Performance culture is fragile and unsatisfying. But Psalm 8 provides a way off the achievement treadmill.
—
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.
Way of Disappointment
In a million subtle ways, we’re told that personal fulfillment is something we can win. Happiness is something we can achieve . . . if we just put in the work. Whatever we think will make us happy, we can go after and get it.
In a million subtle ways, we’re told that personal fulfillment is something we can win. Happiness is something we can achieve . . . if we just put in the work.
An 18-year-old arrives at college and is handed 180 majors to choose from. But she’s internalized a message from our culture: “Don’t mess this up because your entire life—your happiness and your self-fulfillment—is on the line.”
The pressure started long before this moment and will progress as she ages in our modern meritocracy. “You can be happy by way of marriage if you just find the perfect spouse.” “You can have the family, the career, the body of your dreams, if you just _____.”
No pressure.
But what happens if you fail? If you can’t rise through the ranks of our meritocracy? Either you’re a loser with no one to blame but yourself for not measuring up, or you’ll find someone, some group, some system to blame as the oppressor. If you can’t play the winner, then playing the victim at least helps deal with the guilt.
Or what happens if you do achieve your dreams and finally get what you think you want—when you get the job of your dreams, find the right spouse, achieve all you set out to do—but you still have a gnawing sadness that won’t go away. Then what?
As Westerners, we typically respond to these letdowns in one of two ways. We deal with the sorrow and the pressure of life by digging deeper, grinding even harder. We jump on the achievement treadmill. Move faster. Work harder. Fill up the schedule. Get people to like us. Prove to everybody that we’re somebody. Until we burn out.
Or we cope by quitting. We fill our lives with diversions to mask our sadness and fear. We binge on Netflix. We attach our self-worth to a college football team. We shop, scroll, drink, or do whatever we can to escape the burden and the boredom of life.
Sometimes we do both in the same day and call it “work-life balance.”
Even the most skilled jugglers, those who manage to accomplish what looks like almost perfect equilibrium between diversions and achievement, still have their moments. Channeling the book of Ecclesiastes, the world’s top golfer Scottie Scheffler recently asked, “What’s the point?”
Here’s the paradox: You can’t find true happiness by aiming for it. You can only discover true happiness by living a life worth living. We live in sad times because we don’t know who we are as humans and how to live worthily. The Psalter offers us another way to attend to life and answer the question “What’s the point?” Specifically, Psalm 8 is a gateway to the answer in the Psalms (and the rest of the Bible), inviting everyone to a new and life-giving way to live into our humanity.
Way of Worship
Psalm 8 begins, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens” (v. 1).
The Psalms offer us a way of life centered around God. We’re called into the worship of the God whose name is in the earth and whose glory is above the heavens. Theologians describe this in-and-above dynamic as God’s immanence and transcendence.
God is wholly different from us. His glory is far beyond anything we can compare it to—the most glorious mountains, the most beautiful flower, the most riveting story, the thrill of a first kiss. None of it compares to God’s glory. He’s so far beyond us, and yet as Augustine says, “God is closer to you than you are to yourself.” He’s with us now and always. He knows you better than you know yourself.
God created, neither because he needed the world nor because he needed us. The triune God has never lacked, never been lonely. The Father, Son, and Spirit have always been in a perfect loving relationship. God’s love is unlike ours—it isn’t transactional. He doesn’t love out of lack. His love isn’t fragile. God is always radiating outward in joy. Creation was an unnecessary yet fitting expression of God’s overflowing love.
Worshiping God releases us from the trap of self-focus. Getting caught up in worship frees us to live according to the logic of the universe. When I say worship, I mean the raw and beautiful diversity of worship we see throughout the Psalms: telling God about our sadness, confessing our sins, arguing with him, praising him for his goodness and majesty. Instead of navel-gazing our way through life, we’re pulled out of ourselves by worship so that we too begin radiating outward, reflecting our Creator and Father.
Way of Infants
In Psalm 8:2, we find a paradox that reflects a repeated biblical pattern: “Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.” Infants are helpless, needy, and vulnerable. In the real world, we’re told you win through personal strength, through force of personality, or by having the most followers. You don’t win through weakness.
Verse 2 reflects the upside-down economy of God’s kingdom. Why was Israel chosen? Why did Samuel choose the youngest son, David, instead of his stronger older brothers? Whom must we be like to receive Jesus’s kingdom? Is it the resourceful, well-connected, rich, powerful young ruler? No. It’s the class of people whom everyone knew were vulnerable and dependent. “Truly, I say to you,” Jesus said, “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mark 10:15).
This is the way of true wisdom. Or as the apostle Paul puts it, this is the way of the cross (1 Cor. 1:18–31). To be wise, we must confess our foolishness. To become strong, we must confess our weakness. We can’t achieve our way to the good life. Humble confession, rather than self-actualization, is the path to the life we’re all looking for.
As C. S. Lewis merrily explains in The Great Divorce, “We’ve all been wrong! That’s the great joke. There’s no need to go on pretending one was right! After that we begin living.”
When it comes to our pursuits of happiness, Jesus turns our instincts on their head. To live, we must die.
If we attempt to achieve happiness through self-fulfillment, we’ll spend our lives jockeying to stay in control by avoiding self-sacrifice and costly relationships. We’ll attempt to get everything and everyone to revolve around us.
Yet the more we demand to be in the center, the more we’ll always be on the brink of losing control. The more we try to control our way to happiness, the more we’ll always be on the edge of frustration, anger, and despair when we experience life’s uncontrollability.
We must die to trying to be the center. We must kill the quest
