The Anti-Influencer Life

Finding grace, meaning, and small enchantments in repetition, ritual, and daily life

We’ve talked before, you and I.

Or at least I’ve had the same conversation that you’ve had, or could have, if you had the time and setting, and maybe the right person to listen.

You tell me about what’s going on in your life. It starts on the surface, very acceptable. And you can stay there for a while, long enough for an elevator ride, a quick polite coffee, or a walk up from the parking ramp to your office.

But then you start to pause a bit between sentences, then between words.

This is where you begin to wonder if you’re repeating yourself, if I, or whoever is listening to you, is tired of you, and of your words. You might even interject at this point that you are tired of yourself. Of course, it’s not in your public voice that you usually say that. It’s just in the language of your eyes, the lines of your face or your shoulders.

In my day job as a psychologist, I hear this, and not only in the nonverbal way. People ask me if I am, or tell me that I must be, *tired* of them.

In a nonreligious sense, it is a confession. If it is possible at all to make a confession in a nonreligious sense.

It could be expanded to be,

“I find myself saying the same things, covering the same ground, as I try to explain my current experience of my life. And I feel that repetition is wrong. It’s not productive and I’m afraid it puts a burden on those that must listen to me, even if that listener is myself.”

Here is what I want to say to you if I’ve captured something you related to in this essay up until now:

I’m sorry that the idea of novelty, an otherwise good, or at least neutral, characteristic of the natural world has been used and over used so much in the little marketing device you carry with you, that novelty has been elevated to a kind of god, or at least a virtue. And in the process any kind of repetition, and therefore any ritual, any practice (also maligned as a definition of insanity), any returning to, or covering again, has been reduced to and flattened into mere boredom, lack of creativity, and worst of all, lack of progress. The last, lack of progress, having been hammered into a type of sin, is certainly not a story suitable for conversation in polite society.

In short, you have been led to believe that most of your life, as a percentage of your waking moments, is boring, and should be kept behind locked doors, that no one can endure hearing of it, just as, in fact, you cannot endure experiencing it.

You have almost certainly lost any sense of small enchantment in the mundane activities you go about doing. I know that because almost all of us have. We have lost the ability to value the everyday, in other words, the bulk of our life.

And yet the way back might be simpler than we think.

The antidote to loss of enchantment may also seem boring at first, maybe unsurprisingly. Some writers call it ‘re-rooting’—grounding ourselves again in place, in ritual, and in the practices of faith that steady us.

If this resonates, you may find my subscriber-only reflections — written more explicitly as faith informed, from my own Christian tradition. Limiting it to subscribers allows me a place that’s set apart for a more personal voice, not meant for the therapy office. I’d love for you to read along about faith, the struggles of life and re-enchantment. The subscription is free and allows you to get all the weekly essays I write.

Subscribers will also get previews of my book soon to be released by Broadstreet Publishing. More info as it gets closer.