Six Ways to Flourish Through the Holidays
Just Kidding, I don't believe in that. This post is about the tragic death of Dave Hollis and how you shouldn't consume Rachel Hollis content anymore.
You’ll be happy to know that I haven’t perished from this wretched illness—yet. Actually, I feel vaguely better. I’ve moved from my bed to a chair, but I’m probably not going to run around and do any of the things I so brashly inscribed in my calendar at the beginning of the week, like “do the laundry,” “Christmas shop,” and “eat a gorgeous St. Nicholas dinner.” Ah me, how brief and terrible life is.
To cheer myself up about my overall wellness as a person, I checked in on Rachel this morning to see what she recommends. I know you probably already know how to get through The Holidays TM because they happen every year, and you are a normal person and don’t overschedule yourself and stuff like that. But maybe you aren’t sure about how things work. This video is 6 “hacks”—otherwise known as regular life, I think—for a healthy holiday.
What I love so much about this video, if you bothered to watch it—admittedly, it is deeply boring and why would you when you could read a book or watch street cooking from around the world on Facebook reels—is that Rachel does really nail home how important your outward appearance is during this stressful season. It may be that the Lord looks on the heart and that you’re sinning in sundry ways by hating all your friends and relations and thinking vile and idolatrous thoughts about God, but have you considered that hidden calories in your pumpkin spice latte leads to bloating, inflammation, water retention, and fat? Rachel is here to correct the grave error of being more worried about your sins than your BMI.
I jest, of course. The Holiday Season TM is busy and stressful, and this year, catastrophically short. Advent Four is quite Literally also Christmas Eve which means we lose a week of preparation time. I honestly can’t imagine getting through it without having an actual reason to celebrate—like Jesus. I feel this more keenly after reading this tragic piece about the death of Rachel’s husband, Dave (h/t Challies). It has been a bit since I read Nancey Pearcey’s Toxic War on Masculinity, but it immediately came to mind in working through the article. The complicated relationship between Dave and Rachel illumines rather nicely the dark terrors that married people are up against. It might be called, Social Media’s Toxic War on Dave Hollis and other men who listen to the siren call of money and their wives’ soul-corrupting determination to overshare. He went from this:
When Girl, Wash Your Face published, Dave was the head of global distribution for Disney. He spent his days pitching release strategies to stars like Dwayne Johnson and booking blockbusters like Star Wars: The Force Awakens into theaters. It was a job that came with stock options and tickets to the Oscars. In the spring of 2018, he invited his childhood friend Shawn Wehan for lunch on the studio lot. Sitting in an executive dining room one table over from Bob Iger, the legendary Disney CEO, Wehan remembers Dave telling him, “I could have that job in 10 years.”
To this:
Dave, once embarrassed by Rachel’s candor, soon was sharing his own insecurities and intimate details of their marriage. He went along with it when Rachel encouraged followers to join them in “Sexy September” and commit to having sex every day of the month.
Suddenly even the most mundane moments were spun into carefully curated posts. One afternoon, he ran late to a meeting at company headquarters, an employee who worked directly with Dave recalls. As she waited for him, she saw on his Instagram that he’d just finished traveling with all four kids on his own. A superdad on the go.
“You must be so tired,” she remembers saying when he arrived.
“We had our nanny flying with us,” she says Dave told her. “But that doesn’t do as great on social.”
His Instagram account, once dedicated to occasional pictures of his kids and pretty sunsets, became a stream of branded narrative often averaging more than one post a day for an audience that grew to more than 400,000.
Because it wasn’t real, eventually the cracks became apparent even to the couple themselves. Rachel divorced Dave, if I remember correctly, right after reading Glennon’s ghastly Untamed. You should read the whole piece to discover more about how Dave’s devolving relationship with Social Media progressed after the divorce—it wasn’t pretty, but here’s the bit about his death:
But Lynn says she believes those drugs were treatments Dave sought for a different problem. She blames viral fame for his death and the platforms that power it. “They’re all drugs.” Months later, Wehan described Dave’s drug use as the “locked door” that influencers never open to their followers. At the memorial service, Wehan tried to piece together his own memories with snapshots from strangers who knew Dave from his online life, fragments he struggled to put into a fuller picture. Most troubling of all was how Dave, the man who’d surrounded himself with friends since childhood, who had nearly half a million followers at his command, had died alone. Dave was found, he learned, with his phone on his chest.
It’s interesting to me how much the “overshare” is such a necessary part of online communication. It is curious because what is being “over” shared is often only a fragment of a person, or even a lie about them. You’re not giving yourself, you’re offering bits to be consumed by others, and then consuming the likes and acclamations they send back. The trouble was that, for Dave, deep rejection was mixed in with all the acceptance, and that weighed more heavily than all the likes he could ever acquire. Even the savviest of influencers aren’t spiritually aware enough to understand what is really happening. Dave wrestled with himself, with his wife, with the world, and tragically lost.
Wandering back to Rachel’s latest video about staying “healthy” during the holidays, it’s not as if there is no spiritual content buried in amongst the advice about how to eat without becoming enormous. She always manages to slip in being a “best” or “worst version of yourself.” I can’t tell you how much I hate this. It complicates everything so much. It’s like thinking about your brain like a computer, or any of the other kinds of technological metaphors that we’ve corporately accepted, again, without thinking about what they portend.
The fact is, you are a self—body, soul, mind, and spirit together. You are a spiritual self who will live forever. Your choices now do matter, for eternity. The current way around that existential horror is to imagine social media as the new kind of work you have to do to get to heaven. You can be a “work in progress” or “a version of yourself” or “present over perfect.” Essentially, these are all like Instagram filters that shield you from the horrifying reality that your deliberate and willful sin has separated you forever from the source of life.
Celebrating the birth of our Lord Jesus is a fantastic way to get off the health optimization treadmill. It allows you to discover that there is a remedy for your sin. That there is a way to be with God rather than alone. And also, usually, there’s a potluck or two and maybe even a cookie exchange. Here are my six pieces of advice for getting through the busy season:
One: Ask yourself, what would Mary eat? At the very least, you might be distracted from the plate of cold, dead tater tots on the counter.
Two: Get some movement in once a week by going to church and forgetting all the things you have to do when you get home.
Three: Read the Bible every day.
Four: Pray EVERY DAY.
Five: Scold a lot of people about how they’re not Adventing as hard as you. Start to make them feel bad and then laugh and give them a hug and tell them nothing matters anyway because Jesus is coming back, hopefully sooner rather than later, and we just have to bare-knuckle it by enjoying ourselves and each other in as godly and chaste a way as possible by constantly confessing our sins, depending on the grace and consolation of the Holy Spirit, and worrying about the wellbeing and comfort of other people more than ourselves.
Six: Go to church on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day if you can. Distribute candy and then enjoy watching all the thin people squirm. Make it an affection test. Say, “I brought you this candy on purpose as an expression of my love for you. Please eat it in front of me and tell me how much you love it.”
Bonus Seventh: Take a break from Social Media. Or don’t, if you are posting beautiful pictures that I want to see. Hey! What if you thought about it for yourself and made up your own mind instead of taking advice from weirdos and strangers?
Have a nice day!
Eight : read Anne Kennedy. She’ll make you smile with her wit and think with her thoughtful prose.
I could only make it 1/3rd the way through Rachel’s podcast. It is self absorbed, self focused hollow nothingness that lies in stark contrast to the Advent season of why Christ came to save the lost. She is the very poster child of lostness and need for Christ to save us from ourselves.