Rainn Wilson came to Stanford last Friday night and pulled off something that only one with his esteemed level of cultural cachet could: talking about religion, spirituality, and death in front of an auditorium filled with college students, and keeping them mostly engaged for two hours.
Those who eagerly scooped up tickets to see the actor were no doubt hoping for something akin to a stand-up special, or at least the opportunity to hear him talk frankly about comedy and show business. The event itself didn’t really advertise what exactly Wilson would be doing with the undivided attention of so many Stanford students—a modest slice of a whole generation that formed its comedic inclination toward witty, awkward humor through watching “The Office.” Wilson seemed to know the unspoken expectations, and he delighted in completely subverting them.
“I’m going to give you all a strange little discussion, so whatever you were expecting— throw it out,” he said as he took the podium. He came onstage looking Northwest Normal: shaggy hair, low-key hipster glasses, skinny-cut jeans (but not too skinny), sweater, cool sneakers. Needless to say, he did not give off the unsettlingly rigid intensity of Dwight. He looked like someone you might run into at Whole Foods on a Sunday.
It’s uncertain if he was fostering this image intentionally, but the topic of his lecture, once it became apparent, might also be found in the checkout aisle of an organic grocery store: his spiritual journey to who he is today, and how his successful media company, SoulPancake, is the “culmination” of that journey.
“I wanted to create a positive, fun, interesting, unique thing,” Wilson said of SoulPancake. “There’s a lot more of that on the Internet now, but back when we started it, about eight years ago, the Internet was just the worst of humanity.”
Wilson talked in equal parts about his own life story, the mission and ambition of SoulPancake, and big words like “spirituality.” These things blended together over the course of the lecture, with generous sprinklings of life advice and insightful cultural commentary, as he explained how his own experience growing up—and learning to define spirituality and God for himself—informed the company he eventually co-founded.
Talking about these things now, as our collective culture nurses its spiritual hipster hangover, Wilson was walking a very thin line between being taken seriously and being seen as just another disappointingly loony actor behind an iconic TV character. He seemed to know he was dancing near the danger zone, and he managed to never really lose his audience by balancing his sincere appeal that we focus on “the stuff of the spirit, the stuff of the heart,” with his ruthless comic chops.
The alternatively earnest and jarring tone of the talk seemed aligned with Wilson’s personal style, and embodied in the ethos of SoulPancake. An introductory video about the company included uplifting music and an operatic Oprah Winfrey singing the word “love”–and it concluded with Wilson behind the wheel of a minivan, running down one of his cofounders with alarmingly enthusiastic sound effects. The flashes of dark wit were an effective sleight of hand, as the true substance of the talk—his life as seen through the interweaving lenses of spirituality, philosophy, and creativity—occasionally veered too far into the cloyingly earnest for his young audience to completely buy into.
“Don’t get scared by the word ‘spirituality,’” he cautioned at one point. “Spirituality is a part of the human experience and we need to dig into it. It’s a word that needs redefinition.”
To Wilson, spirituality is “everything we don’t have in common with monkeys.” It’s the “acts of selfless service, connection, pondering things, creating art, exploring science with a passion to understand the universe.” It’s the “fun stuff.”
His appeals, as well as his little nuggets of hard-earned wisdom, felt honest, true, and universal. However, Wilson’s honesty—especially with the main organizing principle of the talk being his personal spiritual journey—made the talk seem a bit sermon-esque at points. Wilson was not trying to convert his audience to any given religion, but the moral arc of the lecture sometimes suggested he was.
At these points, it was tempting to tune out entirely, to write Wilson off. But it was definitely worth the effort to push past that inclination, to stay engaged and listen for his nuggets of wisdom, earned through a life spent chasing a dream career in the arts, of reading some of the world’s greatest religious texts, of discovering how to successfully create a company that could combine joy and wisdom in programs such as Kid President.
The truth is that when someone wise and experienced shares his life story, and delves into those deeper, scarier, alluring topics such as spirituality, philosophy, and love, he will veer into the not-so-universal occasionally. Life stories are inherently an individual thing, resulting in subjective answers to the most personal questions.
And yet these are the questions we all want help answering. There’s immense benefit in listening to people be honest, in being engaged as they talk about their spirituality, even if you may not agree with and subscribe to its every detail. That’s part of what we’re doing here, as students: taking in everything and then exercising our ever-developing sense of discernment, picking what works for us out of a broad corpus of books and experience and lectures, and incorporating it into our own life stories. We’ll probably come up with some different answers to those big questions, but it’s worth it to ask them, and it’s also worth it to listen to others’ answers.
“I want you to live a beautiful story—that’s what it’s all about,” Wilson said. “The world would like you to be materialistic, cynical, and distracted a lot. It doesn’t want you to think deeply about your life.
“Ask the questions that are fun and gooey and interesting and difficult—what is love? Is there a god? Do we have free will? What can we learn about life from death? This is the gooey good stuff of being a human being.”
These are worthy questions, and Wilson gave a talk worthy of inspiring us to ask them. It’s a shame that the only reason he was given the opportunity to do so—and the main reason his audience gave him (for the most part) the leeway to wander so close to the deep end—was that he’s a famous comedian. There are no doubt others also worth listening to in this context, who lack the cultural ubiquity that seems necessary to earn our attention.
I left Wilson’s talk knowing some prize bits of “Office” trivia, which is what I had gone in expecting to get. (For those of you wondering, Wilson’s favorite Dwight line is “Fact: I am faster than 90% of all snakes,” and he’d “screw Angela, kill Gabe, marry Halpert.”) But leaving the auditorium, I wasn’t gushing over these pop culture minutiae; I was happy that I had gotten the curveball, that I left the talk slightly unsettled, and with the desire to read.
(‘15) hails from Cotati, California and has a compulsive obsession with all things film, politics, and creative writing. Her favorite pastimes include overanalyzing screenplays while watching TV, hiking, and running illegally through other people’s property.