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The United States has long had a great deal of religious diversity, and was built on the idea of religious tolerance. But one type of belief was always rare: none. Until recently, that is. According to the Pew Research Center, the percentage of Americans who profess no religion (as opposed even to having one that they rarely or never practice) has risen from 16 percent in 2007 to 29 percent in 2021. (Back in the early 1970s, only about 5 percent of Americans espoused this position.)

This phenomenon of declining belief is of great concern to many religious leaders, as one can easily imagine. The Catholic theologian and bishop Robert Barron has built an enormous internet-based ministry in no small part by seeking to reach these so-called nones. Rather than simply railing against a secular culture, Barron turns the criticism around and calls the growth of this disavowal “an unnerving commentary on the effectiveness of our evangelical strategies.”

The growing phenomenon of the nones, however, is not evidence of a lack of interest in spiritual life. Many today who previously fell away from their faith—or never had one to begin with—are seeking something faith-like in their life. They are open to thinking about such commitments, but just don’t know what to look for. Maybe this describes you. If so, ironically, the research data on why people say they became nones in the first place might hold the answer of what to focus on to set you on your spiritual path.

In tracking the rise of the nones in American religious life, Pew has also studied people who had faith in childhood but left it in adulthood. In 87 percent of the cases, this came down to one of three reasons: They stopped believing (49 percent), they felt too uncertain (18 percent), or they didn’t like the way the faith was practiced (20 percent). More concisely, most people leave their faith because of belief, feeling, or practice.

[Derek Thompson: The true cost of the churchgoing bust]

These are the reasons people quit religion, but we can also infer that these same three aspects of religious experience are central to maintaining faith—or to finding it anew and then keeping it. You might say that belief, feeling, and practice are the macronutrients—the necessary elements—of healthy faith. With only one of them, you will be spiritually malnourished: Belief alone is desiccated theory; by itself, feeling is unreliable sentimentality; practice in isolation is dogmatism. To build a new, sustaining spiritual diet, you need to focus on all three.

Many great thinkers have made essentially this point. For example, the ardently religious Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote in his book of daily pensées, A Calendar of Wisdom, that in times of trouble, “you have to embrace what the wisdom of humanity, your intellect, and your heart tell you: that the meaning of life is to serve the force that sent you into the world.”

Feeling is fundamental to religious experience, as scholarship on emotion has shown. Some religions elevate trancelike states of ecstasy, such as samadhi in both Hinduism and Buddhism, which involves complete meditative absorption. Most faiths emphasize the role of the emotional adoration of the divine, as in the Prophet Muhammad’s teaching that believers should “love Allah with all of your hearts.” One cannot rely on feeling alone, however, because it is so mutable. As the 16th-century founder of the Jesuit Order, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, noted, faith features feelings of not only consolation but also desolation, at moments when God feels absent from one’s life.

The second element of faith is belief, which are tenets you have accepted as truths, at least provisionally. These truths are not testable as scientific propositions are, so, in Thomas Aquinas’s definition, they are the “mean between science and opinion.” These are the propositions that you learn from reading and listening to other believers, and that you ultimately choose to accept; examples would be God’s laws for the Jewish people or the Eightfold Path to enlightenment for Buddhists.

Accepting such beliefs as truth does not mean they’re impossible to revise. In fact, research has shown that spiritual people are generally open to reflection on existential questions and willing to modify their views. But these tenets of faith are based on considered arguments, rather than feelings, so they tend to be stable and enduring.

[Peter Wehner: David Brooks’s journey toward faith]

Finally, religious practice offers a set of actions and rituals that you commit to observing in order to demonstrate your adherence to the faith for yourself and others. This is the element of faith that takes it out of the realm of abstraction and makes it part of your real, physical life. You can say you believe in the ideas of Zen, but Zen itself will not become a meaningful part of your life until you practice Zen meditation. Similarly, you can say you believe in the divine inspiration of the Quran, but that doesn’t mean much if you don’t actually read it.

You might assume that any practice requires both belief and feeling—entailing that, for example, you would feel impelled to go to a political demonstration only if you already believed in the cause. But you may have noticed the opposite occurring in your life: If you go to a demonstration uncommitted, you may find that the experience stimulates feelings and belief, which might then lead you to go to future demonstrations.

This is a basic form of what academics call “path dependence,” a phenomenon in which past decisions lead to similar actions in future. The concept is usually used by economists and political scientists to explain institutional inertia or resistance to organizational change, but the same principle can suggestively be applied to individual human behavior. Such path dependence can be affected by both positive and negative feedback, the sense either that people’s choices elicit increasing returns or that they are self-reinforcing or “locked in.”

That feedback loop can be a problem if your religious practice makes you become rigid in your ideology; economists, for example, have modeled that voter path dependence might be one of the causes of our increasing polarization. As it pertains to faith, the trick, then, is to be wary of your path dependence if it results in negative feedback: If you feel or behave like a “locked-in” party-line voter, you might be too rigid in your belief. Yet if you use path dependence on your faith exclusively for positive feedback—that is, your belief elicits increasing returns, perhaps boosting your altruism, community ties, or sense of meaning in life—then you will be using it as a force for good.

Put simply, be completely honest with yourself about why you’re practicing your faith; if your belief spurs positive feedback, carry on.

[Faith Hill: The messy line between faith and reason]

A healthy faith thus requires all three sources of spiritual nourishment. The data suggest that when one or more of those elements—of belief, feeling, and practice—are missing, people fall away. So if you’re looking for faith in your life, you need to seek all three.

Here is an optimal way to do so. In Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom, he quotes an ancient Chinese proverb: “Those who know the rules of true wisdom are baser than those who love them. Those who love them are baser than those who follow them.” In other words, to develop a healthy faith, practice is more important than feeling, and feeling is more important than belief. This implies the reverse of what most people do to develop a spiritual life: They read and think to acquire knowledge and opinions—that is, beliefs—then they see if they “feel” their faith, and only then will they move on to practicing it. But as the proverb implies, this order of priorities won’t work very well.

The right approach is to start practicing, notwithstanding your current state of belief and feeling. If the practice evokes sentiment in you, then study the faith to develop knowledge and opinions. This is an experimental, hands-on approach, much in the manner of how many inventions and innovations come about: An inventor tries something, sees whether it works, and then figures out precisely what’s going on.

In a faith context, this means that you might go to a service of worship a few times. Then you could interrogate your feelings as to whether the services stimulated something deep within (or, alternatively, whether they left you cold). Finally, if the former feels true, you could start investigating the belief system intellectually.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

The three elements of faith can be useful to apply to many parts of life, not just your spiritual quest. Consider marriage, for instance: Without the feelings of love and affection, a relationship is dead; without knowledge and opinions about your spouse, it has no depth; without practicing the rituals of love, your partnership will wither. This same algorithmic progression of faith can also map out your path to marriage. You start out with practice in the form of a date; you continue the relationship if you feel attraction and the beginnings of love; the pairing develops as you gain knowledge and form favorable opinions about your partner.

Obviously, this connubial example is not a random one. To find faith is to find a form of love—a love of the divine, or a rapturous spiritual connection with the universe. But like all good and worthwhile things in life, faith and love merit deep thought and serious effort.

In January, the writer Gary Shteyngart spent a week of his life on the inaugural voyage of the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise ship ever. Like many a great novelist before him, he went in search of the “real” America. He left his Russian novels at home, bought some novelty T-shirts, and psychically prepared to be the life of the party. About halfway through, Shteyngart called his editor and begged to be allowed to disembark and fly home. His desperate plea was rejected, resulting in a semi-sarcastic daily log of his misery.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Shteyngart discusses his “seven agonizing nights” on the cruise ship, where he roamed from mall to bar to infinity pool trying to make friends. He shares his theories about why cruise lovers nurture an almost spiritual devotion to an experience that, to him, inspires material for a “low-rent White Lotus.” And he shares what happened when cruise lovers actually read what he wrote about their beloved ship.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Gary Shteyngart: Hi.

Hanna Rosin: Hi. It’s Hanna.

Shteyngart: Hi, Hanna. How are you?

Rosin: Good.

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

Shteyngart: It’s cloudy here.

Rosin: It is? In a good way? In a way that makes your hair look full and rich?

Shteyngart: Oh, yeah. (Laughs.) It does add fullness to my hair, which is always a good thing at this point. I think spring has finally sprung. And I teach in the spring semester, and I’m like, God, I just want this to be over. I just want to go out and play.

Rosin: You teach fiction?

Shteyngart: Yeah. I can’t teach rocket science.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: Cruising technology.

Rosin: This is writer Gary Shteyngart.

Rosin: There’s just a Russian stereotype.

Shteyngart: (Laughs.)

Rosin: I’m like, You could teach astronomy or physics. I don’t know.

Shteyngart: Chess.

Rosin: Chess. Exactly.

Rosin: Gary Shteyngart grew up in the Soviet Union and immigrated to the U.S. when he was 7. He’s written several award-winning novels, and he was a “literary consultant” on Succession, the HBO show.

Mostly, he is known for his satire, which can range from gentle to deadly. So who better to write an article about the inaugural voyage of the largest cruise ship ever built?

Shteyngart: This whole thing came about because I was on Twitter, and I saw a tweet that just showed the—may I use salty language here?

Rosin: Yes.

Shteyngart: The ass of the ship is how I describe it. I don’t know any of these terms, but, you know, with all the water parks and crap on it. And so I reposted the tweet, and I said, If somebody wants to send me on this cruise, please specify the level of sarcasm desired.

Rosin: Really? (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: And then—God bless The Atlantic—within seconds, I had an assignment.

Rosin: That ass belongs to the Icon of the Seas, a ship that can hold more than 7,000 passengers and 2,000 crew. It has 20 decks with seven swimming pools and six waterslides. The ship itself is about five times bigger than the Titanic. And I’m pretty sure the Titanic did not have a swim-up bar, much less the world’s largest swim-up bar.

In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Gary describes it this way: “The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots … This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.”

To prepare for that voyage, Gary wore a meatball T-shirt he found in a store in Little Italy. More specifically, the shirt read: “Daddy’s Little Meatball.”

Shteyngart: You know, I grew up in Queens and, being a spicy meat-a-ball, I thought it was funny. A lot of cruisers were angry. They thought I was being sexual or sexualizing. It’s very interesting because I thought that T-shirt was the bond between a child and his daddy or her daddy.

Rosin: (Laughs.) You thought it’d just be a conversation starter.

Shteyngart: I thought it’d be a conversation starter. If they had a “Mommy’s Little Meatball” T-shirt, that would’ve been preferable. I feel much more a mommy’s little meatball. But they only have daddy.

I actually thought, My expectations are low, but I bet I’m going to run into awesome people. And I love to drink and chat, and this is—I guess that’s what you do on a cruise ship. And I knew I was going to have a suite, so I was like, Maybe I’ll throw a suite party.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: Invite some people over. On land, I really am quite sociable. I remember I was just leaving a Columbia—I teach at Columbia—leaving a Columbia party, and somebody was saying, Well, there goes 75 percent of the party.

Rosin: Oh, that’s a compliment.

Shteyngart: It’s a compliment. I’m kind of a party animal. So I was super—I thought, you know, Look, 5,000 people. I’m going to find a soulmate or two.

Rosin: Great writers before Gary have deluded themselves in this way before. Most notably: David Foster Wallace, who ended up spending much of his cruise adventure alone in his cabin. They venture out, looking to swim with some “real Americans.” And instead, they are quickly confronted by the close-up details, like the nightly entertainment—

Shteyngart: There was a kind of packaged weirdness in the shows. Goddamn—the ice-skating tribute to the periodic table. What the hell was that?

Rosin: The food—

Shteyngart: It did not have the consistency of steak. It was like some kind of pleathery, weird—like this poor cow had been slapped around before it died.

Rosin: And the physical touch of an actual “real American.”

Shteyngart: He’d throw his arms around them drunkenly, and they’d be like, Ehh.

First of all, I just want to say, Royal Caribbean—the people that run it are geniuses. The CEO’s name is—I’m not making this up—Jason Liberty.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: His name is Liberty! I mean, I don’t know. What the hell? Like, exactly, if I was to write a novel character with, you know, Jason Liberty, people would be like, Oh, he’s being pretentious. But no. That’s his actual name.

I think they know the tastes of their clientele so well and are able to mirror it back to them, but also to give them this feeling that they’re awesome for doing something like this. One of my favorite slogans—you get all this literature—This isn’t a vacation day spent. It’s bragging rights earned.

Rosin: Mmm. It’s velvet ropey, like you’re in a club.

Shteyngart: It’s a velvet ropey situation. You are an adventurer. You’ve earned this. You have bragging rights. But when you enter the ship, you’re in a mall. And the mall is large and multileveled, and you can buy a Rolex at three times what it would cost on land and all this other crap.

And then there’s all these neighborhoods, and you can do whatever the hell you want. You can get trashed or have sex, which, whatever—I mean with your spouse, although there were some swingers on board. But you could do whatever you want in a way that you can’t on land, in a way, I think, because so many of these people are just working their asses off.

Rosin: Right.

Shteyngart: That was a topic of conversation that came up. People were like, Yeah, I work 90 hours a week, and this is my chance to just, you know, be blotto.

Rosin: You’re hinting at this. Part of being on a ship is being inducted into the language and the levels of the ship, and can you walk us through that? You mentioned, for example: You walk in, you’re in a mall. But I bet, eventually, you start to see more. What are the neighborhoods? You said the word neighborhoods. What does that even mean? And what are the distinctions?

Shteyngart: I think this ship and other Royal Caribbean ships of this size—although this is the biggest—try to create this idea of a city, like you’re in a city that happens to be at sea.

One of the funniest neighborhoods is called Central Park, which is literally another mall but with a couple of shrubs growing out here and there. I thought that was really funny—also, using a New York City landmark in one of the least New Yorkiest milieus in the world.

Rosin: I guess it just has to be terms—a word—people recognize. And people vaguely recognize it. They don’t need to know about Olmsted or live in Brooklyn.

Shteyngart: (Laughs.) No, no.

Rosin: They just vaguely recognize Central Park.

Shteyngart: It’d be funny if I asked—boy, would I get a lot of flak if I came up to a cruiser and be like, I don’t think this really matches Olmsted’s vision of Central Park. I don’t know. Meatball not happy. Maybe I should have used a Russian accent. Like, Hello. I am Meatball.

Rosin: Meatball not happy.

Shteyngart: Meatball not happy with Olmsted. So there’s that. There’s Surfside, which is a very funny kind of Disneyland for kids with—

Rosin: And are you walking—like, I still don’t get it. So you go in, and how big is a neighborhood? And then how do you get to the next neighborhood?

Shteyngart: Right, so everything’s on decks, so you take these elevators. I think I spent half the cruise on elevators just going from one place to another.

Rosin: Yeah.

Shteyngart: But I thought I would be in the Suites neighborhood. Because this whole thing—and Royal Caribbean is also brilliant at this. These people—really, a Nobel Prize in Economics. It’s a constant scramble. You constantly want a higher status, especially if you’ve been cruising forever. You want to reach Pinnacle status, which you have to do after 700 days (or nights, rather) on the ship, which is two years, right? Almost.

Rosin: Wow. And so what does that get you?

Shteyngart: So the Pinnacles have their own—I mean, there’s some priority things they get. Like, I was not allowed to go into one dining room at one point, and the guy—I didn’t know what Pinnacle was, so I thought the guy was saying, It’s just pendejo dining. He had a thick accent. I was like, I’m wearing a meatball T-shirt. I am the essence of pendejo. And he was like, No, no, pendejos only. But he was trying to say Pinnacles, I guess. So that kind of stuff.

They have their own little lounge, which I wasn’t allowed into. And some of the other cruisers who are not Pinnacles but have somehow gotten into the lounge, they’re very angry about being denied. And they’re like, There’s nothing in there. There’s just a coffee machine in there.

But the other thing is the suite status, which I had because by the time The Atlantic commissioned this piece, almost all the cabins were sold out. Everybody wanted to be on this ship, and all that was left was a $19,000—Jesus Christ—$19,000 suite that didn’t even look out on the sea.

Rosin: Wow.

Shteyngart: It looked out on the mall or whatever. But it looked like the Marriott, in a way, which—I like Marriotts—I’m just saying.

Rosin: So it’s just a plain—it’s like a hotel room.

Shteyngart: It’s like a hotel room.

Rosin: With a window.

Shteyngart: And I had two bathrooms.

Rosin: For yourself?

Shteyngart: Just for myself, I know. Well, I think the idea of these suites is that more than one person goes on them, right?

But there’s this—the Royal Bling. The Royal Bling is the jewelry store, such as it is, on board. And they introduced this thing called the something chalice. It’s a $100,000 chalice, and it entitles you to drink for free on Royal Caribbean once you’ve bought it.

So this thing is hilarious. Just the concept of it is insane. Everyone’s trying to figure out: Should I buy this? What’s up with this? Should I get it for my 28-year-old kid? Will it earn out? How much does he drink? How much can I drink?

So I talked to the wonderful Serbian sales lady. Everyone’s country of origin, if you’re on the crew, is listed on their tag.

Rosin: Really?

Shteyngart: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rosin: That’s weird.

Shteyngart: So you’re like, Oh, it’s Amir from Pakistan, or whatever.

Rosin: That’s so weird.

Shteyngart: Yeah. And she was, I don’t know, something Olga from Serbia, and she was amazing. They’re all amazing. Every crew member is excellent.

And she was like, Well—she was trying to sell me the $100,000 chalice. I said, It’s really gold? And she’s like, No, it’s gold-plated. We couldn’t afford. She said, If it was really gold, it would be, like, a million dollars. I’m like, Okay. And then it has diamonds, and she’s like, Well, they’re actually cubic zirconia, again, because it would cost, like, $10 million if they were diamonds. I’m like, All right, this thing is sounding worse and worse.

And then she said, But, you know, if you already have everything, this is one more thing you can have. And I thought that was almost like a Zen haiku, but about the American condition. If you already have everything, this is one more thing you can have.

[Music]

Rosin: So the ship has neighborhoods and levels and status in a very explicit way. And cruisers care about that. They care about it in a very deep, almost spiritual way that Gary didn’t quite appreciate until after he’d written the story.

Shteyngart: One of the funniest things—somebody was telling me to look this up on, I guess, Reddit.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Shteyngart: There’s a huge cruising community. I think half a million people are on that thing and, boy, were they pissed!

Rosin: That’s after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: During his time on the Icon of the Seas, Gary Shteyngart met a few memorable characters. There was the younger couple he called, “Mr. and Mrs. Ayn Rand,” who he drank with a few times. And the couple’s couple friends, he described as quote: “bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel.” And then, there was “Duck Necklace.”

Shteyngart: He’s fascinating. He was drunk all the time, and he was being arrested—there is a security force—for photobombing.

Rosin: I wonder if the laws are different on the ship. Like photobombing is a felony.

Shteyngart: I’d love to do Law & Order: Icon of the Seas. That would be amazing.

Rosin: (Laughs.) Right.

Shteyngart: But then he went on this long, drunken, very elegiac thing about, Well, I’m 62, and if I fall off the ship, I’m fine with that. I just don’t want a shark to eat me. And I believe in God, and the Mayans have a prophecy. He just went on and on. And then I looked him up and, when not drunk and getting arrested on a ship, he’s the pillar of his community in North Chicago. There’s so much more to this guy. So he was my favorite, I think.

Rosin: So maybe the ship creates a space where, if you’re grinding and working every day and being a pillar of the community, the ship is your space to contemplate and be philosophical or be an idiot or whatever it is you can’t be elsewhere.

Shteyngart: Yeah. And I think you’re right. And I think a couple of people, especially older people—I mean, 62 isn’t that old—but a couple of the older people were trying to summarize their lives through their cruising experiences, including, for one woman, realizing that she wanted to divorce her husband. All these things happened on cruises.

It’s like the cruise is the time when they’re—the way people say when you’re off land, it’s the rules of the sea. You’re in international waters; you can do whatever you want. I think for some people, the cruise affords them some weird way to look back on their lives and to make large decisions or to celebrate either happy moments or sometimes almost-elegiac moments. There were all these people who looked like they were about to die.

Rosin: Literally?

Shteyngart: Literally about to die, clearly coming off of chemo or on an oxygen tank. Or they had T-shirts celebrating a good cancer remission. So definitely there’s—and I hope this article, despite its very satirical tone, lends some of that poignancy. Because people are people, and this is the kind of stuff that they want to do, either to make an important moment in their lives or to think on the things that have happened to them.

But I think that’s one of the reasons people were so butt hurt on that Reddit—to use a term of art—because I wasn’t just going after a hobby or something. I was going after something that is so key to their identity.

Rosin: That’s interesting that people perceived it so badly. You both appreciated the earnestness of it and made fun of it at the same time. It was satirical but also present.

Shteyngart: I don’t know. I think people really wanted a quote-unquote “journalist” to give an honest review of the ship. But look, I got this assignment by saying, What level of sarcasm do you want? But I didn’t deliver 11 on the sarcasm scale. I think it was, like, six or seven.

I realized the humor part of this—and this is what I talk about in my humor class—the human comedy is that no one understands quite who they are. So I may go around thinking I’m a giraffe, and I keep talking about, Oh, I’m so tall, and I eat leaves off of tall trees. But in reality, I’m an aardvark. I’m a small furry creature, burrowing in the bush.

And that, to me, felt like a lot of what people were saying on the ship. People would say, I feel like I’m on an adventure. And I’m like, Yes, but we’re in a mall, as you say this, that’s slowly steaming to all these islands. But many of the passengers wouldn’t even get off on these islands. They love the ship so much they wouldn’t leave.

And I’ll say this, also: One of the most important things that happened to me—I was in Charlotte Amalie, which I guess is the capital of the U.S. Virgin Islands or Saint Thomas, and I’d wandered off the beaten path. And this elderly Rastafarian gentleman looked at me, and with the most—I’ve never been talked to like this—but with a sneer beyond anything, he said, Redneck.

And I guess I did have a red neck at this point, and I was wearing this vibrant cap with the Icon of the Seas Royal Caribbean logo. But I realized, also, that people hate these cruisers. They hate what they do to their islands, their environment, everything. There’s just so much more happening here than just a bunch of drunken Americans on a ship.

And this also goes to the fact that, obviously, there’s all these people, mostly from the global South, working below decks. They work nonstop. And it’s interesting because a lot of the passengers, they would say, Wow, these people work so hard, with a kind of like, Oh, I wish everybody back home would work so hard, or something like that. But at the same time, I was listening to a comedy act, and the comedian was making fun of quote-unquote “shithole countries.”

So there’s definitely a kind of—even though cruisers keep talking about how much they love the people on the ship, it doesn’t translate.

Rosin: It doesn’t translate. It doesn’t translate into politics.

Okay, I’m turning it back on you—your story. You came into the boat with the story that Gary is a party guy, and Gary’s gonna have parties in Gary’s suite. So what did you realize along the way?

Shteyngart: Yeah, it was like being an immigrant all over again. And, for me, assimilation into America was a very, very long process. So the meatball, or the lack of success of the meatball, really reminded me of that, too—like I’m always a step behind.

And this did feel like, Oh, I was always a step behind. People would have casual conversations in the elevators, just shooting the shit, and I would try to banter with them. But I would always get it a little bit wrong, and I would realize it, too. Like, there was a lot of wind one day, and I was like, Oof, the frost is really on the pumpkin.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Shteyngart: But I realized that that’s probably said in the fall, right? Before Thanksgiving. Is that right? The pumpkin is, you know—

Rosin: So Immigrant Gary comes roaring back in those moments.

Shteyngart: Oh, my god.

Rosin: You want to be, like, Sophisticated Writer Gary.

Shteyngart: Absolutely. So I was always sweating bullets. Like, I want to get into the conversation. And this was a big thing because there was a big contest, several contests—the semifinals or something? Quarterfinals? I don’t know—between the big teams. And I had no idea what the hell was going on, but everybody was talking about it. And everybody was wearing paraphernalia—that’s the other thing.

Rosin: Paraphernalia. (Laughs.) You’re referring to team T-shirts.

Shteyngart: But also everything! I don’t know. Name it: hats, T-shirts, all kinds of crap. And I had nothing. I had meatball, you know.

Rosin: Right.

Shteyngart: Look, the preparation for this article should have—I should have bought T-shirts with sports.

Rosin: (Laughs.) T-shirts with sports.

Shteyngart: And then I should have talked to people about all the rules of football. Maybe there’s a documentary that I can watch, something like that. And then maybe that would have been it.

Rosin: Okay, so I’m reading this essay about this cruise ship, which has a little bit of politics, a little bit of cult, a little bit of status obsession. What am I understanding about America?

Shteyngart: Well, I think we are, in some ways, a country that has been losing religion for a while. I know this is a strange approach to it, but people are looking for something to fill the void. Especially, among the hardworking middle class I think is where you feel it quite a bit. And I think because Americans are never satisfied, everyone’s always looking for, What’s my ancestry? Where do I come from? Somehow just the term American is not enough to fulfill people’s expectations of what life is.

Rosin: Of what they belong to. Like, what they’re rooted in. Yeah.

Shteyngart: And for me, this is an easier question because I actually just want to be an American. I’m an immigrant who just wants to be an American, right?

So, on this ship, what I was seeing was people desperately trying to belong to some kind of idea. And I feel like the cruising life, because these people are so obsessed with the cruises that they wear these—half the people or more were wearing T-shirts somehow commemorating this voyage on the first day of the cruise. So I think I really offended a religion. I insulted not just a strange hobby that people engage in, but a way of life.

And I think that’s the future. Trying to understand America today is to try to understand people desperately grasping for something in the absence of more traditional ideas of what it means to an American, right? And this is one strange manifestation of that. But it was, for me, an ultimately unfulfilling one.

[Music]

You know, God bless David Foster Wallace for being brilliant enough to start the genre, although there were a couple pieces before him, but the modern incarnation of this. Let’s stop this. I did not solve the question of what America is. None of that got solved.

Rosin: So what are we R.I.P.ing? We’re not just R.I.P.ing the cruise ship piece? I just want to end the episode this way. R.I.P. what?

Shteyngart: No, no, no, no. I don’t have that kind of cultural might.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Isabel Cristo, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Rosin: But was there a monkey on the ship?

Shteyngart: No, there wasn’t. The monkey was on Saint Kitts.

Rosin: Oh, okay. I remembered that wrong.

Shteyngart: No, no, no. The Royal Caribbean did not spring for a monkey. They had a golden retriever, and he wore, like, a cap or something? But see, so everybody was going gaga, and I’m like, You’ve never seen a golden freaking retriever? What kind of lives do you live on land?

Rosin: Right, right. But it’s an Icon golden retriever, so it’s different.

Shteyngart: It’s an Icon golden retriever, and he’s, like, I guess, an emotional support dog for these people.