Britt Hartley on helping people step back from the void

A conversation with TikTok Star, atheist spirituality coach and nihilism-recovery expert, Britt Hartley

The TikTok algorithm has me figured out, because sometime last year, it started showing me videos by Britt Hartley, an expert in secular spirituality. When I first heard her introduce herself this way, I was intrigued at the phrase, as “secular” and “spirituality” are not words that are normally put together. But Britt’s story is, I think, a fairly common one: much like me, while getting her masters (hers was in theology, mine was in human rights), Britt deconstructed a bit more of her worldview than she’d meant to, lost her faith, and fell into nihilism. Through her business, No Nonsense Spirituality, she now uses the tools she learned studying religion and faith to help the newly faithless work through nihilism and recover from religious trauma.

After stitching and tagging each other in videos on TikTok, Britt interviewed me last year for her podcast, Almost Awakened, and she has now graciously agreed to return the favor as we discuss recovering from nihilism on Better Strangers this month.

If you’re on TikTok, I highly recommend giving Britt a follow — her stuff is always thoughtful and enlightening. With me, she discussed the tools she gives people to help fight nihilism, why she thinks people get stuck in nihilistic loops, and some of her favorite movies for restoring meaning to life.

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Matt Hershberger: First, could you describe what your work is and how you came to it?

Britt Hartley: I work now as an atheist spiritual director. This title is confusing and paradoxical I realize, but it speaks to my approach in finding and applying spiritual tools that improve our lives without requiring faith or belief in anything you find unbelievable. A lot of the work I do is in helping those who are on the path of religious deconstruction, but my specialty is helping those who keep deconstructing after they deconstruct their religion.

I have a Masters degree in theology with an emphasis in the Future of American Religion from a Christian Seminary, but along the way I lost my faith in religion and God. Not only that, I kept deconstructing until I was breaking down the concept of the self, free will, our ability to interact with ultimate reality, politics, gender, etc. until it felt like there was nothing left and I was in the void.

I use secular spirituality as one of the tools that helped me in that place. I also use it to help others because it contains so many resources for improving the quality of life, without requiring interaction with an organized religion or belief in the unbelievable. Secular spirituality, or science-driven spirituality, helped me to build community, find a contemplative practice, live by a moral code, raise children, create meaning and purpose, develop rituals for my individual and family life, experience states of awe and transcendence, and essentially rebuild my life after deconstruction. 

MH: Can you tell me more about the community-building part of secular spirituality? In my experience, working through nihilism is intensely lonely, and my attempts at finding community (through atheist or humanist societies) were false starts. It seemed to be a lot of people who were really angry at religion (in the Hitchens/Dawkins/New Atheist vein), and I wanted to move past that. I've found a limited community online by talking about my struggles with nihilism publicly, but that has the risk of exposing you to people on the internet who really don't like what you're saying. What do you suggest for people trying to find a community when they're in these dark places?

BH:: Community building is often the hardest part of nihilism, because communities require myths and nihilism is a myth destroyer. For me, I created a community of seekers who were post-religious like me simply by being more vulnerable and open and honest in my interactions. Something that you feel in nihilism is that you're the only one with existential dread thoughts and that is an illusion itself.

When I began to take a step into vulnerability, taking social risks and using my nihilism as a super power to allow me to take more risks than I had in the past, my community started with just one other couple who were asking the questions I like the ask. From that, as we kept talking, others found their way in until now there's a community in Boise of people who were all looking for a place where they could be more honest and talk about life.

There's nothing special about me, or Boise, to create that. All it took was leading with vulnerability. Once I started to, I now have more friends than I have time for because the reality is we're all struggling, just waiting for someone to take off the mask. 

MH: In your experience, what causes people to fall into nihilism?

BH: There are many paths to nihilism but the two that I see the most often in my work is nihilism after religion and nihilism due to being a deep thinker and deep feeler.

For the first group, if you are raised with an external sense of morality, meaning, purpose, and community, and you lose your foundation due to a change of faith, it can feel like you've lost everything. For many, it’s like being a newborn baby with no coping skills and no tools because everything about their life was built on certain truth claims around faith. It can often be especially hard for this group to shift into life at the level of experience and being, if they were outwardly focused on hustling for their work for God's approval.

The other group that I see are those who have the combination of being a deep thinker and deep feeler. Add in a touch of neuroticism and you've got the trifecta. What these means is that if you want to feel the deepest feelings of human suffering and think the deepest thoughts about the meaning of life, all roads lead to the void. Because eventually, if you ask enough questions, you realize that things that you thought were true weren't, you realize how biased we all are, how fallible we are as humans when it comes to truth, and the world becomes more mysterious than it seemed at first. There are many rabbit holes of the mind to get caught in, and thought loops that are difficult to get out of.

While there are many paths to nihilism, such as trauma, postmodernism, not being able to afford to live, etc. I find that if you're a deep feeler, deep thinker, and deconstructed from religion, nihilism is almost certainly a waystation stop on your journey.  

MH: How do you help people make it through these dark nights of the soul?

BH: I really focus on tools, especially tools in secular spirituality that help improve the nature of life itself. If life is just an absurd video game, then you can use the radical freedom from deconstruction to create the game you most want to play just for the joy of playing it. This is what all the philosophers who thought about this question end up saying. For Nietzsche it was the overman, for Camus it was Sisyphus choosing to push a rock up a hill, for Simone De Beauvoir it was an authentic life, for Sartre it was radical freedom, and for Viktor Frankl it was finding meaning even in the hardest of circumstances. But they all whisper the same message: can you improve the experience of living by building an authentic life that only you could live? A life so infused with projects and people you care about that it no longer matters that one day it ends? That's the life that I help people build.

Those tools include using psychedelics to reset the nervous system and remind you of how you played as a child, building community, finding a contemplative practice, doing inner child work, doing thought work to get your brain working for you rather than against you, rewriting your story, tapping into states of awe and transcendence, remembering how to play and take joy in experience and being, and improving intimacy in relationships.

With a few small shifts I've seen in my own life and in the life of others that nihilism or rock bottom can become the place you become honest about what a life worth living looks life for you, and it can give you the courage to create that life because all pretenses and ego die in that place of the void. 

MH: Are there any things you caution people against doing when they're in a dark place?

BH: I do caution against doing things with your body that statistically make life harder. This was hard advice to follow because in my nihilism I was spending zero time taking care of my body because I didn't give a shit about anything. But if you want to try to do things to improve the nature of your experience, your body has a role to play in that. Give your brain your best shot at creating a better life by, at the same time of these other tools, taking care of your body.

Eating foods that make a brain happier, going on walks, getting sunshine, not doomscrolling too long, etc. For me I found that there were certain things I was doing, like sugar consumption, that was making it harder for me to find joy in being-ness, or harder for me to get out of depressive thought loops. Your body is a machine that is part of this equation, not just ideas of the mind. Sometimes it is better to use the body to change the mind rather than use the mind to change how it feels in our bodies. 

MH: Are there specific books, movies, music or TV shows you recommend to the recovering nihilist?

BH: My four favorite movies on this shift towards life are Everything Everywhere All At Once, Groundhog Day, Wit, and Les Miserables.

Editor’s note: light spoilers for Everything Everywhere All at Once, Groundhog Day, and Les Mis below. I broke them all up with trailer videos so you can skip past the sections if you haven’t seen them yet and intend to.

EEAAO represents nihilism with the everything bagel. And the shift that illustrates the beauty of life is when Evelyn puts a googly eye on her third eye, symbolizing her acceptance of the absurd, and she starts using the absurd to her advantage. For play and connection with her daughter. That shift saves her daughter’s life from being sucked into the void.

Groundhog Day is an incredibly underrated movie on the meaning of life. Bill Murray gets stuck in a time loop where life becomes meaningless and consequences no longer matter. At first, he replaces meaning with pleasure. He spends his days filling up on donuts and trying to have sex with beautiful women. But the pleasure train isn't enough, so he tries to kill himself in a myraid of ways. Only then, does he shift into life as experience. He gives the old homeless man one hot meal before he dies, and even though he dies every day, he keeps doing it because the man deserves one last hot meal. He learns how to play the piano just for the joy of it. He dances, ice skates, ice scupts, and lives a life of service to others. He falls in love in a way that is genuine, where he enjoys trying to throw cards into a hat with a woman rather than trying to sleep with her. This love and service shift brings him out of his time loop and he enters life again, excited for a new day with someone he loves. It’s a beautiful story.

Wit is not a well-known film but its especially poignant for those who get lost, like me, in their own heads and forget that life is in your body and in connection. It is with Emma Thomson and speaks to how at the end of the day, our titles and even education don't matter. What matters is human connection.

Lastly, I love the end of the musical Les Mis. It makes me cry every time. In it Valjean, who could have chosen resentment for the life that was stolen from him, shifts into a life of love for his adopted daughter and service for his town. At the end of his life as he dies, the biological mom thanks him for loving her child, and his voice joins the voices of all the dead, voices that cry out from the dust towards freedom and love and against tyranny. Those 4 movies can always snap me back into the meaning of life. 

In the words of Les Miserables, for those who are still in it: “even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”