How I hacked my own brain and invented a new religion

Making stories work for you on a personal level

Hello friends, I was planning to write once a week, but I can’t resist another, more personal letter today. I wanted to share something I find uplifting and also something more centred on my own experiences – while also staying on the overall topic of the power of stories.

You see, eventually the universe will decay into one huge grey porridge, with atoms spread out so thinly across the expanse as to be completely formless and...wait! Come back! I promise it gets uplifting soon!

Dealing with a universe that feels grey already has been a major struggle of mine, since I have been depressed for so much of my life. This letter is about one of the ways I found to make myself stronger, using stories.

At the same time as I have my personal struggles, dealing with the fact that existence is quite simply far bigger than ourselves and our own ability to comprehend things has always been a basic human fact. For whatever reason, way before we could write or make bricks, we evolved these fast nervous brains which can perceive the world far more acutely than we can cope with. Our brains constantly know things that make us scared – like the way that entropy means eventually all energy and matter in the universe will be spread out without form. No form. Dull, right? Boring and scary because it’s just a state of affairs that is out there, getting closer, just like our own inevitable deaths

I think coping with this contradiction is one major reason humans have also used language to develop stories. A story is, by definition, just big enough. It fits satisfyingly in your brain. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. It doesn’t just trail out of sight and imply terrifying things out there in the distance, like our messy reality does. Arguably this is also where religion comes form. The earliest examples of religion come from 100,000 years ago, based on remains of ritually buried humans. So belief seems to be linked to respect for the dead. By extension an entire system of priests and kinds eventually rose up, then partly because people needed an explanation and a satisfying story that would cut them off from the harsh realisation that the universe is too big and death is too real.

But for me, being depressed, knowing that I am part of something bigger is at the same time intensely comforting. It means that whatever my personal grief the universe does continue on, and things happen, whether I worry about them or not. However, in order for this to become truly comforting it also needs to be something I can grasp and understand – something that is filtered through the medium of a story.

When I entered my 40s I thought to myself: probably time to have a mid-life crisis and become religious, isn’t it? Especially during times of social upheaval, like we’re haying now, people have turned to religion. I do have a lot of respect for old religions, while also accepting they have been involved in a lot of abuses as organisations. An old religion is not just its dogma or hierarchy, it also represents a thousands-year-old internal conversation about its own stories and about how many millions of its members have ground smooth these stories by reacting to and reacting against them over the generations. But when I considered making the leap into an existing religion I couldn’t persuade myself. I have a huge need for consistency and logical coherence in my beliefs. I could not stand all the internal contradictions and loose hanging ends that every existing religion asks you to just deal with. Plus they all seemed too clearly historically rooted for me to have actual faith in them coming from anywhere else than human developments. So I thought to myself – how can I gain all the benefits of a religion without needing to commit to what I could feel as the uncomfortable corset of an existing one?

I thought about what religion is and what I wanted from it. It is partly a structure of belief that gives people comfort and partly a social network that gives support. It’s things you think and things you do. Apart form the social aspect I resolved that I could give myself these benefits without needing to subscribe to anything I didn't really believe in, by making my own scaffolding of meaningful belief and devotional practise.

This has actually worked and been something that has given me strength. Religion is a story, but more than that it is also a practise. It both sits in your brain and helps you understand when things are confusing, and it also exists in your body as you go through the motions of what your beliefs say you should do. (And speaking of going through the motions – it doesn’t matter at all to me that I know my religion is all made up. Studies show that people respond to placebo effects even when we know they are placebos.)

There’s also studies that show that “altruistic” behaviour is actually good for us, and those who can help each other tend to also be able stand more pain or stress during a crisis. In wars officers have spoken of being able to live through terrible conditions because of, not despite, the burden of leadership and responsibility. So a religion that calls on us to help others is therefore something that gains energy from us doing it; it is literally a virtuous feedback loop.

How to begin? The basis of my religion could only be existing basic beliefs. We all have them, sitting there underneath all our other beliefs, like the sturdy pillars in the stream that the bridge is piled on. You can paint the bridge various new colours; you can replace wooden parts with metal; you can allow different traffic to flow across it, but your absolute hulking solid planted basic beliefs are usually only formed by a long time, often in childhood, and only changed very slowly, as though being worn away or moved by a passing river. So what are my basic beliefs? That the natural world exists and that we are animals in the world. That democracy and fairness are essential and – this turned out to be central – that being bored is awful. What is more boring, then, than entropy, and its eventual mushing of the universe into sodden cardboard? That’s both scary and clearly evil.

Taking account of these basic beliefs I decided to make my religion centred on the revealed world around us. This is to say it had to be about connection with the obvious existence we already experience; rather than, for example being an ideology based on having access to hidden secrets via a holy word or an unusual way of seeing the world. Put simply, I only need to believe that that which exists, is what is. Circular reasoning, absolutely, but that counts too, in comforting our anmal brains. A smooth self-referential story-circle with no room for unbelief to slip in is maybe essential for a functioning religion.

What is good then? What is the opposite of entropy? Life. The phenomenon of living things. By making constant patterns they are more complicated and more interesting than a cloud of interstellar dust or a world made up of shifting sands and meteorite craters. Life sustaining itself and reproducing is a daily act of resistance against entropy. Hence whatever strengthens the existence of life is good. That’s only my opinion, of course, but in this particular case that’s very much what matters. I am therefore an unabashed biocentrist (I think living things are more important than other things) and also a pro-Earther and terran chauvinist. “Fuck you, Mars,” to quote Matt Damon.

Another key benefit about constructing a religion for myself, as a belief and as a practise is that its success is not dependent on reaching any particular goal or aiming for any particular final result. Your religion is something you do, maybe to a greater or lesser extent, all the time. This means no shocking climate news from the IPCC and no horror of a new extinction can mean an end to my faith in the constant wonder of life-as-phenomenon. My religious duty remains, to respect and value all life. So I have a certain kind of rooted strength from this.

Life being sacred doesn’t mean all lives are sacred, though. As an animal among animals, I act as animals do, and that can mean killing plants and animals for my own life or for the lives of the two feline meat-eaters in my community. Moreover, to take myself out of the killing and dying would be to deny the validity of the lifecycle itself and to imply that I can improve on it. Sure, I try to reduce harm to other lives to a minimum, but above all it is the existence of life as a phenomenon, and the continuation and resilience of ecosystems that I most want to protect. Yes, this religion is clearly open to interpretation and allows me to behave in hypocritical ways. Sounds just like an appropriate human belief system, I think!

So my life has changed in some basic ways. While I care for my cats, while I plant and I water my trees, and while I try to talk about problems and solutions for the climate, each time I do these things I am not just doing it as a lone creature, or trying to exist for myself, I feel I am instead performing a ritual that affirms my faith. I carry out these mundane tasks and they are filled with the glory of partaking of a sacrament. This form of personal discipline through being backed up by a system of meaning made by stories is incredibly important for me. It gives me a kind of daily energy and motivation that doesn’t feel isolated to me alone. Maybe it is, in reality, but it doesn’t matter. I take the sugar pill, and I feel good. I feel plugged into life.

Thank you for reading! Good luck with dealing with whatever life is currently throwing at you. Please get in touch if you want to share anything you think about after reading this.

The bestest of wishes

Loukas Christodoulou