The Sunday Interview: Desire, Shame & Masculinity with Jay Stringer
Jay Stringer critiques purity culture's instillation of shame through fear-based sex education, arguing that conflating arousal with sin fragments masculinity. He proposes "differentiation" as the path to intimacy, urging men to confront personal wounds rather than seeking validation through domination or hypermasculine figures like Trump and Tate. By defining defiance as loving oneself into the world despite systemic absurdity, Stringer suggests true healing requires vulnerability over aggression, challenging listeners to reject oppressive narratives and build meaningful connections rooted in dignity. [Automatically generated summary]
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Today I welcome Jay Stringer to the program, who's the author of a new book called Desire.
And it's all about meaning, longing, and the ways that we give purpose to our life.
This may seem like a little bit of an outlier of an interview for this show, but I wanted to invite Jay on to talk about this because I'm not going to lie, this is a moment where it can feel bleak and the sense of meaning and purpose for our lives can fade away as we battle moment by moment to keep dignity and any sense of safety during a political time of ICE rates, deportations, war, and so much carnage.
One of the things we talked about is how we give meaning to our lives and the stories that we tell.
I don't think that Jay and I agree about everything.
I don't think that we see the world the exact same way.
But I did learn a bunch from his book, and I hope that you take away a lot from our reflections on what it means to be a human being right now.
Welcome to Straight White American Jesus, the Sunday interview.
I'm Brad O'Nishi, author of American Caesar, How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America Into a Monarchy, founder of Axis Monday Media, and here today with a first-time guest, somebody I'm so thrilled to talk to, and that is Jay Stringer, who is the author of a new book called Desire, The Longings Inside Us and the New Science of How We Love, Heal, and Grow, as I just talked about.
Jay, thanks for joining me.
Brad, thank you for having me.
It's an honor to be here and looking forward to seeing where we go.
I want to, we're going to cover a lot today.
I think we're going to talk about how we can think about living a meaningful and purposeful life in a world that feels devoid of that.
I think a lot of folks are like, hey, wait a minute, this is Swadge and this is religion and politics.
You know, how do we get from there to a meaningful and purposeful life?
Differentiation and Intimacy in Desire00:15:41
But one of those is just your story.
You wrote a book called Unwanted that really addresses themes that I think a lot of folks listening will be intimately familiar with for better or for worse.
Christian purity culture, shame, trying to find your body and yourself, you know, after coming out of those high control spaces.
Would you just give us a little snapshot into your journey?
Where did you start?
And how did you get to where you are?
Sure.
So I would, I was born when my dad was in seminary.
So I'm a pastor's kid.
I went through puberty while attending a Southern Baptist high school, which is just like one of those dreadful experiences to do.
So just, I mean, some of the first sex talks we had was, it was, you know, in Virginia.
So we had Liberty University speakers, you know, these were people in their 20s coming to give a teaching often about sex.
So I remember one of the first sex talks I ever got within purity culture was this guy was talking about, you know, referred to these people as Eskimos, the Inuit people, but basically, you know, had this dagger and they would dip it into seals blood.
And then the Inuit people would keep it outside the camp.
And what would happen is the wolves would come in and lick the seals blood.
And then, you know, would just get so enamored by this blood that it couldn't discern the difference between seal blood and wolf blood.
And then in the morning, you would have a dead wolf.
And even as I'm saying this, I feel like I'm reliving my own sense of trauma in this.
But no joke, the speaker changed that to a sense of a lot of you boys are masturbating.
And I'm telling you that it feels really good, but in the morning, you're going to be spiritually dead.
And I remember being probably like a junior in high school, just turning around being like, you just consigned a whole student body to a lifetime of like shame and stigma around this.
And so that's, you know, part of the background that I came from.
And then just in as I went off to grad school, seminary, get my master's in counseling, also did a master of divinity.
You just read a lot of books for men trying to outgrow porn and you get like something like Every Man's Battle, best-selling book in that evangelical space.
And one of the direct lines in there, verbatim, is, you know, speaking to wives whose husbands are trying to leave porn behind, the message is this, present your body as a merciful vial of methadone to him.
And just a sense of what is that, what happens to libido rates with women when they are seen as methadone.
And so just seeing like all of these paradigms that really are not helpful, some of my own journey to address purity culture, my own porn use, just trying to understand like, what is my sexual story?
And just a very unformed lack of education.
I often will say that learning about sex in the church is a little bit like going to a culinary school that will only teach you about salmonella.
It's like, and then they have the audacity to ask for a masterpiece.
And I'm like, this is just such a mind bender of how are we, you know, so much expectation, so much burden placed on us, and yet no education, no formation, no scientifically accurate sex ed required in most of these states.
And it's just, it's heartbreaking to see.
So my first book was unwanted.
And I was trying to thread the needle between not just labeling everything in, you know, Christianity as if you're struggling with porn or infidelity, you're a sex addict, but also wanting to not just kind of say like everything is just kind of normal and you do you.
I wanted to understand the nature of desire and arousal.
And so that first book was really looking at we could begin to predict not just do people watch porn and have affairs, but we could predict the types of pornography they would seek out on the internet, the types of affairs.
And so that book was in some ways something of a prophetic critique of the evangelicalism I went into or came out of.
So whether it comes to sex or politics or any realm of life, I just didn't really experience the formation of a mind.
So that was kind of some of my backstory leading into this book on desire.
So I don't know if there's anything from that before I dive into what desire was all about.
There's so much.
I feel like we could spend the next, you know, however many hours talking about that.
You know, folks will know on this show, I did a series called Mild at Heart, which was a total play on Wild at Heart and the John Eldridge infamous evangelical classic.
We've talked a lot about the ways that everything is turned into sex addiction or porn addiction in the evangelical world.
And there's there's no sense of there being healthy boundaries, healthy senses of exploration.
There's a deep disdain for your body.
So folks listening will be, you know, will be familiar with those tropes.
I think one of the things that I just comes to mind quickly for me that we can we can touch on and then we can move on is, you know, I think we'll come back to masculinity here later.
But as a man in purity culture, I always say I hated myself twice because I hated myself when I was that junior in high school that you just talked about because I had sexual desire and that was a sin.
Any sinful, excuse me, any lustful thought was considered a sin.
And so every time I had a thought as a 16, 17 year old boy, I was like, well, I just committed adultery.
I feel terrible.
I will go repent now.
And then I got married at age 20 to my high school sweetheart.
And, you know, what I had been taught and what she had been taught is that men were sexual savages.
And so you go from like, don't have a sexual thought to God made you in a way, according to John Eldridge and according to all the other purity culture books, that you're the kind of being that will want to have sex, you know, five and nine times a day.
And if you don't, you're not a real man.
And so then I'm like, well, we don't have sex five times a day.
And I'm not really sure I have like things to do.
There's some errands I have to run.
I don't know.
I have to go to the bank later.
I have a job.
I don't think I can have sex eight times today, but I'll try.
And I just don't feel like a real man because I guess, and I think she felt that way too.
Not that she would put it like that, but I think she would say like, I don't understand why you don't want to have sex, you know, morning, noon, and night every day.
Isn't that what God made you for and how he made you?
Is it me?
I must be the problem.
So anyway, those are things I've talked about on the show in the past.
And, you know, I know they come up in your work too.
Yes.
And that's part of the madness is even in the new research that we just completed, the number one source of sex education for people was their own abuse.
And so like we are living in a world where to develop the sex education, to understand certain things requires some level of abuse, tragically, to learn about your body, to learn about certain things that you should know at a very early age.
So one of the things that I experienced along those lines as well was, you know, biologically, between the ages of 13 to 15, adolescent boys will experience about a 20x increase in testosterone.
So you're going from like a strider bike to a motorcycle.
You're going from a, you know, essentially a shot glass to a pint glass.
And the only education that you receive is the conflation of arousal equals sin, as you just said.
And so in my high school, we were joking about this at my 20-year reunion.
The amount of increase in unspoken prayer requests between the ages of 13 and 15 was like 20X of like, I'm struggling with arousal.
And again, taught to conflate arousal means sexual sin.
And I think you're spot on that like the compounding interest of shame is just astronomical, where you start feeling like crap about yourself.
And then you do some things and you're not formed and you don't understand your body.
You are never invited to understand what's happening inside.
And then it gets baptized in religious language, and you just rise again, feeling horrible about who you are.
And the nature of shame, at least as a clinician, is not just that we're unworthy of love or belonging, but the more shame-based you feel, the more you actually seek out evidence to confirm the core belief.
And that becomes part of the madness: I don't just deal with shame that I've inherited.
Now I've actually created storylines that support that that narrative is true.
So it is just a place of madness for people.
It is.
And I mean, there's so much in your new book, Desire, about the things that we want, the ways that we can reckon with shame, with guilt, but also with the desires that we have as human beings.
And, you know, we're not going to be able to get, I've learned during these interviews that if we try to cover the whole book, we're going to get to about page nine and then an hour will have gone by.
But, you know, you talk about a desire for wholeness, a desire for growth, a desire for intimacy, a desire for pleasure.
And I will be really honest, you know, when I read the chapters on intimacy and pleasure, they challenged me because there's a lot of hard questions in there to ask oneself.
There's a lot of, I think, challenging introspective pathways that one needs to go.
If you want to ask yourself, what do I really want in terms of intimacy?
And what do I really want in terms of pleasure?
I think one of the things that I'll just touch on briefly and then we can go to the last part, which is, you know, a desire for meaning is in that lack of sex education that we, you know, you just outlined, there's no differentiation between intimacy and pleasure.
There's a sense that, like, well, you get married as a purity culture, you know, good soldier, and then it's all pleasure.
And the idea of intimacy, whether that's physical intimacy, whether that's emotional intimacy, whether that's intimacy through, you know, an erotic encounter or in other ways, is just like completely blown by.
Right.
And for me, even now, after all these years of trying to reckon with this and really do the work, those chapters were really, really challenging for me.
And I'm wondering, you know, if those are some of the most difficult for you to write, some of the most meaningful to write, you know, where those landed for you as you went through the process of putting this book together.
So I think part of where I would start with that would be to say, like, you know, I think for a lot of us, this concept of desire itself, we have a lot of transference with that word.
So a lot of us, as we've just been describing, came from cultures that may have seen kind of desire as something selfish or might, God forbid, turn into something sexual.
And then we became adults.
We kind of left the church, left evangelicalism.
And then kind of a new creed had taken on.
And that was kind of, I love Mary Oliver's line of what is it that you want to do with this one wild and precious life that you've been given.
Fully support that.
I love Oliver's work, but then also the sense of follow your heart.
And yet no one was actually teaching us how to form our desires, how to intentionally do the formation work.
And so now I think we have a lot of challenge that we need to ask ourselves: like, are our desires truly liberated if more people than ever are falling in love with a business product?
Like AI is astronomically growing with regard to sexual desire, romantic desire.
And again, I think that's a question that we need to ask ourselves as we've gone from the suppression of desire now to the liberation of desire, which no one wants to go back.
But if we really began to get a sense of like, what's happening in our desires, I would say that we're not really forming them.
And so, those categories of intimacy and pleasure, part of what I am really trying to grapple with is this notion of differentiation.
And so, differentiation is taken from cell biology.
And it's essentially for a plant to grow.
Cells have to differentiate, individuate in order to grow.
So, a great example of this would be like a symphony.
So, when you go to a symphony in San Francisco here in New York City, you want your violinist to be the best violinist in the city.
You want your percussion team to like be Juilliard trained.
You want them to have put the hours in so that when they arrive at the stage of the symphony, they are not, they're not bringing the worst of themselves, they're broken strings.
You want the best in them.
And so, differentiation is required for some level of connection and intimacy.
But the purpose of a symphony is not just that there happens to be a great violinist or clarinetist, it's the sense of somehow all these differentiated instruments have come together to create music.
And I think that's largely what we're seeing in our world today: is, you know, Dan Siegel, great neuroscientist, would say that the two strongest needs of a person are to be authentic and to be meaningfully linked.
So, that sense of authenticity, individuation, but also I need to be connected to a people, to a cause, to something.
And I think part of what, you know, evangelicalism often did, and often our understanding of intimacy is that we really want unity, we want connection, we want eroticism.
And so, we want that connection, but we arrive at the stage of our romantic partnerships very underdeveloped.
And then we blame our partner, we blame ourselves, we blame our marriage.
And part of what I would say is that, no, your marriage, your romantic relationship is doing exactly what it's supposed to do when it starts to get hard because it's revealing.
It's the stage that's revealing maybe the depth of your connection, but far more, the depth and the vastness or lack thereof of your differentiation and individuation.
So, that's a really key component of the book is before you figure out meaning and purpose and intimacy and sex, you've got to understand something of who you are and where you are underdeveloped as a result of your upbringing and as a result of the cultures that you've been part of.
I think that that was something that stuck out for me: you know, this idea that if you're in a relationship, a long-term relationship, a marriage, et cetera, that the feelings sometimes of difficulty or isolation, the feelings of challenge or like you're just not understood, those can be signs that the relationship is not working or needs to end or something.
But there's also a good chance they're signs of an opportunity for you to really develop in the ways you just talked about.
And that's the harder route.
And it doesn't, I'm not here to advocate people staying in relationships that are unhealthy or toxic or abusive or just not working.
The Provisional Self and Meaningful Lives00:15:21
But I'll just say that that was a really striking example of this is important and it's an opportunity.
And I'll just make the comparison to church.
You know, a lot of times we hear still in church that if you are bringing up hard issues that divide people and make it so that there needs to be really difficult discussions, you're somehow doing something wrong because you've divided the body of Christ.
Right.
And the same thing is applied to a marriage or a long-term relationship or anything else is, well, if it's hard and there's this stuff to work through, well, it must be broken.
And I think one of the enduring lessons I took away from these chapters was a great reminder of those difficulties are built into any relationship that's ever going to work.
And there's signs that A, it is a long-term relationship, and B, it's a chance.
It's a chance for you and us to grow together.
And that's important.
Yeah.
And part of what I started grappling with, even in my own marriage, was some of the Christian teachings on submission and desire.
Like they, if I come into marriage and I would say genuinely, when I got married, I hated myself.
I had my own eating disorders.
I had my own body dysmorphia.
I had a sense of like deep self-hatred, very similar to what you described.
And part of what I wanted out of marriage was I wanted her to pursue me and to validate me so that I didn't have to kind of confront those painful feelings inside of me.
And that became something of my unsaid statement of marriage.
Like that's what I wanted is I wanted a partner to want me to pursue me so I didn't have to deal with myself.
And so part of the vision that I had to have break down was I'm arriving at marriage with a laundry list of unmet needs and places of entitlement.
And that marriage needed to die.
And so in the book, I talk about what does it mean to first divorce yourself from patterns before the partner?
And again, very much in agreement that there are some marriages that are abusive that need to end.
But there's also for a lot of us, we need to learn how to divorce ourselves from patterns of like needing, pining for external validation, because there's marriage will inevitably bring us into our own attachment wounds and be a place of repair.
But also, if that's all it is, you're putting a lot of pressure on your partner to want you to validate you, even if you don't like yourself.
And I think that's just such a setup for intimacy difficulties later on in life.
So I wanted to really provide a framework for couples for how do you actually grow intimacy and pleasure in a committed relationship.
We can't save each other.
And I think we're often taught that we're supposed to, whether that's through marriage or soulmates.
And it just doesn't work.
You can pretend that it will, but it just won't no matter what you do.
All right.
This leads to sort of the last bits of the book that I kept coming back to because, you know, in Unwanted and in Desire, you do a lot of great diagnosis.
And I think really uncovering the various components and parts.
And you do offer so much guidance in between and so many places for reflection and changing patterns in terms of thoughts and habits and rituals.
But one of the questions that I think needs to get brought up often with folks who are leaving high control religion or those who are just never experienced it, but are themselves trying to figure out who they are, authentic relationships, how to live a flourishing life.
You asked this question in chapter 14 about a meaningful life.
And the last parts of the book are all about meaning and purpose.
How do you live a meaningful life?
You talk about this guy, Kenji, who had had this road prepared for him by his parents, you know, very privileged upbringing, elite schools, elite athletics, tons of money, tons of care.
And as an adult who had graduated from an Ivy League school, was successful, you know, living out his 20s, he quote, felt disconnected from his hopes and emotions, lacked relationships where he was deeply known and had no clear direction for his life was headed.
And then that leads to a question on the next page.
You know, it talks about freedom, talks about authenticity, talks about meeting.
But what do we want to be free for?
And I want to ask, you know, what I wrote in the margin was like, what does it look like to live a meaningful life today?
Increasingly, it feels like to me that we're individualized, we're atomized.
It's hard to form friendships and relationships.
It's hard to have a village, as you talk about later in the book.
It's hard to feel like we're connected and seen by people.
And it just more and more feels like, well, we work, we watch Netflix, we witness the horrors going on around us in terms of our politics and our public square and our neighbors.
And then we do it all over again.
And the quest for freedom, but also the quest for deep relationship, deep connection is really hard.
And so I just wanted to ask you that question.
You know, what does it look like to live a meaningful life today, according to, you know, the kind of paradigm of desire you're presenting here?
Yeah, I'm trying to answer that question for myself these days.
I mean, I think, you know, middle-aged male loneliness is the single greatest health factor facing American men was the big stat number of years ago.
I remember seeing a meme recently of like, you know, everyone talks about the miracles of Jesus, but no one talks about the miracle of having 12 close friends in your 30s type of thing.
Like it's so difficult.
And part of the way that I would begin to answer that is I think of like Annie Dillard, who is a Pulitzer Prize winning author.
And in her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she says, I never knew I was a bell until the moment I was lifted up and struck.
And what she meant by that were kind of reflect on the moments in your life where something inside of you was like ringing.
And that could be a childhood memory of like something really meaningful or peaceful.
You were riding your bike around a neighborhood.
You know, you went to Disneyland and had like the time of your life.
It was like your grandmother's house when you walked in and she would have some treats for you and you knew that you were loved.
But it could also be like, you know, something that you did in your adult life, a project, a community engagement, backyard fire where you're just having like guttural laughter over a scotch with friends.
But like those moments where the bells are ringing inside of you, I think are trying to get our attention with regard to what is meaningful.
But I also think about just the category of like, what's the albatross in your life?
You know, what's that thing that's hovering over that just feels like dread?
That could be your in-laws, that could be finances, that could be your own self-hatred and dysmorphia, could be a sense of just loneliness and severe pain.
But I think part of what my, you know, research has shown is that embedded within our symptoms, embedded within the albatrosses and the heartaches and the misery of our life are actually clues to healing and growth that we need to pay attention to.
So I think part of what we're all in right now is, you know, we have bought something of the lie that like my meaning comes from being significant, being successful.
And that was kind of Kenji's story is, you know, doing a lot of things in his life where he was outwardly successful, but always having that question in the back of his mind, like, am I successful enough?
And never feeling like he actually felt joy and never felt like he was deeply connected to people.
And I think the way that you go about finding connection is through your own desire.
It's through what is trying to wake you up and also what are the things that have broken your heart throughout your life.
So I think embedded within the bells and the albatrosses are how you can live a meaningful life.
Because, you know, Brad, your background is very different than mine.
So what, you know, what a meaningful life looks like for you is going to look very different for me.
Yet, the more vulnerable we are, the more we are in touch with our own story, the more we understand where our traumas and heartaches are, the more that those themes will actually provide some compass headings about how to find the meaningful life that we are seeking.
You, you know, this is skipping ahead in the book, but I do want to bring it up now, just in light of what you said.
You know, you have a section in the last chapter that says, What story does your life tell?
And if you listen to this show regularly, you know, I love talking about story.
I have the chance sometimes to speak at conferences and with various groups.
And one of the things I tell non-religious groups when I speak to them, atheist groups, humanist groups, is we need to tell a story because, you know, facts and evidence and data are awesome.
And I love those things.
I love to argue and I would love to bring all my evidence and data to any argument anyone wants to have.
But when you go to a religious group, whether it's a pro-democracy, pro-social church, synagogue, temple, or it is a, what I would call an anti-democratic, anti-pluralist, exclusionary, xenophobic, racist church, both of them are going to tell you a story.
And you asked this question in the book: What story does your life tell?
And I guess one of the things that will always plague me about our current moment is when your life becomes work, trying to make ends meet, trying to meet your rent this month, trying to make sure you have healthcare for your family, make sure your car will get you to work, come home exhausted, watch two hours of Netflix, go to bed.
It's hard to think of your life as a story you're living out.
But I think about that all the time.
And what is the story of who I am?
What are the stories I'm embedded in?
What roles am I playing in those tales?
Because I showed up here on Earth without choosing to be here.
Don't remember it.
Don't remember my birth.
I don't remember that moment.
I don't think any of us does.
I'm going to die and I'm not going to know my death.
I'm not going to experience it because I'll be gone.
I'm not going to know it because I'll be gone.
So I'm caught in between these two life constituting events that I'll never know or experience really.
And as someone living in the in-between, all I can do, it seems, is make meaning by living out a story that has some significance that's bigger than me, some meaning, some sense of discovery, some sense of love and renewal, some sense of care and pleasure, but also some sense of ensuring that others have the ability to experience those things too.
I'm just wondering what role story plays in all of this for you, because that part of the book is really important to me.
Oh, it's central to everything I do.
And all of us are living out a script of a particular story.
And that could be a script from my dad always said this to, you know, this is what it looks like to be a good Christian.
We have all been groomed with regard to what a good life, a good church, a good community begins to look like.
So that's part of, I think, the adult invitation: we need to interrogate our desires.
We need to interrogate the things that we have defined as meaningful.
Like, is that something connected to our story?
Is that connected to something that is wildly unhealthy and traumatic?
Because you can develop a bond to a very traumatic system.
You can also develop a bond to trying to leave that traumatic system behind as well.
So I think about this category of a provisional self.
So a provisional self is not your fully developed self.
It's not, it's temporary.
And so for me, growing up in my family, I would say my dad was a pastor, was very involved with church duties.
My mom was a stay-at-home mom and was often pretty disappointed that she was losing her husband to the church.
And so part of my job as a young boy was to check in to see how my mom was doing.
You know, could I help out with the dishes?
Could I be good?
And then, you know, my dad and I, I would say, didn't have much of a relationship until I started reading dead theologians in high school.
So the more that I read dead theologians, the more that my dad and I's relationship took off.
And the more I tended to my mom, the more connected we were.
So my provisional self was about the meaning of my life was how can I be good for pastors?
How can I be attentive and kind to women?
And that was the meaning of my life.
But part of what happens to all of us, and as a clinician, I would say this typically happens between the mid-30s and mid-50s or 60s, is that the soul will initiate a crisis.
Could be financial wreckage, could be, you know, some sexual infidelity, could be, you know, just some level of a mental health difficulty, could be an illness.
But that crisis, that catastrophe is part of the soul's way to wake someone up to say, is that really the meaningful life that you want to be living?
Or do you want to begin to define meaning on much more of your own terms?
And this isn't just to be, you know, autonomous, but you have to study your story.
And so I think that's part of what I'm reconciling in my mid-40s is to say, okay, I've been good.
I've been a therapist.
I've been insightful.
That's been my provisional self.
But now that's no longer meaningful to me.
So I could either wreck my life in the next couple of years, or I could begin to differentiate and kind of say, what else from my childhood?
What else from themes and culture am I trying to wake up to?
So I'm not just trying to serve my own life, but I'm really learning how to be a good ancestor as well.
And I think that's part of the pivot in the 40s is my first half of life was trying to build a name, build recognition.
But now I think I'm in a much better place to be able to say, there's so much beauty in the world, also so much profound trauma.
How do I engage it?
How do I want to be as an ancestor when I die one day?
And so I think that corners me every day to be able to say, what type of life is meaningful, not just to myself, but to those around me.
From Trauma Wounds to Human Wonder00:10:59
So I think embedded within our stories, embedded within the provisional self, there are clues to what has been meaningful to you.
But I think part of our adult task is to interrogate what is meaningful to be able to say, is this good?
Is it true?
Is it beautiful?
Is it baptized in something deeply unhealthy and evil?
You know, one of the things I say a lot these days, and I don't, I'm not being, I'm not, you know, it's jarring when I say it.
And I think people think I'm trying to be funny, but I'm not, is, you know, I say, I'm going to die soon.
Should I be doing this?
And I don't, you know, it's hard not to laugh when I say that because it sounds, it sounds morbid.
But what I mean when I say it is like, I'm also in my 40s and I have this, this view now of my life as like, I have some decades left, you know, on this earth.
I hope I hope it's three or four or five more decades, but I don't know.
And The sense of meaning that you're pursuing here is really important to me in the sense of I have these many years that I think might be left on this earth for me.
What's the story I'm going to live out?
And what are the things I'm going to leave behind so someone else can pick up the story behind me?
And there's this quote from Camus, and I'm going to throw you a curveball here, but here we go.
Here's the Camus quote.
You know, no one told you Camus was coming, but Camus talks about the fact that, you know, pursuing a sense of meaning is just a distraction from the absurdity of our life.
There's this existentialist allure of Camus in that moment of saying, oh, he's so, he's so resolute and he's so unflinching in terms of his view of the human condition.
And I think where I've arrived at this, and I'm wondering if you agree, is that I don't think that there's any way to resolve my condition.
I think that the human condition is irresolvable.
I have a condition that can't be cured.
And so instead of trying to cure it, I'm going to spend my life loving myself into the world in a way that is actually going to give some significance to the seconds I have here.
And what we discover, and I think you do a wonderful job in the book talking about this, is that often comes down to really important questions we can ask every day.
What am I going to learn today?
What new thing am I going to try?
And who can I help?
And, you know, Camus might say that that's more distraction.
And I would say, listen, man, whether or not I do those things or not, my life will always be irresolvable.
I'm a walking absurdity, but I can be a significant one.
And I can be meaningful to others while being absurd.
That seems better.
I don't know.
How does that hit you?
Yeah, so many directions.
What would you say is your condition?
I want to better understand what you mean by you have a condition before I answer that question.
So I know that folks listening are going to be in different places.
Some folks are lifelong atheists.
Some folks listening are agnostic.
They're kind of unsure.
Some folks have come out of high control religion and are trying to figure out if they want to stay as a quote-unquote religious person.
Some folks listening are spiritual, but not necessarily joiners in an institution or a group.
Others are like, you know, man, I just came here for religion and politics and y'all are out here talking about Camus.
So I'm not sure what I was, this was a mistake.
So what I would say to everybody listening is, regardless of where you fall on that spectrum, you were born without a choice.
You got thrown into this place.
Now you got to be here.
And unlike so many other organisms on this planet, you are aware of yourself, you're aware of others, and you're aware of the fact that you're going to die someday.
And that leads to the greatest sorrow.
Like to be human is to be pain, period.
There's no avoiding it.
There's just no getting around it.
It It also leads to a chance for what I would call transcendence, not in the sense of raising to the heavens, but a sense of doing things, pursuing things, suffusing your life with a sense that I just don't think other, most other organisms on this planet have.
Yes.
You already talked about it.
When you sit with a friend on a parked bench and talk for two hours and connect, when you teach your little kid how to hit a baseball or how to ride a bike or you play water guns and water, water balloons in the summer, when you go visit your grandma and you listen to her tell you about what life was like then and what she struggled with and how she overcame, when you join with others to protect your neighbors from the people trying to kidnap them, who there's a sense of like love that, you know, you would never,
you would never get unless you were that mortal, irresolvable human that someday will die and has to live with that grief on an everyday, ongoing basis.
And so that's the condition that was the possibility of me.
And I would say that that's probably, you know, one of the core reasons why I would identify as a follower of Jesus is because of that interplay between death and resurrection.
So I think about grief every day of my life.
And, you know, that sense of grief is when you don't grieve, you become very narcissistic.
And that's part of what we're seeing in our politics today.
It's part of what we're seeing in churches.
It's what we're seeing is in the absence of grief.
I used to think about narcissism as like a sense of this person is full of themselves.
So in my high school, it was like they had to have a Ford Mustang Cobra, Saline edition, Tommy Hill figure, most attractive girl in the class.
And we said that they were full of themselves.
But clinically speaking, what I learned is that narcissism is not a fullness of self.
It's actually an absence of self.
And so if you don't know who you are, you are going to identify with very strong things like military force, might, domination.
Why?
Because that gives you solid ground.
It begins to help you understand, like, this is who I am.
It's a reflection back to you.
So your high net worth, your sense of how many downloads you have, all of those become reflections back to who you are.
But if you really are honest about some of the pain points in your life, the suffering, the pain, you know, I think of midlife of just being like Odysseus and, you know, going through trying to find home, but crying all the time.
The more in touch you are with your pain, with your trauma, with those stories of heartache, the more that you are actually going to descend into the earth.
And that's part of what we see in biology is for us for a plant to grow, the seeds actually have to go down first.
They have to go down into the underworld in order for the shoot to emerge.
And so when I'm thinking about just like honest places of meaning or growth, it's that sense of how in touch is someone with their trauma, with their disillusionment, with the heartache of their life.
Because what happens in the underworld is you develop a limp.
You develop a sense of a trauma, a wound.
And as Robert Bly would say, through a man's wound lies his genius.
So there's this sense of the more that you enter your wound in that underworld, the more that you can really trust the meaning and goodness that you're doing in the world, because it's not a power grab.
It's not a sense of domination.
It's not a sense of, I don't like who I am, but I can identify and merge with systems of power.
It's a sense of authenticity, a sense of alignment with those who have also been wounded, who have been hurt.
But as you put so well, when I play with my kids, when I see John Batiste play an instrument, I'm stunned by that.
And so, you know, when we talk about Beethoven, when we talk about Mozart, when we talk about John Baptiste, we don't say that they labored and everything was painful as they sat at the piano.
We say that they played.
And so I think that's the interplay of kind of death and resurrection: there's some sense of we have to be familiar with death, we have to be unafraid of it.
But there is also profound beauty in life that's really hard to join if we're honest.
And so, but I think kids teach us how to play.
I think the best artists, musicians are always inviting us to grapple with like there actually is life and beauty in this world.
And do you want to get caught up in the flow no different than getting caught up in a river?
And so to me, that's where I have found the deepest meaning in my life is when I'm deeply connected to the grief of my community, but I'm also deeply connected to the artists, to the creatives, to places of beauty that exist in our world.
And last comment I'll make there would just be: you know, some Victor Frankl would talk a lot about man's search for meaning.
Joseph Campbell would say, I don't think that people are really seeking a meaningful life.
I think they're seeking experiences of being fully alive.
That's what Joseph Campbell would say.
I think it's both.
I think we want experiences that bear deep meaning and purpose, but we also want to feel fully alive in our lives and our communities.
So I think there's such an interplay between honesty about the condition of heartache, but also deep honesty about the possibility of new life.
My colleague Mary Jane Rubinstein has a great book called Strange Wonder.
And in that book, she really links the etymology of wound and wonder.
And, you know, the etymological links are a little bit tenuous, but nonetheless, the wound is often what leads us to the wonder.
And I think that for me, the wound that is at the very heart of the human condition, which is irresolvable, which is mortality, leads to the wonder, which is like, well, pain is inevitable.
And if I give up on the wonder, if I give up on the play, if I give up on the community, if I give up on the love, well, then I just had the condition and I didn't, I didn't even take, you know, the parts that were on offer.
Defiance Against Systems Stealing Joy00:04:55
I didn't take all of the dimensions that were possible.
I was just left with the thing that was inevitable.
There's another saying from the lost generation where, you know, they're all in Paris and it's the 1920s and they're all Fitzgerald and Hemingway and they're all trying to figure it out.
And there's this sense of the real stuff you can't avoid.
And that's that's pain.
It's disease.
It's it's it's tragedy.
It's war.
But there's all this make-believe that we do as humans that doesn't mean it's not real.
It means that it's what we are able to do as creatures, acutely aware of ourselves and others.
We can play.
We can imagine.
We can create symphonies, right?
We can play games.
We can tell stories.
We can recall the past.
We can invent.
We can learn new things.
And that leads me to something that I want to just close on.
And if you have time for one more question here, defiance.
Defiance is the bold refusal to believe that our lives don't matter.
I think in 2026, there's a sense that a lot of folks want us to think our lives don't matter.
That billionaire lives matter, that powerful politician lives matter, that aristocratic lives matter, but the common person doesn't.
If you are caught, if you are left behind, whether it's in an ICE raid or a climate crisis, well, you know, it's just one more person.
If you're a soldier who's killed in an Iran conflict that started seemingly to distract us from the Epstein files, so be it.
Defiance is the bold refusal to believe that our lives don't matter.
And I wrote below that in the page that this is resistance.
Like today, for me, resistance for a lot of people is the refusal to believe that our lives don't matter because so many people want us to think that.
Wondering if you have further thoughts on this idea of defiance and/or resistance.
Oh, I think of there's the C.S. Lewis notion of, you know, a friend is someone who doesn't just share a same, you know, hobby or a similar interest.
Like you like Isla Scotch, I like Isla Scotch.
Let's go drink Lagavolin together.
It's, he would say a friend is someone who shares a common question and you don't need to agree on what the answer is.
And so I think in that sense, like I have a lot of friends.
I don't agree with all their answers to everything, but I think that sense of a lot of my best friends are those who are defiant.
Those who look at the world and say, hell no, something about this is screwed up.
Something about this is not the way it's supposed to be.
And I'm not going to sit idly by as this happens.
So I felt that defiance with regard to purity culture.
That was part of my anger.
Was like, why are so many adolescents getting buried in shame and guilt for their entire lives because of these like, you know, I was going to say shitty message, but like shit can grow stuff.
I mean, it's manure.
It's like, it doesn't even have that purpose to it.
So that sense of, I have defiance with regard to that particular topic that led to my life matters.
I want to make a contribution.
I want to add a verse.
I want to add some level of change to the system.
And Brad, like just getting to know you, but that sense of we are friends, not because we have a lot of shared history, but you have defiance against systems and realities that are stealing joy, that are stealing dignity, that are stealing life from people.
So I think that's part of the role of defiance is, you know, you have to find something that pisses you off.
But part of what I loved about the, you know, Jewish prophets was it wasn't just enough to tear something down.
It was always unto building something.
So, you know, when prophets are there, they're going to get stoned, they're going to get killed.
But the purpose of a prophet is not just to tear down, but to actually imagine what new life might come.
What if we actually got this right and we weren't a people full of greed?
What if we actually were not just seeking after the kings that the rest of the world has, the military domination that the world has?
Like, what if we actually believed the story that we were given?
So I think inherit or defiance is so important to find the meaning of your life, but far more importantly, the connections that you need to be able to sustain you in some of those agonizing dark nights is, you know, do I keep going?
Believing Your Story Sustains You00:02:50
Do I keep pressing forward?
And all I can tell you is there's a lot of days I'm like, no, I'd rather drink and disconnect from this world than to have to live with Defiance.
So it takes a lot of energy to live with Defiance.
And I think that's where it's good to see some other people take shots and kind of be a light, even when I feel like I want to go dim.
So I think Defiance is so important to make change.
Well, there's so much more to talk about.
And if you have like two more minutes, I want to ask you just about vulnerability and masculinity.
But the book is out now.
It's called Desire.
Can you tell us where folks can find you, where folks can find the, you know, any speaking engagements or book tour or anywhere they're like, hey, I need more of this.
I need more J.
I need more of this book.
Where's that?
So website is the central hub.
It would be j-ay-y-stringer.com.
And then Instagram is j-a-y-underscore stringer underscore.
Why all the underscores, do you ask?
There's also another J Stringer who's a British crime fiction novelist, and he's older than I am and beat me to every single freaking social handle, every website.
So I have all these dashes, unfortunately.
But the website has information about the book.
Do a lot of science and assessments that you can understand your relationship to desire.
Intensive speaking, do a lot of that on the road, kind of helping organizations, churches, denominations kind of think through some of these matters, and then do a lot of individual and couples intensives and retreats, those sorts of things.
So that's where you can find me is primarily Instagram, some on Facebook, but there are multiple Jay Stringers out there.
Right.
Yeah.
I am the first.
If you find a British crime novel, hey, you may enjoy it.
Check it out.
But that's not the right Jay Stringer.
Okay.
So keep that in mind.
All right.
You know, as always, folks, we'll be back next week with, well, we'll be back later this week, I should say, with it's in the code and the weekly roundup and other great content.
You can find us on Discord and you can find us on our brand new websites, accessmondie.us and straightwhiteamericanjesus.com.
Sign up to our newsletter to stay connected and make sure you know everything we're up to.
We have some great stuff coming up, including a webinar with Sarah Posner and hopefully Matt Taylor, Julie Ingersoll, and other live events and bonus episodes and all of that.
So stay connected with us there.
All right, Jay, real quick, you got to go, but masculinity is something that has turned into the most prominent men in our country are Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, Andrew Tate, RFK Jr.
We're yelling, we're screaming, we're acting tough, we're really into war.
Vulnerability vs Hypermasculinity and Domination00:06:28
And there's just no place for another model of masculinity that might be different from that.
But there's also no sense to me of vulnerability.
And it strikes me, and this is really my question, is this book is called Desire.
One of the things that I think many men do really poorly, including myself, is they have desires, but they're embarrassed to tell anyone what they really want because it might be kind of, you know, hard to let people in that deep.
Like, this is actually what I want.
And that could be family, career, money.
That could be what I want for dinner tonight.
It could be sex.
It could be love.
It could be what I need emotionally.
But when it comes to desire, you have to be vulnerable, don't you?
If you want your desires to somehow be nourished and recognized.
Absolutely.
I mean, even vulnerability, Latin is through the wound as well.
So that like vulnerability requires you have to be in touch with the wounds of your life.
And so, I mean, try and make this short, but after my book launch had my brother-in-law got me a very luxury facial in New York City.
And it just, you know, part of what we were talking about is like the masculinity journey of like, you know, what it was like for him to probably be the first man ever in many generations to ever have his face be treated with kindness.
For me, it was less about masculinity and more just about like, I can't believe the amount of money is being spent on me when this could be used anywhere else in my own life, pay off student loans, other people that can't, you know, aren't eating tonight.
Like I, that's part of what I was grappling with.
But as I allowed my body, my face to be engaged, you know, the face bears more beauty and more shame than any other part of the human body.
And so that sense of vulnerability, like when you see people cover their face, that's a sense of shame.
And so for my face to be touched, to be engaged, I mean, I cried getting this facial because it was all these places of woundedness around my face, things that have been said, ways that I've been hit, like physically hit, like all of this vulnerability came out just through the tenderness of having my face be engaged.
But then when I think about powerful men, and again, haven't worked with, you know, any of those as clients, but I've worked with powerful men that have very high net worths and they all have formative traumas.
And I know I'm a therapist.
I'm not reducing everything to trauma.
But one of the things that you learn about trauma and vulnerability is when trauma happens to us, it creates fragmentation.
It's a sense of, I can't trust the ground underneath me.
I can't trust my mom, my dad.
I can't trust this person because this system allowed for this to take place.
So there's fragmentation.
After fragmentation comes the need to numb.
And why do you numb?
Because trauma comes from the Greek word meaning wound.
And so when you are wounded, you can't stay in the heartache of being abused, of being bullied, of being ridiculed, mocked, humiliated.
You have to disconnect.
You have to find some way to dissociate.
And then eventually you're going to end up feeling some level of isolation as a result of the harm that was done to you, but also some of the choices you made to self-soothe after that.
So why is that important?
Think about a lot of powerful men that have never addressed their own vulnerability, that have never addressed their own wounds.
Part of what you need when you're coming out of a system of trauma or stories of heartache is you need stable ground.
And military power, political power provides that stable foundation of I don't feel weak anymore.
I feel powerful.
It is a type of thirst that the more that I chase this, the less vulnerable I feel, the more mighty I feel.
So, you know, road rage, if I, you know, get pissed off and give someone the middle finger and road rage, like that's dopamine, that's oxyto.
Like there's a high from adrenaline, neuroadrenaline, catecholamines.
So all of that feels really good in the context of unaddressed trauma.
So part of my answer to that, not my sole answer to that, would be, you know, there is a lot of unaddressed vulnerability.
And the way that that gets played out is through hypermasculinity, a sense of domination of others, because it provides neurochemicals.
You get a hit when you dominate other people.
We've seen studies that when you are sadistic to someone, when you are angry with someone, it feels good to feel powerful.
And so, I think we have to really grapple with what are the unresolved heartaches that are actually wreaking havoc through domination in our world today.
So, I think that's part of it.
And then, also tied into the narcissism that we were talking about earlier: if we don't have rights of initiation of men, like this is who you are, this is what our community needs, this is what dignity means, this is your, you know, your ancestors, this is where you come from, and here is part of meaning for your life.
We are having very uninitiated men that the only places of power that they see in the world are these power grabs and domination and ridicule.
And that's what they're trying to look like and emulate.
So, all desire at the end of the day is mimetic.
I see you having something, and I want that thing too.
And so, the more examples of narcissistic leadership that we have, unfortunately, that's either going to create more defiance in a good way, or it's going to create more memetic behavior.
And again, back to the point that you raised so well: how do we develop a culture of defiance when so much of the mimetic behavior is going to be to emulate really powerful, abusive systems?
Mimetic Behavior and Narcissistic Leadership00:00:46
Yeah, and how do we get it?
Too, but no, no, not at all.
No, I mean, but also, how do we live out a story that will ground us in something other than copying those who think that domination and pain and submission are really the only ways to live a good manly life?
And I think that's a question for next time, but that's all part of it for me: is if you don't have a story, then mimesis is what you have.
And if everyone around you is saying to be a man, you dominate, then you hurt and you control, then that's where you'll go.