No More, God

Alone in my room, I listened to a neuroscientist (Caroline Leaf) talk about the 21st century’s rise in preventable deaths. She talked about surging anxiety, depression rates, and especially of my generation (Gen Z). Gallup reports that 47.8 million Americans are diagnosed with depression.^[1] I sympathize with the despair. I feel as if I’ve been raised in the silence of a well-furnished cage, one that I have not chosen; an existence where life feels like a waiting room for an event that has already been canceled. Marx writes that the present exists “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”^[2] As I’ve been studying English, I’ve been finding the vocabulary for this claustrophobic resignation.

The first stage is the Theater of the Absurd, where post-World War II writers did as their movement implies: portraying the absurdity of life. Beckett’s infamous play Waiting for Godot depicts characters Vladimir and Estragon stuck in a metaphysical fog, knowing that they are stuck, but not how, or why. Ionesco brings this absurdity into the home with plays like The Bald Soprano and The Chairs, where he stages the meaninglessness of interior life: how redundant we all sound, how relationships only fill an ever-tolling time. The Absurdists knew they were trapped. They portrayed many of their generations’ feelings: living just to die. An ethos I have to understand. The Absurdists wrote in the long, cold shadow of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb—events so catastrophic they rendered traditional logic obsolete. If the Enlightenment promises that reason will save us, the World Wars prove that reason just as easily be used to industrialize slaughter. Their work became a literature of exhaustion. Of silence. Frequently, they stripped their stages bare because it reflected the state of their souls. Through an articulated silence they the paralysis of a civilization that had seen the end of the world, surprised to find itself still breathing, albeit without a purpose. But I feel that they fell short. The Absurdists recognized their emotions, but not the mechanics of the trap itself. This is where the Postmodernists are important, where time and industrial, material progression allowed for a clarity of their oppressors.

If the Absurdists were lost in a void, the Postmodernists—Pynchon, DeLillo, Baudrillard—show that we are stuck in a system. This isn’t an abstract silence, it is a hyper-materialist, hyper-technological grid. While the Absurdists look at an empty sky and feel the absence of God, the Postmodernists look at the skyline and see the presence of the Network. In the works of Pynchon, this transition is felt through a pervasive, conscious paranoia. It is no longer a question of “The fog of Beckett’s stage is replaced by the dense circuitry of global capital and military-industrial bureaucracy. DeLillo furthers this by illustrating how our most personal fears are mediated by the white noise of consumerism and the spectacle of the media; we are no longer individuals, but data points in a high-speed loop of information.

At BYU’s art museum, I saw a group of phone-out people briefly take a picture of and leave the large painting Christ Healing the Sick at Bethesda by Carl Heinrich Bloch; they couldn’t have been there for longer than two minutes. This is a famous painting, and more so within our Church’s identity. Dellilo writes about this phenomenon in a scene in White Noise where people congregate at the “most photographed barn in America” but the destination reveals no barn, only a place where people take pictures of the barn with signage of the “most photographed barn in America” that blocks out such barn. With a beam in my eye, I saw this play out in real time at the museum. It was as if meaning is so misunderstood that I was being told the painting does not deserve the attention, but the image of the work, picturing the symbol of the Church to show others that they have engaged deeply with the Church, is meaning. The idea replaces the object. We live in a referential age where landmarks serve as Instagram posts and vacations more social media fodder, algorithms that steal away the value of the human experience.

Jean Baudrillard provides the philosophical blueprint for this entrapment, suggesting that we have moved past the absurd into the simulacrum. In this stage, the real has been replaced by its representation. We aren’t stuck in a desert waiting for a savior who never comes, we are stuck in a shopping mall that looks like a desert, where the exit signs are just advertisements for more mall. This isn’t a lack of meaning, but a crushing surplus of it—a system so totalizing that it even commodifies our rebellion against it. The Postmodernists reveal that the walls of our cage aren’t made of nothingness, but of glowing screens and unbreakable algorithms that only keep us in the mall, to keep us buying, engaging with references: our new life-standard. And we continue to buy into it. We prove that we are comfortable with this new life, which, ironically, isn’t really life at all. Which is why the Postmodern writers like Dellilo are ironists. But, as Lewis Hyde writes in Alcohol and Poetry: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.”^[3]

When those walls squeeze so tight, when the cage we’re in is so clear and we’re tired of describing our restrictions: stasis. We are still in the cage. And a caged bird has no need for wings. It has no need for its glamorous feathers that spot, dot light across its body, light that ripples like unstrummed music; it can shed these adornments, as they will not rationally improve the bird’s life. We can put a nice red light to the cage, keep it warm; feed it the cheapest bird food so it doesn’t become a greater burden; reduce the bird to nothingness after our needs are met.

I am sometimes asked what I’ll do with my English degree. I understand people want to connect with others and sometimes they truly don’t know what to talk about, or that they are genuinely interested in where I’ll take this pursuit. But sometimes this feels like a self-validating fishing of the financially-rewarding career that has hollowed them for the past twenty years, only lifening them when they compare their annual incomes with another: “Good luck with that,” I’ve been told. “Find how to live within your means,” “Marry someone who makes more than you!” but No, I want to grab them and sob; I think so low of myself and this will make me better; I am the fruit of failed relationships and yearn for absolution, and my studies have been a gradual relief. But a relief, still. I am learning myself, and empathy, and that is all I want in this life: life. I do not want to live for the material but to live to live.

The greatest fear is when we become nothing. When we are treated like the animals Schopenhauer wished we were, only we are now subjugated by extreme laws, systems, ideas that continually reduce. T.S. Eliot understood this. In his post-World War poem “The Waste Land” he writes: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”^[4] In Dante’s Inferno, where is Satan and his captured souls? Frozen and damned in place. When Oedipus receives judgment, he is blinded. When Lear retrieves the hung-body of Cornelia, he agonizes “Never, never, never, never, never.—”^[5] with an em dash that cannot make itself clearer. In despair we are without words. In trauma we are without explanation. At our lowest, we are without. Stuck. Trapped. Negated. An internally-gouged icon for something that should be more.

But there remains a rupture in the grid. Being at BYU has many benefits, one of which is that I am reminded of the wonderfulness of God. God, the Man that the Enlightenment casually replaced. Our contemporary ethos emphasizes data, logic while reducing people to laborers and consumers. But at the start of many BYU classes, we begin with a prayer. It is a jarring, illogical act, speaking to an unquantifiable Presence. In classes not strictly about religion, they are influenced by Christian virtues and my classmates act from Christian perspectives. I am told that God is good. I am taught that all of life’s perfections are found within God. That God is a bright and burning light that continues to deliver His people, which is everyone that has ever lived and will live. In despair, there is He. I may not be relieved of my burdens, but through Him they will be lightened. I am told to be of the world, but not in it: “If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you” because it is not in the world that I find light, but outside of it, in Him.^[6] In order to serve God, I must love. I must love all of His children, connecting light, praising light, serving light. Teachings that are the reversal of what I’ve matured in. There is no value in the material, but in the Other. They are my brother, sister; mother, father.

I am no disciple. Scriptures, prayer, church, they only feel interesting. I do not see me in them, as the absurdity of hope seems too large. I cannot reasonably explain to someone why they should have hope. “From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion,” writes Camus, “the most harrowing of all.”^[7] This is the alternative to religion. I live amid abounding evil. Morality seems second to status, economics. The wealth disparity grows larger. Identity is fading. The humanities are disappearing—where “science [reason] conveys a picture of the world from which a real human psyche appears to be excluded—the very antithesis of the ‘humanities,’”^[8] writes Jung. Academia seems to pose itself as a burning house and a within-voice yells “There’s still a room to move into.” Critics are becoming only-applauders. Looking into, listing the future would chart myself as a doomer. Not a nihilist, but a pessimist. But this is not who I am—it is who I am being grounded into, without God. I and my friends are tired of living life as phantom limbs.

If the Postmodernists are right and we are trapped in consumer ouroboros, then perhaps the religious life is the only way to find reality. The life that you can feel, weigh, taste that exists outside of reference. Prayers, hymns, quiet service act as a form of sacramental resistance to the Postmodern condition. They suggest that objects and people aren’t just labor to be exploited but are imbued with a divine origin that the Mall cannot commodify. And so I want a new silence to be made. A new definition learned. One that does not justify our entrapment, but allows a hope: this is not all; there is something greater, greater than we could ever know. Again, Eliot in “The Waste Land”: “Looking into the heart of light, the silence.” Inner peace is often described as a type of silence. Meditation requires silence. Contemplation. In God’s holy places we are enshrouded in silence. Silence can be light, but I cannot find it in my surroundings.

I am no disciple, but I am a human. And it seems that only God affirms this.

^[1] Witters, Dan. “U.S. Depression Rate Remains Historically High.” Gallup.Com, Gallup, 10 Oct. 2025, news.gallup.com/poll/694199/u.s.-depression-rate-remains-historically-high.aspx.

^[2] Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Alpha Editions, 2021. p. 15.

^[3] Hyde, Lewis. Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking. Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 1987. p. 16.

^[4] Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land.” Poetry Foundation, 2020, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land.

^[5] Shakespeare, William. King Lear. Edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, Folger Shakespeare Library. p. 259.

^[6] “John 15:19.” Bible Gateway, www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+15%3A19&version=KJV.

^[7] Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Vintage Books, 1955. p. 22.

^[8] Jung, C. G. The Undiscovered Self. Mentor, 1958. p. 21.

Featured Image: Snowstorm – Steamboat off of Harbor’s Mouth, 1842. J. M. W. Turner.