Culture
Eli Finkel's Existentialist Crisis
In this episode of Self Help, host Terrence Mickey engages with Eli Finkel, a psychology professor and best-selling author, who shares his journey through an existentialist crisis while researching co...
Eli Finkel's Existentialist Crisis
Culture •
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Interactive Transcript
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I'm intrigued to see what you do.
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Welcome to Self Help, the podcast for anyone who thought, who am I?
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What in God's name am I doing?
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How did I get here of all places?
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And then to figure it all out, you turn to a book.
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Because you're that kind of person, and thankfully, so am I.
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I'm Terrence Mickey, your host, and I do not judge from where you seek your guidance.
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It might be from Plato, it might be from Stephen King.
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I only care about how the book helped you because I'm a firm believer that we cannot get
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enough help in this life.
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This show is all about books that change people's lives,
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and the story behind why that book was so important to them.
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You're listening to the bonus episode for season one,
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and if you have a book that changed your life,
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Because your book recommendation and story could be exactly what someone needs to help themselves.
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My guess is that when you developed this idea for a podcast,
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you were not thinking of existentialist philosophy.
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Oh, Contrare, what am I not thinking of existentialist philosophy?
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My guess is Eli Finkel, the best-selling author of the All or Nothing Marriage,
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how the best marriages work.
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And while he was writing his book, he had a crisis.
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Eli is a psychology professor at Northwestern University.
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And while researching contemporary marriage, he observed a curious trend.
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At least in the US, marriage has changed in ways that have made the best marriages better than
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before and the average marriage worse than before.
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And I was trying to figure out, you know, what is it that's led to this divergence?
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To find an answer, he studied the role of marriage in our lives over the years.
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And one of the things I learned is that marriage in the US has loosely speaking
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been through three general eras.
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The good news is that these three general eras get mildly less depressing over the years.
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Starting with the colonial times and when Eli calls the institutional era,
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when marriage was all about our basic survival needs.
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Most people didn't say in that era, like, you know, Jennifer, she's completely lovely,
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but I don't really feel the pitter-patterer.
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So I'm not going to marry her. That would have gotten you left out of your colonial hamlet.
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Marriage wasn't about love and it wasn't even about the personal fulfillment of the individuals.
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Marriage was essential for survival.
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The things you looked for in a spouse were things that were oriented literally toward food,
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clothing, shelter, the very basics. I mean, if you wanted light,
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that meant that you made the candles.
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In the second era, the companion era, you could save yourself an afternoon of hard labor
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by picking up a candle at the store, which freed you up to search for true love in the big city.
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So with the rise of this factory work, urban centers in the U.S. serve as magnets
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for people from rural areas and from other countries.
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And for the first time ever anywhere, you have a new social system where young men and women
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are geographically and economically independent of their parents.
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And for the first time ever anywhere, they start to have more of a say about what they're
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going to prioritize in a marriage. And they want a marry for personal fulfillment.
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And in particular, they want a marry for love. This was the dominant idea.
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And this dominant idea went south in the late 50s and early 60s when people realized it came with
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soul crushing and prescriptive gender roles.
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They discovered that it left them flat. Women were supposed to be nurturing but not assertive.
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Men were supposed to be assertive but not nurturing. They had split the psyche in half and ways
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that weren't really true historically.
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And then came the 1960s and all hell broke loose.
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The pill and Vietnam protests and the civil rights legislation and on and on,
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you know, tuning in, turning on and dropping out.
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The 1960s started the third era, the self-expressive era, where we still find ourselves today.
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You get a sense that yes, people still want love from their marriage. They really care.
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Yes, love is not dead but there is a catch.
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Love is no longer sufficient. These days you might say I love the person but I'm not growing.
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And what people increasingly want is to live an authentic life. They want a spouse or a significant
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romantic partner to bring out the best in them and they would like to do that for the partner as well.
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When Eli saw how we've progressed from working the land with our spouses to expecting them to
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help us work on our soul, he saw a connection to a familiar psychological model.
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I remembered Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
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Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist and his hierarchy of needs is like the food group
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pyramid for our mental health. It prioritizes our basic psychological needs.
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At the bottom of the pyramid is our need for safety, which connects to the institutional era of
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marriage. In the middle is our need for love and belonging, which connects to the second era of
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the companion at era. And at the top is our need for self-actualization, which connects to the
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self-expressive era. After Eli mashed up Maslow's hierarchy with the different errors of marriage,
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he discovered an explanation for why bad marriages were sucking so hard and good marriages were
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killing it. Then I realized that this transition that we have made in how we think about marriage in
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US from the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy to the top of Maslow's hierarchy had interesting
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implications, the most important of which being meeting those higher level needs is actually
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harder. It requires more deep insight into each other's essences and unconscious blockages
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and all those sorts of things than meeting the earlier needs and therefore more marriages are
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falling short of our expectations and therefore more marriages are a little bit disappointing than
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in the past, but that those marriages that succeed at the top of Maslow's hierarchy are able to
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achieve a level of richness and fulfillment that had been unavailable in earlier decades.
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Eli was thrilled to connect the dots between Maslow's hierarchy and the three errors of marriage,
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but his insight left him with a nagging question. But then I was left hanging in ways that I didn't
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anticipate when I thought, well, what is authenticity? What is self-actualization? And if we adopt
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Maslow's version of it, everything fits together nicely. But for Eli, everything didn't fit
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together nicely. I became disconcerted by the idea that there is this core essence. I became
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doubtful of it really for the first time as it was working on the book and that was what
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really blocked me for a while and I put the book down for a while and then picked up a bunch
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of other books. During his break from writing, Eli turned away from the psychology books. He
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wanted to know if we're all working toward an ideal self, what exactly is the ideal self?
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One of the major challenges that I came to when I realized that many of us these days are
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expecting marriage to facilitate our voyage of self-discovery, our voyage of personal growth is
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is trying to figure out what is this thing? What is the self? What is the ideal self?
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Now before all this, Eli had a neat and tidy metaphor to explain the ideal self. He'd use it at
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wedding toasts and he'd picked it up from his advisor in graduate school. You know, she had developed
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this idea that the ideal self is akin to a sculpture nested within a block of stone and she got
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this idea from Michelangelo himself from the great Renaissance sculpture. So the way Michelangelo
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looked at a block of marble and he could see a statue yearning to be freed with the help of a
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chisel, we ourselves could also be considered blocks of marble. All of us have an actual self that
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is who we currently are. You can think of that as the raw, uncut block of stone. And within this
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block, we have a statue craving to be freed. But we also have an ideal self, an optimal version of
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ourselves, a more patient, a more giving, a more ambitious, whatever it is, a version of our self,
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and that is akin to the beautiful form that's sort of slumbering within the rock or trapped within
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the rock. And in Eli's metaphor, our partner could be Michelangelo. And so we as, as relationship
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partners spouses, for example, can play a major role in helping to bring out the version of ourselves
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that sort of embedded within. We can be the chisel for each other to uncover our ideal and
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authentic selves. It's a nice metaphor. And I had always accepted that metaphor at face value.
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And it has been influential in my life and my own research and also in my personal life. But I
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started to wonder the extent to which there actually is a deep, essential self embedded within a
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block of stone, that whether that's the right metaphor or there's an alternative possibility,
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which is that there may not be some essential self, a foundational raw sort of inborn sense
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of identity of who we really are, and that we create it. And here comes the crisis.
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It's a rather significant shift to say, huh, what if that isn't a thing? What if there isn't a
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sculpture, a statue nested within the rock yearning for freedom, but rather that it is incumbent
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upon us to develop, to create a sense of self. It was really at that moment that I decided I
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needed to take a detour away from social science and psychology in particular toward more
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philosophical investigations. Eli turned to Sarah Bakewell's book at the existentialist cafe.
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Just luckily for me, Sarah Bakewell, this was 2016, had written at the existentialist cafe,
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and it got this glowing review in the New York Times and was listed as one of the New York Times 10
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best books of the year. This Bakewell book provided the road map that I needed in order to make sense
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of some of the issues that were plaguing me, try to think more deeply and more precisely about
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the nature of the self and the nature of authenticity, and it was a big deal when I read it.
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She does it in a way that is not only a delight to read, but situates it within a historical context
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where the stakes are so massive. And the stakes were indeed massive. Sarah Bakewell's book
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at the existentialist cafe focuses on Jean Paul Start and Simone de Beauvoir as a couple who were
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the architects of existentialism. And they were faced with the waning influence of religion,
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the rise of Nazism, and the outbreak of World War II. It used to be that the good book told you
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everything you needed to know. We used to be very, very religious, and if you're very, very religious,
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then you sort of do what the Bible says. You adhere to the rules of the Torah and the Mishnah or
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the New Testament or some combination of the above, right, the Quran. That is the recipe.
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Like nobody has to go out in pursuit of the development of the self or to find ways to
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imbue your life with meaning. There was a rule book there that said to live a purposeful
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meaningful life, do the following. So it was really with the decline of the power, the influence
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of major religion that led to the sorts of concerns in the 1800s and the 1900s and up until today,
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that the existentialists were so concerned with. In some sense, humanity was left without a foundation,
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without a moral foundation for its existence because all those good books that guided us for,
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certainly centuries and millennia were suddenly doubted by larger and larger proportions of
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the population. That's when we confront a very, very sobering reality, which is why am I here?
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Like what is the purpose of my life? Those were new sorts of questions because you weren't
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born into a universe that just made that make sense. And your sense, you're left with what
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Soren Kierkegaard has called a sense of thrownness, right? Like here I am. I'm this little speck in
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this infinite universe and why and what does it all mean and how can I do something that has meaning
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and purpose and so existentialist philosophy is a new form of philosophy that really only emerged
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with the decline of religious belief. Here's a good example of how existentialism confronted a lack
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of moral foundation. One day a former student approached art for advice.
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The student's brother had been killed in battle before the French surrender
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and then his father turned collaborator and left the family, leaving the former student as a
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sole caregiver of his mother. But this student longed to sneak across the border and join the
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free French forces in exile to fight the Nazis. Fighting on the battlefield would avenge his
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brother's death, defy his father and help liberate his country. Except he also didn't want to
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abandon his mother. He didn't want to leave her alone during a time when it was hard enough to
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even find food and his desertion could put her in trouble with the Nazis. So he wanted to know
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should he protect his mother and benefit her alone or should he join the free French forces
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and benefit many. Now this is an old philosophical dilemma but start didn't approach it with a
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traditional moral calculus. A Sarah baked well points out he led his audience to think about it more
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personally. What is it like to be faced with such a choice? How exactly does a confused young man
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go about dealing with such a decision about how to act? Who can help him and how?
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After listening to the student's problem, Sart finally said, you are free. Therefore choose.
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That is to say, invent. No signs are given in this world. None of the old authorities can
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relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh, moral or practical considerations as carefully
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as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something. And it's up to you what
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that something is. Sart never provided an end to the story. Whether his words were helpful to the
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student or not will never know. But his response did help Eli. You have freedom and yes of course
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that fills you with terror with a sense of existential dread because there are no rules, there are
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no boundaries, there's no guidebook telling you how to live a worthwhile life. You have to figure
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all of that out. But what's so empowering about the philosophy, especially as it's conveyed in
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Sarah Bakewell's book, is how amazing is this opportunity that we have to build a meaningful life.
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And as you know, people like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, they ended up being enormously
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influential authors and journalists and activists and they developed a worldview that required them to
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try to live in accord with that worldview. They were just immensely of this world. They were
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immensely attuned to the circumstances around them. And what were those circumstances? The rise
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of Nazism, World War II, the postwar era, when they became bona fide international celebrities
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because they worked to build a coherent internal worldview. They weren't always successful but they
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worked to do it and then live a big, titanic life that was consistent with that worldview. So,
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yeah, when I read that book, I'm not left with this sense that oh, you know, there's no meaning or
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purpose. I'm left with this sense of, yeah, it's terrifying to try to develop your own sense of
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meaning and purpose when there are no ground rules. But what an opportunity to live just a huge,
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interesting, important life. Eli had gone from believing we each had an essence that needed to be
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excavated, to pondering, well, maybe there's no essence, no ideal self, but it's our responsibility
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to create an ideal self. One decision and one moment at a time, which is one of the central ideas
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to existentialism. And while this philosophy offers no easy answers, somehow Eli still found it
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to be practical. At a very abstract way, it's enormously practical. And in particular, it's practical
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as a tap on the shoulder that says, hey man, hey, hey woman, here you are, you're on this earth for
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some amount of time, an unknowable amount of time. And what is it that you're going to do with that
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time? How are you going to live your life? And I think one of the easiest things to do is to
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sort of glide through life, right? We have some sense of the expectations as they're laid out for
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us. And but just because something comes pre-packaged, just because you can find it at Wal-Mor,
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doesn't mean that it's the life that actually makes sense for you. And one day we're going to have
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an opportunity, probably, to reflect back on the life that we've lived. And I think that tap on
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the shoulder that existentialism gives us is, despite giving us no direction whatsoever,
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and being immensely impractical in that sense, is in another sense the most practical thing,
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the most important or applied thing we can imagine. Because it's a reminder, you get a certain
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amount of time. And the best thing you can do with that time is to figure out what really matters
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who you really are and try to live a life that live a life that that actually aligns with
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the thoughts you were able to develop after you got that tap on the shoulder.
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As always, thank you for listening. Today's episode was produced and edited by yours truly.
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And if you're excited to read Eli's book or Bakewell's book, our sponsor has a treat for you.
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Perfect. Are you ready? Save us last words.
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