March 5, 2026

It’s perhaps the most widely assumed cultural narrative of our time: “You can be whoever you want to be.” From a young age, we’re told that our truest self is the one we create. And when there’s conflict between your most authentic self and your family, culture, or inherited religion, your self ought to win out.

Problem is, it’s an unlivable story.

We see the fallout of this broken story everywhere: anxiety, depression, deaths of despair. Today more people are constructing their most authentic selves, yet we’re also more empty and hopeless.

Is there a better story about ourselves?

Fellow Joshua Chatraw says yes. In his latest essay for The Keller Center, Joshua unpacks how the story of self over-promises and underdelivers. Then he turns to an ancient song—Psalm 8—and invites us into an identity that offers true rest and satisfaction.

Joshua’s essay is an excellent application of how to retell the West’s cultural narratives through the lens of the gospel. If you’re curious about how to do this yourself, check out our newest resource for small groups and Sunday schools, Making Sense of Us.

MATT LIETZEN

Content Strategist

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 19th century, he observed that despite our prosperity, there was a “strange melancholy in the midst of abundance.”

Fast forward to the 1990s. In the movie Fight Club, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt) captured his generation’s growing sense of discontent:

We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Skip ahead to today. Most Americans have luxuries that the prosperous in the 1800s couldn’t imagine and the movie gods of the 1990s only dreamed of: supercomputers in our pockets, AI to do our bidding, and entertainment always at the tip of our fingers. And yet amid this abundance, Tocqueville’s “strange melancholy” persists.

Deaths of despair have reached alarmingly high levels. Loneliness has been declared a public health epidemic. Student mental health has never been worse. And, like Durden, many of us are regularly “pissed off.” Psychologist Richard Beck sums it up:

The data is pretty clear. While America is the most affluent nation in the history of the world, our rates of anxiety, depression, suicide, and addiction are all skyrocketing. We’re not doing well. We are a deeply unwell society.

This all raises an urgent question: What’s the matter with us?

We could blame many culprits. The rise of the smartphone, the media, or simply those “other” people. Yet in various ways, each of these is related to a deeper underlying problem. As Andrew Root points out, something deeper is worth a closer look: the way we’re pursuing happiness.