The Rollercoaster Inside: When Liquid Modernity Goes Internal

It’s one thing to be on a rollercoaster unsure of WHERE you are heading to next. It’s another thing to have a rollercoaster inside you, leaving you unsure of WHO you are to going to be next.

Welcome to the modern world. ‘It’s easy to point to the obvious one of gender fluidity, but the philosophy runs farther and wider to other issues such as social fluidity, career fluidity and relational fluidity. Whatever word you stick in front of it, it’s the fluidity of the modern world that is - at least - consistent!

We exist within a culture that is experiencing rapid discontinuous change. So many variables. So many black swan events that no one could have ever predicted. When is the next war? What is the economic future holding? And just what about those tariffs? Yet one of the biggest changes in the last century is the manner in which we look within ourselves for ultimate meaning and foundation.

From French philosophy to Disney movies, the move towards a recrafting of the internal self - a moulding of our psychological self and inner identity - is almost standard fare. And we are promised that if we can find out who we truly are, and if we can craft the most authentic self possible, then we will finally understand what it means to be free.

Yet does that work? For all of the Frozen songs that suggest - nay - demand that we become who we know ourselves to be once all of the cultural barnacles are scraped off, and all of the societal expectations removed, there is a distinct lack of security around our inner self. Once we hit the “rapid discontinuous change” button inside us, it’s hard to stop it, indeed it becomes addictive to keep reinventing ourselves.

Fortunately there is a veritable cottage industry online willing to take your email and credit card details, in order to help you discover who you truly are. The term we use for that search of the authentic self is “expressive individualism”. Find out who you truly are and express that to the world.

This is almost a mantra in our modern age. Australian pastor and author Rory Shiner, puts it this way:

We are not argued into expressive individualism, we are formed into it. To live in modern Australia is to be a part of a relentless discipleship programme. Every Pixar and Disney film, every graduation speech, every new novel and Netflix series is one hundred percent on point: your purpose in life is to find the true inner you and then to express that to the world.

The great problem of course is that we can never sure that we have arrived. External circumstances change. Internal experiences change! And so the rollercoaster continues. The late Tim Keller, who pastored in New York City for several decades, had this to say about the fragility of the internal search for the self, and its constant remoulding:

The modern self is exceptionally fragile. While having the freedom to define and validate oneself is superficially liberating, it is also exhausting: You and you alone must create and sustain your identity. This has contributed to unprecedented levels of depression and anxiety and never-satisfied longings for affirmation.

Now this would usually be the point where I would say that the answer is “Jesus”. But let’s hold that thought. What we are experiencing in this time of liquid modernity is a rush by people towards all manner of self-proclaimed secure foundations. There is a push towards the hard left and the hard right politically. We are seeing that played out IRL and online.

There are any manner of spiritualities on the market, often cobbled together from seemingly contradictory viewpoints. New York Times best-seller, Tara Isabella Burton, labels the spirituality crowd today the “Remixed” - they’re mixing up a cocktail of spiritual and ethical frameworks and seeing what works for them. The attraction they hold is the promise of community, ritual, meaning and purpose. In other words, all of the stabilisers required in a fluid age.

In his new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, posits that the search for meaning and internal security located in the transcendent, is evident across all times and cultures. Yet it is unique to our time and culture alone in the modern West that we take a certain pride in the fluidity, a fluidity that is, quite frankly, shredding us.

Douthat’s book is a call to reconsider religion, and given his Catholic faith, the Christian religion in particular, as a grounds for locating the inner self securely, as well as a platform for launching into the modern world. He affirms, with the author of Psalm 13, that the disquiet of the internal self cannot be resolved by deconstruction, or by a never ending shape-shifting, whether that be in obvious ways - such as with gender - or less obvious ways - such as internal locations of security such as vocational satisfaction or human relationships.

Look at how Psalm 13 sounds so modern in its cry about both external and internal liquidity:

How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
    How long will you hide your face from me?
 How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
    and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
    How long will my enemy triumph over me?

The Psalmist, along with Tara Isabella Burton, Tim Keller and Ross Douthat understand the rollercoaster all too well. But like the Psalmist, these modern three also understand the solution:

But I trust in your unfailing love;
    my heart rejoices in your salvation.
 I will sing the Lord’s praise,
    for he has been good to me.

At Life To The Full we are committed to journeying with you on the rollercoaster - both external and internal. And we are committed, as the first section of the Psalm indicates, to sitting with you in the mess and wrestle. But we are also committed to a framework that says that the LORD is the one who both reframes our internal selves and who reorients us to face the external rapid discontinuous changes of the modern world. God won’t always remove the external instabilities, but he will provide internal stabilisers - as well as am externally stable community - to help us on the journey.