more adaptive, inclusive, expansive, so that it really accommodates a changing future with more grace? Yeah, well put. Thank you. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well. So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Wow, that's a good question. Um, you know, for me, my parents are from Taiwan,

they're immigrants. And, um, for me, family is really important. And, and that's my primary and primal sense of belonging. They are everything to me and they, I know who I am because of them. And so when you say to live a good life, it's to be true to my family, to my parents, and to honor them. That's what it means to me. It comes back to belonging. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we had with Lisa Miller about spirituality and the deeper science behind it. You'll find a link to Lisa's episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you appreciate the work that we've been doing here on Good Life Project, go check out my new book, Sparked. It'll reveal some incredibly

eye-opening things about maybe one of your favorite subjects, you, and then show you how to tap these insights to reimagine and reinvent work as a source of meaning, purpose, and joy. You'll find a link in the show notes, or you can also find it at your favorite bookseller now. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping.

And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.