Dan got some emails about the Western State Hurricane shows and other things that are timely and he wants to do those first! He does not have the emails printed out today and does a fake crumple of an envelope he had laying around.

Gary’s Van meetup, Borderline Personality (RW176)

Hi, Dan and John.

Vitals: 24 year old male from Australia, 75 kilograms (165 pounds), 173 cm (5’8”), about 125K AUD (83 USD), show size 10, star sign Pisces, mother's maiden name Never Mind.

A few things: Firstly, I saw the Western State Hurricane shows in Seattle. I am sure that it is now fairly obvious who is writing this e-mail. The shows were both fantastic. As someone who typically pictures John sedentarily sitting behind a microphone, seeing him jumping around on stage like the bona fide Rock star he is was a fantastic experience. Thank you for putting on all the great shows. Seeing you perform was definitely worth the trip.

Secondly, I also went to the Gary's Van meet-up. I was struck by how personable and generally ”on” you were outside of the more structured and uni-directional setting of a podcast. You were great to your fans, me included, and Marlo was fantastic and handled the crowd well. I can see why you wanted to move into politics.

My first question is: How do you do it? You talk a lot about introversion and extroversion, and along the spectrum I place myself far toward the extroverted side. However, the thought of engaging with fans in the manner that you do just sounds draining. Not that I would speak ill of the other constituents of Gary's Van, and I'm not, referring to certain sections of your fan base more generally, having a bunch of nerds throwing references to my own shows back at me would certainly irk me after the 50th time.

Is it just something that you have gotten used to after years and years of being a somewhat public figure? How often do fans rub you the wrong way in these situations? How do you handle it? I understand the talking about the concessions you make to be more appealing to an audience is probably one of the more touchier topics, but how big a departure is your public persona from what you consider your natural self? What concessions do you make?

Like any performance, John is full of dread on his way into any room and on his way down to meet the denizens of Gary's Van. It was a very successful meetup. There were probably 30 people there, people who had come from a long way away, some of them, while some of them were from Poulsbo or even closer. Some of them were from Seattle. John dreaded it, but he dreaded it in the same way that he dreads going on stage to do a show. When he is backstage and has to go out there is nothing he wants to do less than what he is about to do, but as soon as he walks across the threshold, as soon as he is there on the stage or in a room with people, the dread goes away because now it is happening and dread only operates against the future.

It is an involved question, not a tricky one, because John is the same person in person as he is on the off-worlds. He is identifiably the same as he is here if he is sitting in a room of 30 people who have all come to see John, which is the part that is complicated or involved. You would have to be a monster to feel comfortable feeling that that kind of attention was warranted. When John is in that group of people, what he is thinking is: Here is a group of people that belong together with one another and John is the catalyst of it because he tries to be the catalyst. He works to be a catalyst, he works to talk about things in the world in a way that helps other people not feel alone and helps other people identify either themselves or people they know in the things that he is saying in a way that helps.

Everybody in John’s family believes that they should be helpful, a thing that they talk about with one another because they often identify it as the source of their suffering: ”Why are we unhappy?” - ”Well, because we have to be helpful, and if we are not being helpful, then we are not being useful, and if we are not being useful, then we are not being good!” It is very difficult to be helpful all the time because they are not the type of people that go build houses for the poor. They are not that kind of helpful, but they feel a responsibility to be something else.

Walking into those situations John is conscious of the fact that a certain component of that interaction is going to be framed as that they are there to see him, that he is the hero, he is the reason, he has something special. John is not being cagey when he says: ”I know that I am the reason we are all here, but it is only because I am saying out loud and have a venue to say out loud what you all also think and feel, if not directly, then you think and feel the opposite of what I am saying, but you also think and feel these things. I just am saying them!” Whatever John’s gift is, it is a gift of articulation.

Those 30 people getting together at those tables, what was exciting about it for John, what the point of it was, was that they meet one another. When John sat down he realized he can't just sit and talk to 30 people that know him as intimately as this group does. If they are on the Gary’s Van Facebook page, it means that they listen to these podcasts closely, they communicate with each other already, this is not a Comic-Con appearance where he is sitting at a table and just like: ”Hello, who should I sign this to?”, but he needs to know who everybody is here.

In meeting everybody and in listening to everybody talk and answer questions people are asking, he is always trying to redirect it somewhat to: ”This is us, this is our group, there is commonality here, and that is what is going to save us!” It is the thing that always saves you, the feeling of common cause. There are people listening to the show who feel alone in the world, isolated, until they hear a show where they go: ”Oh, ha! You just described a thing that is true about me and I can't touch you with my hands, but I feel like I can touch you with my mind or my soul or whatever!”

John is not going to say that that is not hard, because it is, but part of what is hard is that there is a lot of desire to make it about John because that is a fan impulse, to celebrate, to be excited. The challenge for John is just to fulfill that need for people. He is super-happy to sign your boob, if that is what you want, he will make that sacrifice, but to do that in a way that isn't just a: ”I am famous and you are here because I am amazing!”, it is a social experience, and John is super-present for that kind of thing.

The excitement of meeting all those people is that John likes meeting people because he learned so much. Our writer, who came from Perth, describes himself as an extrovert, and that is somewhat evident, not in his manner when you meet him, because there is a shyness to him, but it is evident because by the end of the weekend it seems like he had become personal friends with all 30 of those people or a lot of them. He had become a treasured person to some of those people. He is extremely likable. He has that interesting balance of ”kind of shy”, at least in manner. He is a young guy from Western Australia.

John was a public figure when he was 4. There was no school, there was no grocery store, there was no situation where John didn't walk into it and immediately assumed that the people there were interested in a show and that he was there to provide them with the show. He was famous in his schools and there has never been a teacher or authority figure or student in a school that didn't know John by name. He has always been a public figure, just the scale of publicness has increased. He never became a famous person, but the people that know him know him.

Dan’s comment

Dan has given talks and at the end been completely mobbed by 50, 100 people who were standing in line to talk to him about something, they would wait 30 minutes to say: ”I really liked your talk!” or: ”That thing you said eight years ago on this one blog post really helped me!”, or people coming up and saying: ”You were totally wrong about this thing that you said!” and that can become a conversation, too. It is very different and unless you have been in that situation.

Around a year ago they brought 2001 back into the theaters. They had just done a rerelease of the 70 millimeter cut of it and then they also redid it in 4K. Dan’s son had never seen the movie and he was around the same age that Dan was when he saw it as a kid. They were sitting in the movie theater and there is an intermission in 2001, how cool is that? The lights come up in the intermission and the guy sitting next to Dan says: "You are Dan Benjamin!” - ”Yeah, hi! Who are you?” and he was a listener, a really cool dude, he had brought his younger cousin to go see it with them, they struck up a conversation and it turned out he had been listening and read Dan’s old posts on Hivelogic about installing MySQL on a Mac, he was an old school listener.

That kind of thing happens to Dan quite a bit, not every day, but often. The first few times it happens, you're like: ”Wow, that is weird! People know who I am now?”, but after a while it just becomes a really neat opportunity to meet somebody or learn about them.

There are plenty of people who like to be out and about and doing things and who are charged up or energized by being out and about and doing things. It is also possible that you don't have to be an extrovert or always be an extrovert to enjoy talking to people or enjoy meeting people. Dan is definitely not an introvert, but he wouldn't go so far as to say he is extroverted either. He definitely enjoys downtime, he can go a long period of time without really talking to a lot of people.

When Dan is out at one of these things like John went to he really, truly enjoys meeting the people and talking to them and hearing what their stories are and finding out: ”How did you get here? How did you find the show? Where did you come from? What brought you here tonight?” If you enjoy it, then it doesn't feel like you are being an extrovert, it doesn't feel tiring, it doesn't feel like people are wanting something from you, but it feels like you are actually getting something from them in a way, you are getting their story.

Most of the time those people are there because they like you, and it feels good to be liked, it feels good to realize that this person came from somewhere else to see you or to tell you about the thing that you did and then it helped them. What could be better than that?

John’s skill being the facilitator and being good at articulation

Things that happen like that in the material world… John feels like his gift is articulation and to a certain degree processing. He processes experiences and things that he reads and he is able to say them or sing them in a way that helps people understand things that maybe they were already thinking about that they just had never made a connection between. John is a facilitator of connecting disparate ideas or pieces of information. He really does see that as a kind of gift like being able to throw a javelin or whatever. There is no element of it that makes him good, it is just a skill, and the thing that does have a moral element is that he draw conclusions from those connections that he wants to explore.

John’s conclusions from those connections are good, but up above that level John is just making the connection, he is just combining ideas and saying: ”Here is where they connect, here is where they are related!” John doesn’t take credit for it. He doesn’t get a charge out of people thinking he is great. That is embarrassing. That is the introvert. When people celebrate him and saying: ”You are amazing!” he is so embarrassed to the point of feeling humiliated. What he like is when somebody says: ”This connection that you made, I took that and I made the following further connection more. I took that connection that you showed me and it helped me make this decision that ended up being good in my life!” It is a misattribution of credit if someone says: ”You saved my marriage!”, and it is a correct attribution to say: ”The thing that you said caused me to think differently, and in thinking differently I made a different decision and that is what saved my marriage!”

Anyone who is listening would recognize that, and a lot of the time when you say: ”Oh, you saved my marriage!” it is just a shorthand, you are just trying to say to the person: ”You helped me!” Oftentimes the person doesn't realize, they think that John did saved their marriage. The favorite thing that anybody has ever said, and John hears it not infrequently, is: ”I didn't understand my wife or my sister or my dad because they were suffering from something that I don't suffer from, so I didn't understand them. and hearing you talk about it, I can't personally relate, but I can see that you are talking about the thing that plagues my dad, and it helped me understand my dad better because my dad isn't able to say what plagues him.” That is the greatest complement, that is why John does any of this, to do that. But he didn't do anything, but they are the ones that heard what he said, recognized it and made the connection and it is their mind that is doing the concluding.

An extrovert is just like: ”Hello!” John took his daughter to this meeting and she was just like: ”It is 30 people that are all looking in the same direction! I need to stand at the point where they are all focused, which of course is right in front of daddy!” She is an extrovert. But John is always pointing out that: ”I did not save your marriage! I just talked about connections that I had made between things!” and that is helpful. So much of what troubles us is we are not making connections between things that are related. We tend to silo things, we see things and then we see other things and we don't see that they are connected and John is always looking for a grand unification theory of everything all the time because these things can't exist in the universe simultaneously and not be related. You cannot have this and that and and say that they are separate because they are all made out of the same fucking however many elements, which isn't that many.

Borderline Personality

If Dan would be so generous, I would like to pose another question. John, you have dropped quite a few references to borderline personality disorder lately. I believe saying that there is a high incidence of people with BPD in your life. My partner of a few years has BPD, I see the effect that it can have on our life and don't want to understate that. However, it does contribute to a strain on our relationship and it does make my life harder, too. As someone who definitely has more experience than me in this area, do you have any advice?
See you on the Perth leg of your 2021 world tour!

Whatever mental issues, whatever emotional disease John suffers from, it does affect his emotional reality, but it does it in a slow, long-form way. There are unreliable narrators in his head that are interpreting things and finding interpretations of them that are unhealthy, events in the world. Somebody across the room looks at him and then looks away and there are long term arcs in his life that will incorporate that information and have it confirm suspicions he has about the world that are maybe incorrect or unhelpful.

On a day to day, hour to hour basis John feels like he has a pretty reliable apprehension of what is going on. He knows when something is an emergency and when it is not. If the stove catches on fire he knows that it is solvable, and it is not solvable by pouring water on it. He knows where the fire extinguisher is, he knows how to put out a stove fire without panicking, he knows that when someone looks at him from across the room and looks away, he doesn't burst into tears, he knows how things are connected to one another.

John’s day to day life is pretty stable. There is compression put on it, but he is emotionally stable. In dealing with people with borderline personality disorder, their emotional life is unstable. We use the term like: ”Oh, she is unstable!” to mean a lot of different things, and John doesn't mean it in that sense, but with border line people, whatever emotion they are experiencing right now is reality to them and they don't remember a time when they didn't feel that way and they cannot imagine a time in the future when they won't feel that way.

Those emotional moments can be short or long, but whatever they are, they are extremely destabilizing, not just for the person, but for anybody who is interacting with them because all of a sudden this new emotion they are feeling is super-real and you can't use reason on it, you can't say: ”No, wait, wait, wait! It is just that the stove is on fire, it is not that the world is on fire!” and you cannot convince them of that until the moment subsides in them, and it subsides only by various methods.

People that are really working hard to treat their own borderline learned skills to recognize those moments and to somehow find a way to acknowledge them and to try to not make any decisions in that frame of mind. For John, in long association with people that have borderline, the challenge has over a long time been to learn not to engage with the emergency emotions that they are having on the level that they are having it. If they say: ”The world is on fire!” he can't get into an argument with them about it. He has had to learn to be a force of redirection or at least an agent of redirection, which is counter to the way that he thinks or experiences his own emotions.

If he is having an emotion, the last thing he wants is the person he is engaging with to say: ”Look over here! Isn't this bangle pretty?” - ”What? Fuck you! I am talking about this emotion I am having!” And the thing about borderline people is that this is also going to be their reaction. What isn't going to help is addressing their momentary hot live wire emotion as though it is as real as they feel it is. That ends up in a state of constant unstable ”the world is on fire” all the time and your world ends up being on fire too, in a way, even more because the borderline person displaces their emotional emergency onto you and if you validate them by also feeling like it is an emergency, you are really in a death spiral with them, in particular if you are like John and are also emotionally struggling, but wanting to help. You can be in tough shit.

When John looks back at his relationships over time and recognizes that this is a recurring theme, border line is a thing and he is attracted to it and borderline people are attracted to him, ”What could I have done differently?” and in a lot of cases, what he should have done is de-escalate. He was never trying to escalate, but the choices he made actually did escalate rather than de-escalate because he took their emotion seriously, he took the experience at face value, and then he was astonished when an hour later or a day later it was as if to them that emotional state had not existed and they didn't remember being in a place where the world was on fire. And when you say: ”But yesterday you said the world was on fire?” - ”What are you talking about? The world is not on fire! You seem crazy! Why are you saying such a crazy thing?” You just feel gaslit all the time.

They are not doing it on purpose. A borderline person is not doing that to hurt you, but their emotions when something happens and they go into that state it is as real to them as anything, and when it is gone that is new real. ”Good luck, my friend!” Borderline people are amazing. They are some of John’s favorite people in the world, the way they feel, more than the way they think. It is like being on a ski slope where you are just on the side of in control and if you make one wrong move, you are going to yard sale.

The sequencing of the Western State Hurricanes album (RW176)

Hi, Dan and John!
The new (?) Western State Hurricanes album is amazing. I have had it on heavy rotation since release, bouncing back and forth between the Western State Hurricanes and Long Winter cuts of each song. Thank you so much for releasing it! I am curious how you settled on the sequencing. Did you reuse a track ordering from when the album was originally planned, or did you do it from scratch? Were there any particularly difficult sequencing decisions, or did everything seem like it just belonged in a specific space?
Thanks for all the good work on Road Work. — Eli

The sequence of a record is the order that the songs go in, like the setlist, except of a record. When you are putting a setlist together for a show, either you are playing the same setlist every night, which is to say you start every set with the same song and end every set with the same song, which a lot of bands choose to do, or you are working from a little handful of set lists that you have worked out and you are choosing one for this particular night, or you are going to make a set list in advance each night that is going to reflect the mood your band is in and where you are and what worked last night.

On a lot of Long Winters tours they would start a set with no setlist and call audibles on songs, they would pitch to the audience and say: ”Anybody got a request?” A guy came up to John at the Western State show and said he was at a show in Chicago that they played one time and after the first song John said: ”Any requests?” and he just shouted a song and they played it and at the end of the song John said again: ”Any requests?” and he shouted another song and they played that. According to his story, and eventually the audience just acquiesced to this, he just kept shouting out songs and they kept playing them and he basically had a concert where he dictated the setlist or at least a portion of it, six songs or whatever in the middle. It was one of the great concert experiences. That is not what most bands would do. Most bands are trying to put on a professional show.

The sequence of a record is very important. When you are sequencing a vinyl album, you have some pretty important constraints. You have the first song on the album, which is what everybody is going to hear when the needle drops that first time, and then you have half of your songs that have to perform an arc that deposits you at the last song on side 1… There were lots and lots of albums in John’s life where he really preferred one side of the album to the other. He would play side two of this record over and over and over again and only go back and revisit side one every once in a while, because he loved the sequence of side two or loved the sequence of side one, because that is where what he considered to be, if not all the good songs, at least they all went together in such a great way. Side two often was where a band's more adventurous songs were or the darker songs.

In sequencing of vinyl, you also have the first song on side two, which is incredibly important because people flip that record over and you got to interest them in side two. Why would they ever go back to side two? You got to give them something there and you got to save a great song for that place, you don't want to start side two off with your weird spoken-word thing! Side two also has to find an arc and presumably the final song on side two is this anchor-song.

In sequencing this record, they were thinking in terms of: Song number one? And song number one isn't always the hit, it is the thing that establishes the tone of the band. Your hit sometimes isn't until Song three. You want your hit, or at least your first single on side one somewhere.

As an answer to the question: John has never sequenced an album where it wasn't collaborative with the other people involved. Everybody got an opinion, most of the Long Winters records were ultimately sequenced by Sean. When they were on tour he would always make the set lists because that was the kind of thing he liked and John hated doing it. This record was largely sequenced by Bo, the bass player of the Western State Hurricanes, because he loves making lists, he loves having spreadsheets, and he did all this math on the sequence of this album and when he presented John with the order, it sounded great.

Through with Love, which is ostensibly the title track and ostensibly the popiest tune, is actually the first song on side two. It fulfills some of the rules. They used to sequence CDs, thinking of them in vinyl terms. Right around song five or six they always talked about that song as the first song of side two. They didn't sequence those for vinyl initially, they were just thinking that way.

Supporting a partner going through difficult times (RW176)

Hello Dan and John!

My name is Ross, and you can use that name on the show. I am a 31 year old assis-male, 6’2”in height, 152 pounds in weight, with an annual salary of around £16.000 ($20.682) a year before taxes.

I was born and raised in Toronto, but have lived in Glasgow, Scotland for the past seven years. I emailed you a bit more than a year ago and you gave a thoughtful answer to my question, so I figured I would send another with that in mind.

My concern involves supporting a partner going through very difficult times. To be specific, my girlfriend of 5 years is type 1 diabetic. She takes insulin, but due to traumatic experiences in the past, she has not seen a doctor about her condition for about 15 years. Three years ago sight-threatening complications arose and she has been going to a specialist eye clinic for this (Thank you, NHS!), but she still refuses to seek help about the root of the problem, the management of her diabetes.

Over the course of the past three years, she has fallen into unhealthy habits and a worsening depression. It has gotten to a point where she rarely gets dressed, rarely leaves the house. She is eight years my senior, works freelance, and lives with her parents, has lost touch with her friends, and is scared shitless pretty much all of the time. We don't have the relationship we used to, but I still care deeply about her. I have really tried my best to be a supportive partner, but being around this constant negativity with no sign of progress has really affected my wellbeing. It feels like both of our lives have been consumed by her condition.

She is afraid of being alone and afraid that I will leave her and move back to Toronto, which I am in fact seriously considering doing. I am not really sure what my question is, but I would be interested in hearing what you both have to say about dealing with the painful life stuff of those you care about and the effects that can have on you, or instances of when you were in a bad way and how those around you handled it.
Many thanks to you both! — Ross.

This is so common! She is depressed and diabetic, but the letter could have said that she was a drunk or a drunk drug addict and it would be the same. The problem is that none of the things that are plaguing her are his fault and none of them are anything he can do anything about. He cannot help her. There is nothing you can say, there is no action he can take, he is trapped in a situation where all the decisions that she needs to make are 100% hers. One assumes that he has done everything he can over the course of their relationship to encourage her, to support her in getting help, in maintaining her disease, in seeking a connection outside, and she has rejected those options.

He is in a place where he can't do anything, and yet he feels like he has all this power, but it is only negative power because if he leaves, then she is going to fall apart, that is the dynamic that they have right now. He doesn't want to be with her anymore, he wants to go back to Toronto, and rightfully so. He wants to get on with his life. He doesn't have any positive power to make her life better, but he feels burdened by all this negative power that he can make her life worse by effectively not continuing to sacrifice his own life at the altar of her depression.

The one thing he can't know, that none of us can know, is what happens. There are an awful lot of depressed and desperate people that losing something is the thing that shocks them into changing their life. There are also a lot of depressed and desperate people that will lose everything and lose it all and nothing is enough to shock them into making a change. But the question for him is: It is all tied up in the guilt and responsibility, he feels, the real honest desire he has for her to get better, and the absolute powerlessness when you are dealing with somebody that doesn't want to get better, or that can't get better, and ultimately you can't put her in rehab, you can't hospitalize her against her will. If you sit and scream at her it is not going to help, if you are in a long term codependent relationship with her it is not going to help.

As awful as it sounds, and it is not tough love, you can't go back to Toronto in order to shock her, you can’t play with her that way, and the hardest thing is to recognize that you don't have any power because not only do you not have positive power, but the negative power you imagine you have isn't real. You don't have that negative power. A lot of times somebody that is in desperate straits like that will try and put that on you and say:"If you leave, I will kill myself!” or whatever. That is a very common way of for a person that feels like they don't have that power over themselves to put it on someone else. That is not his!

Ultimately it is his life that he is trying to lead, his own life, and he needs to figure out what is best for him now. It sounds ruthless, but it is really all he can do. The only positive thing he can do for either of them is for him to go on with his life. Go back to Toronto and get on with your life. You have no idea whether there is something in in the co-dependency of your relationship that is enabling her decline, which is not something to factor into a guilt equation. You just don't know. We all like to think that we can look into relationships like this and be able to see the future and be able to see our complicity and our power or lack thereof.

We are not that smart. It may be a butterfly flapping its wings that ends up making a difference to her, or she may die in a diabetic coma, but you being there isn’t going to help her. There are a lot of people listening to the show that suffer from malady and the people that suffer from chronic pain, but those people also know that they have just as much responsibility as anybody else in the world to be good partners, to be considerate, and to be bearing their share of the burden.

Having a disease, being in pain… diabetes is a manageable condition. Most of the time, people with diabetes, whether it is with insulin or diet, there are a lot of people with Type 1 diabetes who are in the world and you would never know that they had any condition at all, unless they decided to share it with you. It is more than just that with her. Depression is the issue and depression is a lot harder to manage than diabetes, actually. Depression is also addressable. To have depression and to have to be in a relationship with someone where their lives are defined by your untreated depression isn't fair and isn't just.

It sounds cold, but: Move to Toronto! Get on with your life!

You got to love yourself, and you got to recognize that there are an awful lot of people out there that don't want to do the work and they want you to do their work. You can help those people up to a point, but then you got to get away from them. If the person you are with isn't willing to do their work and wants to make it your work? You got your own work and you got to get away from them!

Following your dad on a mission trip (RW176)

John and Dan, this is a timely manner!

Name: Alex, age 33, Height 6’2”, weight: about 200 pounds, gender: male, shoe size: 11l, location: Nashville, Tennessee.

I grew up in a Christian home where my dad was/is a youth pastor. My experience with church was very enjoyable. I have a lot of great memories and attribute my upbringing as the source of a lot of core beliefs around being a good person. I wholeheartedly believed Christianity until I began to have doubts in my early 20s and ultimately landed in Agnosticism. I have since come out to some of my family, much to their sadness, but they live about seven hours away, so I don't see them often.

While I don't mind going to church with them when visiting, I deal with anxiety, hoping they don't turn a one on one situation, like a trip to the grocery store, into an opportunity to bring up Christian apologetics and encourage me to give it another try as they have done in the past. I attribute the anxiety to my proclivity to avoid confrontation and not wanting to feel like a disappointment, as I ultimately am feeling like a project. I know they are proud of me, but have said they have failed me by not instilling the importance of having a relationship with Jesus. They are rooted in their faith and I am not trying to change their views, even though their beliefs compel them to try to change mine.

There are a lot of feelings and frustrations with the situation that are difficult to verbalize. This is all coming to a head with the impending decision as to whether or not I will join my dad on a mission trip to Haiti in April 2020. He has been leading trips to a community there for about 20 years, but I have never gone. He is getting older and I think this would be a good father/son experience, but I expect it to be a full immersion into a Christian environment that my dad will use to try and reach me along with the awkward situation, since I don't want to participate in all the religious elements, Bible study, prayer meetings, etc.

I see my options as: 1) make an excuse for being unable to go. I think I would regret this. 2) sit through those parts and treat them as part of the experience. This feels passive and unfair to myself. 3) Have an open and honest conversation about my concerns about this trip. I think option 3 is the best and most difficult approach since it is going straight at the issue by standing up for myself. I would love to know your thoughts and any advice you may have for this situation.

Thank you for all your do! I have been listening to The Long Winters since When I Pretend to Fall and Roderick on the Line introduced me to Merlin and Dan's Back to Work show. Since then, you have all been important and consistent voices in my life. — Alex.

John is super-glad their listener wrote. It is great that he is reaching out about it. John has friends who grew up in the church and they also had great experiences with it as young people, and it did instill in them a solid core and then they fall out of religion as they get more experience, and of course that is an expression of growth: As you get older to examine the belief system that you were raised in and to confront it internally and to ask hard questions about it and depending on the answers that you get to leave a church, particularly one where your family is still in it, that is bold and strong and good, ultimately.

Of course you carry around a lot of baggage about it. To land in agnosticism is hard because it is not an ideology. Agnosticism is doubt and lack of that. All education that is effective should produce doubt rather than certainty. If you learn something and it does not give you more doubt, then you are probably not paying attention. Doubt is intelligence and certainty is something else, and to move from certainty to doubt is the direction of evolution, intellectually and spiritually, not the other way around. You are not moving toward certainty if you are learning.

That is extremely hard to carry into a situation like the one he is describing because he is with people that have a freaking book that has got it all written down. To counter that on the same level with an ideology of doubt and uncertainty and questioning is impossible. You can't go head to head where they quote a passage and then you quote Nitzsche or The Beatles. You can't address it at that level!

Doubt and inquisitiveness and self-questioning are real and powerful and things to rejoice in. So often we think of doubt as something to be embarrassed by or ashamed of because it seems like we just aren't collusive. It seems like there is a truth and we just haven't figured out what it is and that makes us feel passive or dumb or not perceptive or missing something. We are often characterized that way: ”What more do you need to learn before you pick a side?” - ”Well, I don't feel like picking a side is the thing!” and a lot of people just don't get that. People pick sides to give order to the world. They are Steelers fans and maybe they have a team when the Steelers aren't playing that they like better, their second team. They pick sides, it is what we do.

To live in a world where you say: ”Not picking sides is what I do!” is powerful, and it is more powerful than all the doctrines, all the ideologies, all the religions of the world. It is just that there is no book and there is no catch phrase for it. You don't go to Haiti with agnosticism and teach classes. That is the problem! You go to comparative literature departments. It is so frustrating that there isn't a bigger place in the world for doubt because people who practice doubt don't organize.

He absolutely needs to go to Haiti with his dad. a) going to Haiti with his dad has nothing to do with fucking God. His dad wants to make it that, but he is a full grown man now, their correspondent, and his dad doesn't get to decide what his experience of things is going to be. He is going to have to deal with the fact that his dad is going to want to turn it back to Jesus, and this is a wonderful opportunity to be confident in doubt. You don't have to fight your dad, you have to explain and demonstrate to him that doubt is a condition of grace, that you are not ashamed of it, that being agnostic is not just being not Christian, but it is its own place of that is beautiful, that is not just gray. You didn't just turn the lights off on God. It is a place of great beauty and great light.

Haiti is going to be an amazing experience! If you go to all those prayer sessions and are acting as an agent of doubt, you are going to help somebody. There is going to be somebody there who is at risk and Jesus is not going to be what they need. There is so much pressure there to have Jesus be the answer, and there are a lot of people there that Jesus is being forced down their throat and it is making them miserable and there is not someone in their life that can say: ”Actually, there is also doubt, which maybe works for you better!”

John is not saying to go into these meetings and try to undermine your dad, but why not? You don't believe in what they are doing anymore. Don’t give him the position of authority!

He should not have a conversation with his dad before he goes, fuck that! Whatever he is going to say doesn't matter because his dad thinks that he is going to get him alone and get him back to Jesus. No matter what he says to his dad, his dad is going to think that. His dad is going to go to his deathbed thinking that he is going to get his son back to Jesus. He is a missionary and a youth pastor. There is very little risk that agnosticism is going to get in his heart, but he has to understand his son, and his son can't live the rest of his life not fully out. You don't want to come home for Christmas and just like. "Oh, we don't talk about religion!” because you are always on the defensive then, you are always on egg shells and your religious relatives feel like they have got you on the ropes and they go after you, they drop Jesus into everything just to watch you squirm.

To take charge of that requires so much strength, so much personal strength to take on your whole family and the religious edifice that supports them that goes back 2000 years, but you got to have that strength because otherwise you are just living in this in-between world. The reason that their correspondent is asking is because John thinks he does have that strength and he does recognize that it is possible to stand up for oneself, but not defensively. You know why they are religious. You know what religion is. You don't have to define it, you don't have to explain why you left it, even. You are just in a state where you recognize that doubt is a higher level of awareness and doubt is a more profound way to experience life. Be proud of it!

Dan feels like he should have a conversation with his dad first because Dan likes to set people's expectations. He wouldn't want his dad to think: ”Oh, my son is going to go with me. This is my chance! I am going to get to him this time!” If he has the conversation with his dad ahead of time where he says: ”Dad, it would mean a lot to me to go on this trip with you. I see it as a really great opportunity for us to be together. You know, Dad, I know you are probably not going to do a ton of these and I have never gone my whole life and I want to be a part of it and I want to go and see what this thing that you do like all the time is about. I admire you and I want to see what your passion is about and what your work is about and what you are up to, but you got to know that my feelings are not a part of this and for me this isn't about Christianity, this is about being with my dad and admiring him and seeing the amazing work that you are going to go over there and do. I want to help as much as I can, but more importantly, this is about me and you time. I am going as a spectator. I am not going as a religious participant. I am going to watch you and to connect with you and to appreciate your passion for the stuff that you do. But I want you to know that this is not a religious thing for me. This is not a Christian thing for me. My views are not in question. The way that I feel is how I feel, and if you can accept that… knowing that I am going to be with you, the dad that I love, that I am proud of, and to learn about you and what you do, then I would love to go with you, but if you are looking at this as an opportunity to try and change my mind, then it is going to make it a difficult trip, and I really want to have a great trip with you!” and just see what his dad says to that.

John thinks that was such a beautiful thing that Dan just said Dan is absolutely right. That is exactly what he should say and it is such a lovely way of framing it. They will start off on a on a very different foot and his dad, of course, will want him to come and he will still probably try and pressure him, but just the way that Dan framed it there is just exactly right, a perfect way to address it in advance. John can't wait to hear the follow up!