Bears, Beets, Battlestar Galactica

Talking to Dwight Schrute about what's important

“Do you believe in love, Jesse?”

It’s always unnerving to be asked a question when you’re the interviewer, but it’s even more unnerving when the question is about your deepest beliefs, and it’s being asked by the guy who played Dwight Schrute on The Office.

How did we get here?

Dwight Schrute, or “Rainn Wilson” as he insisted on being called for the duration of our chat, these days devotes a lot of his energy to discussing spirituality. He had a tough time before he was famous - anxiety, depression, addiction … the Holy Trinity of modern unhappiness.

Then he became one of the most prominent faces on one of the world’s most prominent comedies and he felt … unhappy still. Enough wasn’t enough.

Rainn’s solution was to more fully embrace the spiritual aspects of life. To change his thinking and adopt the following perspective:

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience." - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

We chatted about this and I could feel some listeners starting to bristle. In my experience nothing gets people riled up like hearing somebody expressing their belief in God, or a god-like energy. I don’t know why it makes them so angry to hear about someone else’s faith but it tends to bring out a very aggressive streak in some people. With them in mind I asked Rainn if it was possible to get the benefits of spirituality - connection, purpose, nourishment of the human soul - without believing in God.

That’s when he asked me about love. He has what I think is a very appealing view, that in 2025 God is not the “Scary Sky Daddy” but is found in parts of the real world that give us awe - love, music and sunsets, for example. “You can’t describe the feeling music gives you” Rainn told me. “You have to experience it.”

This will still not be enough for many people, who will feel that we are confusing scientific phenomena with something more mystical. But I wonder if there might be value in the latter view - a value strong enough that you might choose to take the view purely out of self interest.

Here’s the largely non-religious NYT writer Ezra Klein (I’ve drank way too much Ezra in the past few weeks and will move onto a new thinker to reference soon I promise) talking to podcaster Tyler Cowen. He uses the R word here which might be triggering but you could sub in “spirituality” if you wanted:

“One of the things I just think is true about the world is that religion is a functionally unmatched — depending on which side of this you sit in — either understanding of ultimate reality that enhances human cohesion and cooperation, or just a cultural technology that enhances human cooperation and cohesion. And as religion weakens, belief itself weakens.

“… as belief itself weakens, we have not replaced that with any other technology — cultural or otherwise — that is able to create cooperation, particularly long-term cooperation, cooperation that requires sacrificing now for gains later, or not even in this life with anything of even nearly matched power.”

Ezra’s co-author Derek Thompson voiced something similar but more personal on the Honestly podcast, when asked to name something he’d changed his mind about:

“I grew up thinking that not believing in God was a sign of intelligence. And the older I get, the more I find my own lack of belief or feel my own lack of belief to be a kind of psychological and emotional deficit rather than a value.”

I’m not here to convince you to become a believer, only to suggest that spirituality might be having a cultural moment - a moment so significant that even non-believers are coming round to the idea that they might benefit from something religion-like in their lives, without having to take on an old-fashioned God and the dogma that can come with it.

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I had zero religion in my early life, which might be why I’m more positively inclined towards it than other media people - it’s easy to see the good aspects of churchgoing when you haven’t been witness to the hypocrisy and (much) worse that often came with it. Even as a comedian I always felt uncomfortable with the idea of ridiculing ordinary Christians for the things the worst people in their church have done. I look at the grace and kindness most decent New Zealanders show towards people of the Muslim faith and wonder if we could use some of that towards other religions - an essay for another time.

I think a useful way to think about the concept of spirituality is to think of it as the opposite to individualism. Almost every marketing message we receive in 2025 tells us to put ourselves first - “you’re worth it”. What’s undeniable is that after many years of living like this (start the clock whenever you like - the invention of TV, the rise of neoliberalism, the dawn of the smartphone, the embracing of social media), the people of the West have never been more miserable. We are lonely, depressed and disconnected.

Maybe we need the modern equivalent of Pascal’s Wager. Pascal though that it was worth believing in God in the off chance you were right - the potential benefits outweighed the mortal inconvenience.

Might it be worth believing in something bigger than we can see, if only because the act of believing might be its own reward?

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You can hear my interview with Dwight here

You can find out more about his work on spirituality here