A noticeable decline in spirituality and religiosity across Western societies over the past seventy years has unfolded alongside a clear rise in mental‑health challenges, and many cultural observers see these trends as intertwined. While the relationship is complex, several patterns help explain why the loss of spiritual frameworks may leave people more vulnerable to psychological distress.
For much of Western history, religious traditions offered a common narrative about purpose, suffering, and moral identity. As church attendance and religious affiliation began to fall sharply from the mid‑20th century onward, many people found themselves without a stable source of meaning. Without shared rituals or metaphysical grounding, individuals increasingly had to construct identity and purpose alone, which can heighten feelings of anxiety and existential uncertainty.
The same period saw Western culture shift toward radical individualism, emphasising personal freedom over communal belonging. Religious communities once provided intergenerational support, social cohesion, and a sense of being held by something larger. Their decline has contributed to greater loneliness – now recognised as a major predictor of depression and anxiety.
Psychologists such as Carl Jung argued that when traditional spiritual structures fade, the psyche seeks substitutes in consumerism, self‑optimisation or therapeutic culture. These can offer comfort but rarely provide the deep existential anchoring that spiritual traditions once supplied. The result is a population more materially comfortable yet often more emotionally unmoored.
Interestingly, modern psychology has begun reintroducing spiritual concepts – mindfulness, meaning‑making, compassion – suggesting an implicit recognition that humans need some form of transcendence to stay mentally grounded.
In the almost forty years I have been a freelance contributor to Tracks Surfing Magazine, no other story of mine has received a more positive response than the long-form series Dark Lineage, published in 2023. People still talk to me about it. For those who didn’t see or read it, the story’s subtitle explains what I set out to document: The Bad Boys of Australian Surfing and Why They Self-Destruct.
I explore not only how the eight legendary surfers, Kevin Brennan, Keith Paull, Michael Peterson, Joe Engel, Nick Wood, Shane Herring and Chris Davidson were similarly driven to succeed, but also how they were equally driven to destroy themselves; seemingly disappointed by the fact that achieving their goals didn’t make them feel how they hoped it might. I researched their past and discovered absent fathers, childhood abuse and neglect, and a recurring lone wolf mentality.
But something that has occurred to me over the last few years is that the crisis they suffered from was fundamentally spiritual. It seems to me that the downfall of these surfers stems from a lack of inner grounding – an absence of a stable identity, inherent self-worth, or connection to something greater than themselves. Without such a foundation, their sense of self became fragile and dependent entirely on external validation, leaving them hollow when success failed to provide the redemption they sought. This is sometimes described as a “God-shaped hole in one’s soul.” An existential event that has led to many abusing drugs and alcohol or going mad.
I realised that ultimately, the tragedy of the blessed members of the Dark Lineage was the curse of equating achievement with salvation. The series exposes the dangers of tying identity to performance and the spiritual void that fame cannot fill. Through this lens, the story reveals the fragility of ego, the relentless search for meaning, and how talent can become both an asset and a trap, perpetuating a cycle in which men mistake ability for identity and accomplishment for true fulfillment.
But just as an active alcoholic might curse his bad luck to be addicted to grog, if the journey is completed and he enters into recovery, it can also lead to an even more exquisite experience than surfing: a spiritual awakening. In this way, the diabolical path of many addicts, including me, has forced us to surrender. By having even the slightest willingness to believe that there might be a power greater than ourselves that has our own best interest at heart, we embark on life’s real journey. It’s what the religious refer to as “Letting go and letting God,” while the spiritual – or philosophical – call it “Just letting go.”
Sixty years ago, in February of 1966, when I was just four-years-old and sitting in a little chair at a little desk in kindergarten at Rose Bay Public School, that I heard for the first time, during a class called Scripture, about God. Until that point, my father was the one whom I thought was the bearded one in charge. Back then, parental roles were divided, and while Dad provided and protected, Mum did everything else, including comforting and encouraging.
At RBPS, every morning, the entire school recited the Lord’s Prayer together. Something that has saved me on many occasions, during the intervening half-century of pagan and heathen shenanigans, as I both metaphorically and literally fell to my knees and asked God for help. It’s extraordinary how naturally praying to God comes to even the most ardent atheist if he finds himself in enough of a jam, particularly if he thinks his life depends on it.
In my surfing life a few of the times I’ve found myself praying desperately to a God that I didn’t know or understand included when I was caught in the G-Land tsunami in 1994; and a year later when my legs were pinned under a load of surfboards in the trailer of a ute in New Guinea, which was sliding sideways at a high speed and I thought was going to flip and roll down the side of the mountain we were on; or when I free-fell out of the lip of the biggest wave I’ve ever caught, a twenty footer, in Hanalei Bay, Kauai, in 2004.
It could be argued that a spiritual experience is merely the fleeting absence of ego. Perhaps, by merely contemplating a power greater than ourselves, we momentarily transcend the bondage of self and our desperate clinging to our identity. And maybe this allows us to “lose ourselves” momentarily and opens up the possibility of entering a “flow state.”
I believe that, as surfers, during our finest moments, we concentrate so deeply that we leave our egos behind and become one with nature. Think of the magnificence of some of the greatest surfing performances you’ve either seen in real life or on film or video. Times when the surfers became one with the wave and danced like crazy demons, touched by God, while not just walking on water, but running.
My best experience with this was in 1984, my finest hour. Or more precisely, my finest 10 seconds; when I pulled into Speedies at G-Land for the first time. A moment captured by chance, by my cousin Paul, on Super 8, which found its way into the beginning of Billabong’s first VHS, 1987’s Surf into Summer. I remember clearly, looking at the water ahead of me going flat as the long wall reared up vertically, and praying, “God, please help me now!” as I pulled into what appeared to be a closeout.
Then, most recently, as a Christian, when a three metre White Pointer thrashed through a bait ball only a few metres from where I was paddling through deep water to my home break. Only then, as a believer, my prayer was no longer “Please God, get me out of here,” but instead “Thy will be done.” This transformed the moment of horror into an experience of peace and acceptance. A profound understanding that all was well in both the here and the hereafter, despite whatever was about to happen. It was both a revelation and a transformation. I recognised, for the first time, the interrelationship between suffering and sacrifice, and truly letting go. And herein lies the resolution of what Joseph Campbell describes as the hero’s journey: the arc in which an ordinary person is called out of their familiar world, undergoes trials and transformation with the help of mentors and allies, and returns home changed, bearing new insight or power.
A hallmark of the madness of these times, and ourselves as individuals, is the truth of where Godlessness goes. Unless one can attribute good things to God, there is a high probability that one will be tempted to take credit for them. This is not only a disaster because it breeds arrogance and deprives one of the wonderful feeling of gratitude, but also prevents creativity from flowing through him.
Or potentially even worse, we attribute greatness to others, who often seem to have such good intentions. But, as the wise inform us, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” The fact of the matter is encapsulated in the quote by G.K. Chesterton: “For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.”
And so now I believe that had any of the members of the Dark Lineage found God, or at the very least spirituality through overcoming ego, they could have continued on to enjoy even greater gifts from the Almighty. But this is a lesson we need not learn from our own mistakes; we can, in fact, learn it from theirs.
