[This transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.]

Scott Black: We are obsessed with being our best selves and awash in the language of self-help and self-improvement. But is our cultural fixation on health and wellness actually making us worse? Is it keeping us from being fully human? Welcome to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center.

I am Scott Black, director of the Tanner Humanities Center, and today I am delighted to welcome Kate Bowler in conversation with Gretchen Case about our culture of toxic positivity and how to be an authentic human being. Dr. Bowler is Associate Professor of American Religious History at the Duke Divinity School.

She is author of Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved, No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear, and Have a Beautiful, Terrible Day: Daily Meditations for the Ups, Downs, and In-Betweens. Dr. Case is Director of the Center for Health Ethics, Arts, and Humanities at the University of Utah.

She’s Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine.

Gretchen Case: So we’re already recording, and this is for the Tanner Humanities Center for the whole university. I sent some questions ahead of time, but I thought we would talk today about authenticity. I think it’s on the minds of a lot of people. It’s something that you deal with a lot. There is reason for hope in authenticity, and I’m always just looking for reasons for hope and ways to look forward and stuff like that.

Goodness, authenticity is—

Kate Bowler: The perfect topic for right now.

Gretchen Case: Well, can I start with just a fun question? What do your friends say about you? Because a lot of people want to be your friend. Who’s the authentic Kate? How do your friends describe you?

Kate Bowler: I think my friends would say that I will die of empathy-related causes, for sure. That I am slightly more evil than I seem, which I think is entirely accurate.

Like, I saw my husband gardening the other day and he picked up potatoes and then had a back spasm and fell over. It sort of looked like he was dying of a heart attack—and instead of rushing out to help him, I cried because I was laughing so hard. So that feels more accurate to my true self.

What’s so funny about your friends knowing you is they can always see that little sort of film that separates the person we want to be and the person that we are at 2:00 AM. What a joy—and a terrible hypocrisy—to have people see us.

Gretchen Case: Up close. Yeah. And what an honor to have people who stick with you when they see who you really are.

Okay, so that’s a little bit about being authentic. But how do you—meaning both you personally and the generic “you”—stay authentic as an academic? How do you perform that academic life, have the intellectual rigor, and still be a person?

And for you, that’s what helps you reach thousands of people—because people see you as authentic. So what’s in there?

Kate Bowler: I think so often our culture imagines authenticity as some kind of approximation of “be who you are.” Hamlet’s Polonius—“to thine own self be true”—has been a modern obsession. How do we get to that really real self?

I think for academics in particular, we are constantly struggling with: what is our process of becoming? Not just the classically liberal view of “dig inside and you’ll find something good.” I’ll tell you, Gretchen, I do not share that view. I think what is probably deep inside of me is song lyrics, insecurity, concern about whether I bought dinner.

But one of the things I really love about the academic life is it forces us to structure into our habits a means of becoming. So we’re not simply a sum total of what we already are, excavated—we are ideally trying to query into something deeper than ourselves. That’s been one of the most convenient ways to structure my life: I can set a book project in front of myself and ask, who do I want to be based on the question? How will I come to know myself better, and how will I come to know a topic more deeply?

The fact that we get to query so deeply into one weird topic is our special niche—magical, I think—a superhighway into greater self-knowledge.

Gretchen Case: And you brought up that the topic might be important, because that was one of my questions: is it about the subject? I want to give a shoutout to Religious Studies here, because you’re a religious studies person. I think—like I said in the questions I sent you—religion is about authenticity. How you approach religion, spirituality, how you rest with yourself. Belief doesn’t work without authenticity.

So yes—what is it about your study of religion and aspects of the spiritual that helps you feel authentic? Religious Studies is in the College of Humanities here, and you’re at a Divinity School. Do those structural things matter as well?

Kate Bowler: I love that, because I really don’t think religion can be studied effectively if it’s not intersecting directly with the humanities. One of the privileges of religious studies is that it touches on history, sociology, economics, psychology—and so having that interdisciplinarity is entirely unavoidable.

What I find especially attractive about that approach is that we sometimes think of ourselves, culturally, as just Homo Economicus. Like our duty is to produce capital, to grow in metrics and impact. Even we do this to ourselves—not just “oh, I need to produce another book,” but we absorb vocational language from the culture and imagine that all of our lives have to be purpose-driven, obsessive, singularly focused.

That messaging comes so early—from the first time someone says “do you like soccer?” and then, “do you want to make soccer your all-consuming life passion?” Some of us start doing that with our jobs. Like, “do you like the Elizabethan court? Is that now officially your personality?” That could be!

So I think maybe for academics—or people intersecting with humanities and religious studies—we get to think more about how authenticity can address this problem. That we are more than these economic engines. We’re more than robots for growth.

We get to talk about religion and the humanities as implicitly recognizing the multiple layers in which we intersect: mind, body, spirit. And then we get to turn that into real theories about what we think happens—about the goodness of our creation. What is hope? What is death? Do we believe salvation comes from outside of ourselves?

We get deep fast when we tread in those waters.

Gretchen Case: Yeah. Well, so staying with intersections with the humanities, but moving into healthcare and medicine—which is a lot of what I do.

This question keeps coming up, and I’m sure you’ve answered it a million times. First of all, “humanities,” “humane,” and “human” all get mixed together when we talk about medicine. But the humanities is the study of what it is to be human.

What special insights do you have from your particular, individual story? It always comes down to: what should they know? What should healthcare workers in training know? What should they know now about the human experience? What do you wish they had known about your human experience of being so sick?

Kate Bowler: I think one of the first things I noticed when I started experiencing that much precarity was that I was so very afraid. So very fearful that pain would separate me from everyone else.

And I found that primarily, the language spoken to me was not that lovely humanities, human-focused vocabulary or framing. What normally comes back at you is outcomes language, or probabilities. It’s a language that’s scientifically based that starts to sound a lot like people are just gauging certainty at you.

One of the things I love about people who spend a long time with those who are sick—so, the lovely chaplains, the nurses, the very human doctors—is when they’re able to lay aside outcomes language and just remember that somebody who’s very sick or dying is still somebody who’s living. They’re trying to find purpose, meaning, their own way of being human—through a system that now feels like they’ll be squeezed into a structure they might not survive.

It’s always a shame when people use words like “soft skills,” as if empathy isn’t rigorous, as if careful listening isn’t both art and poetry—and frankly, one of the best ways to get better diagnoses.

I think those beautiful, heart-forward combinations—the way people talk to you, and the way people experience their vocation as a healthcare provider—have been one of the things I hope we all get to do together in this new era of medicine.

Gretchen Case: And what would you say to someone who says, “Well, my authentic self as a provider—as a physician or a nurse—is to give the certainty of diagnosis. To give the statistics. That science language feels authentic to me”? How would you pull at that and say, “There might be more”?

Kate Bowler: I think that’s what’s been so exciting to see in the real flourishing of the field of palliative care. They’ve really understood how science-informed language actually interacts with how people hear.

You can use the language all day long, but the question is: is it effectively helping your patient make informed choices about what’s next?

One lovely thing about how palliative care frames this is the intersection between meaning and metrics. It’s never been clearer to me than when people come in with their pain scale: on a scale from one to ten, are you a four? Are you a six?

That’s a perfect example of science language—desiring precision—meeting the blurriness of emotion in our little meat suits.

I think one of the things we should always be asking ourselves is: is our language attuned to matching people’s experience of that language? Can I shape my language more directly to help people live inside categories they already know?

Because I’d venture to say that most outcome language, most “science certainty” language, is not framed in someone’s authentic experience. It’s language lawyers developed to help navigate how expectations are set with patients.

I know I’ve had the phrase “standard of care” used at me so many times, and neither party knew what we were talking about.

Gretchen Case: It’s also very safe language. When people—because I think where authenticity comes in is people wanting to be good at their job.

To use language like “standard of care” or to rely on statistics—that’s safe. That gets away from the terrible, wonderful uncertainty that is humans taking care of humans.

Kate Bowler: And I don’t mean to be blindly optimistic about certain aspects of AI, but we know doctors have been dramatically overburdened—especially over the last 15 years—by a desire for metrics, for elaborate note-taking and systemization. It’s allowed them almost no humanity.

And now with these note-taking devices, I do think it’s allowing doctors a little more breathing room—even within their scheduled visits—to be able to encounter a person.

So I do feel we have some technological solutions that can help doctors be more people-facing.

Gretchen Case: Yeah. Well, since you brought up not wanting to be overly optimistic—but you are very optimistic—one of the questions I was asked to ask you is: how do you have so much capacity for joy?

Where does that come from? Is that from your—quote—second chance at life? This new chance? Is it all from that? And do you ever struggle? Like—how are you so happy?

Kate Bowler: I guess, to be honest, I don’t really believe in happiness as a durable, steady state. Like a place you’re supposed to get to and stay.

I just don’t think most of us are lucky enough to stay positive, stay happy, stay in some kind of blissful place. So I’ve put so much weight on the gift of joy.

Joy to me is both a gift—something that happens from outside you—and it’s also a job. I’ve taken it on. Like: how do I put myself in the way of joy?

Because otherwise, in a day—or week, or month—that’s full of things I didn’t choose, I might miss joy altogether.

Being very unlucky—having all kinds of terrible things happen—has made me very, very stubborn about joy.

It’s oddly that Nietzsche challenge from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Have you ever said yes to one joy?” And then there’s a litany that follows—well then, you have to say yes to all the pain, all the suffering…

So I do feel like being joyful is about turning toward your life and practicing saying yes. A lot of the time, the “yes” you get to say is an incredible surprise—of delight, gratitude, or a weird feeling of love.

So yeah, I’m trying to be more joyful. I want to stand there like I’m putting myself in traffic.

Gretchen Case: Is the traffic—

Kate Bowler: Joy. Or the traffic is probably a bad thing—but joy is in there somewhere.

Gretchen Case: It’s the clown car.

Kate Bowler: And do I want to be hit by it? Yes, I’d like to be struck directly by that clown car.

Gretchen Case: Got it. Just working through the metaphor. So can I talk to you a little about your social media presence and how much you’re out there—not just in your books, but on Instagram, online?

Utah has a lot of social media influencers. We have a lot of online people, and people are in general—nationwide—interested in looking at other people’s lives. I think that’s a kind of, to go back to our theme, search for authenticity.

Trying to find real life in this unreal life. How do you find your authenticity? How do you stay true to yourself when you have to frame yourself in particular ways—on social media or in public?

Kate Bowler: There’s such a dark side to that parasocial nature of the attention economy. We see it everywhere. Loneliness is at a high point. People are desperate for connection, and yet there have never been higher rates of people disconnected—watching other people do things.

So because of that—and because of my own tendency to doomscroll late at night—I’m very aware that there are a couple necessary pieces to being an online person.

One is the private necessity to be very, very careful about maintaining real-life social connections. You have to have as many in-person experiences as you have online. Period. Otherwise, there’s just too much outsourcing.

I’ve developed a lot of really wonderful relationships because of this online work, but the temptation is to imagine that “real life” is somewhere outside of me—that it’s happening elsewhere. And that’s a terrible mistake I try not to make.

The other thing I take very seriously is the responsibility to portray an unshiny but reasonably polished version of what I really want to say. For example, I try really hard not to only pick flattering photos or care that much about how I look. That’s just a rule I have—because I would very much like to live in my actual human body. My actual human body is 180 pounds and does not look good from every angle. I’m just trying to be fine with that.

The other bit is that I’m a professor, and I’m so grateful to have the authority of an expertise. I want to represent that honestly. So I try not to, for instance, do too many videos in my kitchen. The truth is, I’m a pretty cool historian, so I try to do them at my job, where I can represent my views in that way.

Because I think hyper-personalization is accidentally contributing to the de-credentialing of our profession more broadly. I want people to know and trust experts. So I want to represent myself—

Gretchen Case: Fairly.

Kate Bowler: In that way.

Gretchen Case: Yeah. That was actually one of my questions. I mean, I think it’s settled whether or not academics can be on social media—you started talking about this—but are we a special case? Because we need to present ourselves in certain ways?

Kate Bowler: I do think we should. And I do think we should.

We’re both quick to point out the gendered nature of this. It’s so much more tempting to take any woman with credentials and hyper-personalize her—to want her only to be relatable and likable, and not have a relationship to her expertise.

It’s one of the gifts of people finding women easier to connect to—especially on Instagram—but my concern is that we now have a culture in which higher education is under threat. They don’t know to trust us.

So I feel a responsibility to appear trustworthy and to speak in a manner that suggests I have the benefit of an institution that has supported the ecology of my brain.

In brand terms: I want to co-brand with my institution, such that we all benefit from the fact that this is an institute of higher learning. Thank God.

Gretchen Case: Yeah. Has this gotten harder as you’ve grown more popular? Because—you’ve gotten more popular. More people want to be your friend.

Kate Bowler: Well, that part I’m very happy with. It was very, very lonely before. So just having a community of people to have these conversations with—especially from an interdisciplinary perspective—man.

I used to really only read history, and just this week I got a chance to interview great psychologists and builders of social movements. That has been wonderful.

But I do think we’re in a crisis. People who care about education—they’ll call us “credentialists.” I do think we’re in a strange sort of populist miasma about what education means.

It feels important to keep finding ways to remind people that institutions of higher education are for the people. And the work—this is work for everyone. That requires that we be accessible. It also requires that we put on our expert hats.

Gretchen Case: So where do you think the future of the humanities is—and of interdisciplinary work? Within this big, like you said, miasma of what is going on with higher education. What ways do you see forward for the humanities and for interdisciplinarity in general?

Kate Bowler: One of the wonderful bits about humanities-facing projects is we’re not simply trying to drill down on measurables. We’re trying to existentially bear up against great mysteries, great philosophical questions, great questions in religious studies.

Some of the endless round robin of historical telos—we never truly find the end of the source material because the questions themselves are so deeply mysterious. These are the messy, unsolvable, unanswerable problems that made us go into these fields in the first place.

So I think the fact that these fields will typically be underfunded, not necessarily respected—especially now, as we culturally absorb the normalization of cruelty—means that the things that make us most deeply human, even if they feel mysterious or soft or unanswerable, will continue to be the most pressing.

How do we be, for other people, a great and beautiful hope?

The softer it gets, the weirder it gets—I think the more we need to double down.

Gretchen Case: And how can we encourage people not to be afraid of talking about things?

I think the more we feel the tension in the atmosphere, the less we want to talk. The hot button topics feel lava-hot, right? But how do you say—because to me, this is the moment we lean in and say yes. Push that button.

Kate Bowler: I’ve always found it reassuring to say: what’s wonderful about leaning in right now is we have great language to describe what’s happening.

People will feel more comforted, frankly, by knowing more than they think.

People worry: “If I wade in now, I’ll know things I don’t want to know.” But we have great categories for, say, the wild disconnect between forms of official civil religion right now and what we hope authentic faith might be.

That’s great language. It’s precise language. It all has a history.

I think once people land on a category—like “civil religion”—they’ll feel more and more at home in this thought world. And more like they get to co-create in their own lives a lovelier version of a society.

Gretchen Case: Do you have big thoughts on authenticity that you want to share with us? Like, if I said define it right now, what is authenticity—especially in the academy? What’s your big picture?

Kate Bowler: Authenticity is a modern obsession with a performance of the self. There’s a separation between this deeper existential self and the performance thereof—and our hope is to live in alignment between the two.

It’s that great compliment Abraham Lincoln’s best friend gave him: that Lincoln could play no part but his own.

That’s what we’re hoping to do: to live in alignment with our deepest values and our deepest hope, knowing of course that the self is always a performance.

But we shouldn’t worry too much about being asked to perform. In the academy, we’re so often asked to perform a kind of hyper-certainty that we’re not comfortable with.

An authentic performance, then, is an emboldened version of your great intellectual gifts and also the deep humility that we know and don’t know simultaneously.

Gretchen Case: My hope is always that when I say “I don’t know” to a room full of students, they take that as good and authentic. And sometimes they don’t.

Kate Bowler: But what a compliment—that you walked to the very edge of what you knew with them. Isn’t that what we’re really trying to do?

Gretchen Case: I say it often. I want it to be an invitation—like, there’s more I need to learn, more you need to learn. We’re not done here.

What we put on the exam is not it—and once you learn it, we’re done. No. There’s more that we both don’t know.

I totally agree. Well, thank you so much for talking with us today. We’ve loved having you here in Utah. What a special community. I really, genuinely had a fantastic time.

Kate Bowler: Thank you so much for having me. And I cannot tell you how often someone stopped me and said, “You were on stage with her? She was wonderful.”

Gretchen Case: Aw.

Kate Bowler: What a gift. And so many people didn’t know what they were showing up for—which is my favorite. But really such good feedback, including from a lot of medical trainees, which makes me happy.

Gretchen Case: I was totally wowed. Thanks for having me.

Scott Black: You have been listening to the Virtual Jewel Box Podcast of the Tanner Humanities Center. Our theme music is Jelly Roll Morton’s “Perfect Rag.” Thanks for joining us.