A Millennial Sees Chapell Roan and Thinks About Pascal's Wager

And five great substitution for the divine

I’m thirty-six. Today, music festivals are full of bands I don’t know and genres I don’t understand. My favorite acts tour with gray hair, playing their most popular albums from decades ago, and fans pay a thousand dollars for a seat on the far cliffside of an arena.

I ended up at Austin City Limits 2024, because I wanted to see Blink-182. I had never heard of almost any other bands from the line-up. Wandering from stage to stage throughout the weekend and seeing that an artist like “mike.” had two million followers, I realized how far I had fallen behind the times. Blink-182 proved to be powerfully nostalgic. Dua Lipa mesmerized crowds with emotional dance music on Saturday night. When Chapell Roan took the stage on Sunday, I watched a sea of thousands of people, aged ten to sixty, dance and shout that they are “hot to go” while steepling their hands, as if in prayer, and started to think about the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal. Yes, really. He had a theory that nothing could fill a hole in our heart like God. Without God, he wrote, that hole in our heart is a vacuum.

As Pascal writes in 1670’s Pensées:

What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?

This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.

As the horde hollered, “H-O-T-T-O-G-O” back at the stage, I watched Chapell Roan strut back and forth and thought: What, exactly, would Pascal say about all this?

A concert has all the features and functions of a mass prayer. The shared ritual helps people transcend the self and connects them to a community and a cause. In this case, I guess, the cause was being hot to go.

Pascal would argue that a Chappell Roan concert isn’t exactly an “infinite and immutable object” like God. The concert isn’t infinite. Anything from the material world is turned to nothingness by the vacuum. God, in being infinite, is the only thing that can really fill the space in our hearts. Headed home in a state of deflationary elation with the breaking masses, I wondered how we to try and fill the vacuum of our hearts in a secular society. Because Chappell Roan reminded me that we are as religious as ever. It’s part of human nature to find something to worship. We’ve just changed up rituals.

Here are five ways we try to fill Pascal’s vacuum today:

1. Music

Chappell Roan has 44 million listeners on Spotify. That’s small change compared to the 91 million Spotify users that listen to Taylor Swift. One survey found that Swifties make up more than half of the US population. The revenue from her last tour made more revenue than the country of Barbados. (read more: Taylor Swift and the Trauma Generation)

As Forbes describes:

In its first week of release, Tortured Poets Department generated the biggest Billboard debut of Swift’s storied career. It sold 2.6 million copies, including 1.4 million on day one. It is behind only Adele’s 25, released in 2015, as the No. 1 debut week—that album sold a stunning 3.4 million in week one. Tortured Poets Department surpassed ‘N Sync’s 2000 album No Strings Attached (2.4 million copies in its first week) for second.

An academic paper compares a Taylor Swift concert and organized religion by explaining that the purpose of a religion is to organize the chaos of one’s life and add a narrative through the context of a communion. Taylor Swift checks all the boxes:

Worshiping Taylor Swift is a communal activity because her followers have a shared love and adoration for the artist, and they interact at concerts and on social media, such as through fan pages… the culture is performative because of the rituals Swifties use to show their devotion to the singer-songwriter, which I will analyze later. Taylor Swift has created a world of her own through her songs, her concerts, and her actions, and Swifties have been absorbed into this spiritual realm of her creation.

Taylor Swift’s lyrics serve the purpose of myths in the Swiftie faith, for they lead devotees through a powerful journey of emotional exploration and trigger the formation of strong parasocial bond.

Anyone who likes music could readily agree that music informs beliefs and identity. The musicians on stage are delivering sonic sermons. In choosing genres and aritsts, fans choose what to worship and who to worship. In Pascal’s view, this behavior is natural and inevitable. We should just be doing it in church. Not in a crowd, screaming that we are hot to go.

2. Travel

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.

- Paul Bowles

Another great way to fill the void is constant motion. This is why the travel industry is worth about 10% of the global GDP. Who needs a local community when you can have a global one? Seeing new places, meeting new people, and experiencing new things are all ways to feed the vacuum in our hearts by feeling like we’re part of something bigger than ourselves.

With travel, we look outside for that sense of divine. Visiting new places, we experiment with new beliefs based on new environments. Trying rituals like clothes. Capturing the memories of other selves. Displaying what we choose to remember on social media. Creating collages of colorful characters as symbols and icons. An Instagram profile is a stained glass window with the holy visions we decide to see.

In believing you can find new transcendence by changing your surroundings, traveling frees us from the fear of creating something that’s worth building, something that requires a fearless foundation, while assuring us that we can easily become our true self, vacuum-free, with the right destination.

As sociologist C. Wright Mills puts it:

On vacation, one can buy the feeling, even if only for a short time, of higher status. The expensive resort, where one is not known, the swank hotel, even if for three days and nights, the cruise first class - for a week. Much vacation apparatus is geared to these status cycles; the staffs as well as clientele plays-act the whole set-up as if mutually consenting to be part of the successful illusion. For such experiences once a year, sacrifices are often made in long stretches of gray weekdays. The bright two weeks feed the dream life of the dull pull.

Is travel transcendence? Yes. Is it temporary? Yes.

Wherever you go, there you are. But what did you leave behind?

Pascal would tell you to flip the coin.

3. Simulations.

Americans spend four hours and thirty-seven minutes on their phones every day and about two hours a day on social media. We spend about three hours a day watching TV and half of Americans spend at least eight hours a week playing video games.

In this church of simulation, we’re constantly selecting what we want to feel by choosing what we want to consume. In spending so many hours in these sweet baths of sensations, we end up soaking in beliefs about what’s important. In place of our own thoughts, we pick and choose from other thoughts across the internet, on pocket-sized screens. We think about the critical importance of accomplishing something in a video game, finishing a TV series. Crafting the right message for an unseen audience to read.

If religion is about organizing the chaos in life, we’re often finding sanctuary in simulations today. Rather than connecting beyond the self in the real world, we find a personal world to achieve some sense of the divine. But, when the lights go off, do we have anything to show for it? After a day of scrolling, what do we take away? Where do we go and where do we end up but back where we started?

Today, screens are excellent substitutions for the divine.

4. Psychology

In Litverse’s series defending repression, we covered Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death (1972). The book speculates on how, in a secular society, we’ll see more and more people choosing to worship therapy and their own psychology as the divine. By the numbers, Becker seems to have called it.

Research shows that just 8% of baby boomers say they’re willing to go to therapy. About half (45%) of millennials say they’ll talk to a therapist to improve their mental health and about half (42%) of adults born between 1990 and 2010 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition. For Gen Z, research shows that 9 out of 10 report experiencing anxiety and nearly 8 in 10 experience depression.

This, in my mind, is the appearance of the heart vacuum by another word. What else does depression feel like but a black hole sucking all the joy out of the world? It can seem impossible to fill the void when life itself seems lifeless.

Becker traces the obssession with psychology - and understanding “one’s self” - directly with the decline of Christianity. Writing:

When man lived securely under the canopy of the Judeo-Christian world picture he was part of a great whole; to put it in our terms, his cosmic heroism was completely mapped out, it was unmistakable. He came from the invisible world into the visible one by the act of God…

Commercialism promised Western man a paradise on earth, described in great detail by the Hollywood Myth, that replaced the paradise in heaven of the Christian myth. And now psychology must replace them both with the myth of paradise through self-knowledge.

Pascal would be a big fan of this perspective. God was the only possible answer. Rather than looking inside yourself for the meaning of life, you had to look above. There is no other option but the vacuum.

5. Ethic

It only makes sense that, in addition to trying to fill the space in our hearts with sensations and stimulations, novelty and psychology, we also try to hustle our way to heaven. How else can we explain the American obssession with proving yourself through hard work and money? Because these are the ultimate symbols of the divine.

The Puritans would be proud of the Western desperate to find fulfillment at work and the very American way of measuring your worth by income or dedication to holy hustle culture.

If you’re working and keeping yourself busy, you won’t even have time to think about the divine either way. This has been the secret of American work ethic for a long time. As British diplomat Lord James Bryce observed in 1888’s The American Commonwealth about the American obsession with hustling to all the way to the event horizon:

The constant reaching forward to and grasping at the future does not so much express itself in words, for they are not a loquacious people, as in the air of ceaseless haste and stress which pervades the West… each darting wither and thither with swift steps and unique mien, driven to and fro by a fire in the heart. Time seems too short for what they have to do, and results always come short of their desire. One feels as if caught and whirled along in a foaming stream, chafing against its banks, such is the passion of these men to accomplish in their own lifetimes what in the past it took centuries too effect. Sometimes in a moment of pause, for even the visitor finds himself infected by the all-pervading eagerness, one is inclined to ask them, “Gentlemen, why in heaven’s name this haste? You have time enough. No enemy threatens you. No volcano will rise from beneath you. Ages and ages lie before you… why complete in a few decades what the other nations of the world took thousands of years over in the older continents?

The Vacuous Heart

Unlike Blaise Pacal, not everyone has a divine vision that makes them recant their scientific genius overnight. No matter where you might be on the spectrum of religiosity, Pascal’s theory that we all have a vacuum at the center of our heart is a useful perspective to think about that “vacuum” and what we might be doing to try and fill it. The habits that become preferences that become patterns we follow become religions because it is in following those patterns we find transcendence. What we consume is what we believe.

Personally, I find transcendence in the process (writing) rather than the product (publishing). That’s when I enter a flow state that feels divine, because the flow state is made of those moments when I feel like I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be and doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. And that’s what I imagine it feels like to believe in God’s plan for you, day after day, without a doubt. And that’s why Pascal’s Wager makes so much sense, as long as you can convince yourself of the currency of common convictions.