IDENTITY— HOW DID WE GET HERE?-#3
July 22, 2026
“We have a very loud American cultural story about winners and losers and people who lose, people who didn’t get back up, people who took more than they could give. They very quickly get a message that in a culture of self sufficiency and independence, they are the wrong kind of person.”
“The script of American consciousness is tied to self-sufficiency and overcoming your own obstacles…five steps to “not feeling like a loser” books masked as “self help” are everywhere…this is a dense and punitive script that was invented in the 1900s and helps explain why we feel like we do…” Kate Bowler on The Spiritual Life with Father James Martin.
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly” John 10:10
It’s a striking thing to admit — that I found myself more readily aligned with Kate Bowler’s description of cultural consciousness than with what Jesus promised in John 10:10. But honesty requires it.
The path of ambition and pursuit is not inherently wrong. For my generation, it was also simply the water we swam in. Unlike many of the employment challenges facing today’s graduates, finding work was not particularly difficult for those of us who came of age in the seventies and eighties. It may have taken a couple of tours to find your groove, but a career could become apparent within a reasonable span of time. And to Bowler’s point, finding your own way became a punctuation mark on your life. You set your goals, you laid out your plans, you made your mark. Independence and self-sufficiency became natural byproducts, quietly woven into the fabric of your personality — not as flaws, but as virtues.
But time has a way of convincing you that because you do something, you must be the one controlling it. Life asserts that your determination and goal-setting are the reasons for your success. So you commit more time, you ascend, and although you make room for faith, it is really only there to accompany your own plans — a kind of silent partner who gets credited at Christmas, Easter and times of crisis but otherwise stays out of the way. You share your successes with the like-minded, quietly compare your progress, plan your holidays, grow your family, buy your home. All around you, people are doing the same. It is a collective chase. There are hurdles, of course — but just as you were taught, just as you learned, you bear down and work through them, because in the end, what you strive for is what will be attained. Master of your destiny. Captain of your ship. When you witness people who fail, you feel that momentary terror — the reminder that anything can happen, even to you — and so you put even more effort into the plan. Months become years. Years become decades. You are too busy to think about it with any depth, but by this time it has already become part of you. How you act. How you think. How you see yourself and how you quietly judge others.
C.S. Lewis captures this with unsettling precision in The Screwtape Letters:
“Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is ‘finding his place in it’, while really it is finding its place in him.”
It is worth noting that in Lewis’ book, this observation is made by one devil to another he is apprenticing — which gives it a particular edge. The innocence of an honest pursuit, lived independently of God, can have consequences that only become visible in retrospect. The world shapes you quietly, without announcement, until one day the shaping is complete and you barely recognize it happened.
Is it any wonder, then, that the struggle proves so real for so many once the pursuit is no longer in play? When the thing that organized your life — that gave it structure, meaning, and forward motion — simply stops, what remains is not just an empty calendar. It is a question that was always there, waiting: Who are you when you are not what you do?
That question, it turns out, is where the real work begins.