Getting personal: from doubting pastor's kid to [?]
A correspondence on borrowed beliefs and the terror of authentic choice
There's a particular kind of comfort that comes from never having to question your place in the world. For the first nineteen years of my life, I lived wrapped in that comfort like a warm blanket.
The church doors would fling open every Sunday morning in Old Klang Road, Malaysia, summoning the faithful to my father's church—the one he'd founded with my mother, both of them pastors with dreams of building a community of believers. And at the center of this spiritual ecosystem was me: the pastor's kid.
I wasn't the rebellious PK you see in movies. I thrived in the spotlight. By thirteen, I'd mastered the art of being charmingly irreverent without crossing any real lines—telling slightly inappropriate jokes to the youth group, watching their faces dance between shock and amusement as they calculated whether the pastor's son could really have said what they just heard.
When people asked about my faith, I had answers. Clean, practiced, inherited answers that flowed like a river I'd never thought to question the source of. I could deploy testimonies on command, recite creationist logic with confidence, and quote Scripture with the fluency of someone who'd never doubted its authority.
I was the jovial, seemingly carefree pastor's kid who could charm his way through any theological conversation. The church wasn't just where my parents worked—it was my stage, my playground, my identity. Everything made perfect sense.
Until Australia tore it all apart.
Debilitation of Belief
At nineteen, my father suggested I study overseas. "Do you want to study in Australia?" I don't recall having a concrete answer, but somehow I found myself agreeable. Within six months, I was living alone in a new land, facing new people, being asked new questions.
Questions that would destroy everything I thought I knew about myself.
"Why are you a Christian?" they'd ask with genuine curiosity. "Do you think there is a God?" "Why not have sex before marriage?" Each question pierced like an arrow aimed at assumptions I'd never examined. And to my growing horror, I realized I had no authentic answers. None. My supposed religion was nothing but endless mimicry, my deepest-held beliefs revolved around little more than the creeds and affirmations of my beloved community.
I could recite testimonies (again), deploy creationist logic (again), recount apologetic arguments (again and again and again). The same words, the same phrases, like a broken record—like a siloed echo chamber where each repetition became hollower than the last.
God is real God is real God is real—until the words lost all meaning, until they became mere sounds, empty vibrations bouncing around an increasingly desperate mind.
We humans have this peculiar torture: we just know when we're saying something we don't truly believe. It's like being called on in class when you're unprepared. All eyes turn to you. You stand up slowly, and suddenly it's not about answering the question—it's about the question piercing you. You stammer, trip over words, grope through thoughts and memory, trembling, until you're no longer attempting the right answer but desperately improvising a lifelike representation of knowledge you don't actually possess.
That was me, every day, for months. A walking, talking case of impostor syndrome made of borrowed beliefs and hollow certainties.
The Baby Tooth Agony
But the worst part wasn't discovering my faith might be wrong. It was the excruciating in-between—that torturous space where everything hangs precariously, neither staying nor going.
You know that stage when a baby tooth is coming loose? The most painful moment isn't when it's still solid or when it's finally fallen out—it's when it dangles precariously, held by mere threads. Every sensation becomes agony. The softest breeze, the slowest bite—everything tugs at what hangs so uncertainly. The tooth tries to stay attached yet tries to come loose at the same time, coming ever so close to losing itself completely, yet clinging on, uncertain but stubborn.
That's exactly what my faith felt like in those early months in Australia.
Sometimes fighting optimism would pour through me. I'd cry out to the God of my childhood, read the doubtful prayers of the Psalms, will my religious certainty back into being. My inherited beliefs would harden themselves like that stubborn tooth, refusing to either strengthen or fall away completely.
But at other times, I felt suspended over nothing—dangling above an abyss, hanging by threads so thin I could feel them fraying. If I let go, everything would come loose. But the idea of losing myself completely made me tremble with terror.
All reality seemed to hang in that balance, swinging between desperate faith and terrifying doubt. The innocence of my childhood beliefs was like a life preserver slowly losing air while I thrashed in unfamiliar waters.
Arc in the Book: The Simulacrum of Inherited Identities
Here's what I've learned since then: this crisis of borrowed beliefs isn't a malfunction—it's the birthplace of something more authentic. When you discover that your deepest convictions aren't really yours, you're not uncovering a problem to be solved. You're encountering what I call the Vexed Question [?] that makes genuine choice possible for the first time.
In my upcoming book The Last Existential Crisis, I explore how this moment of existential rupture opens up what I call "correspondence"—a way of living with questions rather than rushing to foreclose them with inherited answers. The pastor's kid crisis revealed something universal: we are all, in various ways, living borrowed lives within what I call the Simulacrum [o]—that vast ecosystem of inherited answers we mistake for our own thoughts.
But recognizing this isn't the death of authenticity; it's where authenticity finally becomes possible. The ventriloquist's dummy realizes the voice was never its own—and in that recognition, discovers it might have something original to say after all.
This is what I mean by moving from performance to correspondence. Instead of executing scripts you've inherited, you start improvising responses to what's actually happening in your life right now. The baby tooth has to fall out before the permanent one can grow in.
An Invitation to Correspond
I'm sharing this because I suspect many of you have your own version of inherited identity that felt unshakeable until it wasn't. Maybe it was political beliefs absorbed unconsciously from family dinner conversations. Maybe it was career ambitions that were never really yours. Maybe it was supporting Manchester United. Maybe it was ideas about success, relationships, or meaning that crumbled the moment you tried to examine them honestly.
The pastor's kid crisis is just one version of a universal human predicament: How do we distinguish between who we are and who we've been programmed to be? And what happens when we discover that line is much blurrier than we thought?
So here's my question for this correspondence: What beliefs or identity did you inherit that felt solid until it started dangling by threads, like a baby tooth? When did you first feel that piercing recognition that some of your deepest convictions might not actually be yours?
Let's map this territory together—because if we're going to question everything we've inherited, we might as well do it in good company.
This is the second in a series of correspondences based on my upcoming book "The Last Existential Crisis." The Last Existential Crisis is coming 2025. This Substack will share exclusive excerpts, behind-the-scenes insights, and ongoing correspondence about what it means to be human in an age of infinite, lossy answers.
What's Coming
Over the coming weeks, I'll be sharing insights from the book that explore:
Why staring at your own hands can trigger an existential crisis
Civilisation, history, progress as an avoidance of the difficult questions
What happens when the theater of self-improvement finally collapses
Why nightmares are essential to sanity
Ultimate miscommunication in the form of the problem of suicide
What the jazz musician knows about authenticity that therapy does not