Review

Culture

Film & TV

Purpose

Romance

18 June 2025

5 min read

The Four Seasons and Dying for Sex hunt all of life for meaning

The TV shows joining academics exploring what it means to flourish

Giles Gough

Giles Gough is a writer and creative who hosts the God in Film podcast.

Tina Fey and Michelle Williams.

A recent Harvard study revealed an intriguing relationship between religion and how well people feel their lives are going. The study suggests that there is a direct correlation between attendance at religious services and happiness.

The researchers defined ‘human flourishing’ as encompassing all aspects of a person’s life, including happiness, health, purpose, character, and relationships. Perhaps a snappier way to think of this would be “what does it mean to live a full life?.”

There must have been something in the air that leads to asking this big question, because two TV shows have come out close to the release of this study, both of which tackle what it means to have a fulfilling life. While science has only turned its attention to this topic recently, artists, philosophers and storytellers have been grappling with this one for centuries, and as science has neither Tina Fey, nor Michelle Williams, let’s see what the story tellers have to say

The Four Seasons

The Four Seasons is Netflix’s latest comedy drama series based on a 1981 Alan Alda film of the same name. In it, a group of long-time friends in their fifties, who regularly go on holiday with each other have their whole dynamic rocked when Nick (Steve Carell) tells them he plans to divorce Anne, (Kerri Kenney-Silver) his wife of 25 years. Danny and Claude (Colman Domingo and Marco Calvani) are the group’s only same sex couple, but their warm and hedonistic lifestyle is marred by Danny needing surgery for his heart condition, which he keeps putting off. Our point of view characters are Kate and Jack, played by Tina Fey and Will Forte. Initially positioned as the most normal and stable couple of the group, seeing the unhappiness in their friend’s marriages opens a fissure in their own relationship. Kate gets frustrated that Jack appears to turn into a hypochondriac when they’re in private, and Jack resents his embarrassing secrets being shared by Kate as the butt of a joke. As season one draws to a close, we are unsure if these two will repair their marriage.

The Four Seasons is a show about wanting your remaining days on this earth to be filled with meaning and passion. Dying for Sex has arguably the same motivation but on a tragically compressed timescale.

Dying for Sex

Inspired by the story of Molly Kochan and originally shared on the podcast of the same name, Dying for Sex follows Molly (Michelle Williams) as she receives a diagnosis of Stage IV metastatic breast cancer. In a moment of desperate clarity, she decides to leave her husband, Steve (Jay Duplass) and begins to explore her sexual desires for the first time in her life. Aided by her best friend Nikki (Jenny Slate), Molly dives into the world of online dating, finding partners that range from the kinky to incompetent, and finally compassionate. Molly’s one goal is to experience an orgasm with another person for once in her life. An aim that is hindered by a childhood trauma of sexual abuse. Despite the edginess of the title, Dying for Sex is a heartfelt meditation on what it means to find love just as your body is shutting down on you. It includes perhaps the best depiction of the final stages of life for a person with a terminal illness, the show is worth it for that alone.

Yet one constant remains for believers and non-believers, and it is as trite as it is true; love is the key to a fulfilled life.

It is important to note that there is a class element to both of these shows. The Four Seasons places good-looking affluent people in beautiful locations and then invites you to feel invested in their relationship drama, like an episode of 90210 for people in their fifties. Similarly, Dying for Sex sees Molly receive some of the best medical care possible, by virtue of still being on her husband’s health insurance. In a country where free health care is not seen as a basic right, the luxury of the facilities she has to hand starts to seem conspicuous. But this is not oppression Olympics and we’re not here to compare people’s pain. The less money you have will certainly decrease the amount of time you have to ponder the meaning of life, but it’s not a question that should be avoided indefinitely.

The connection between ‘human flourishing’ may be the type of thing that might get jumped on by pastors around the world. But a note of caution is advised here as to how it’s used. Firstly, the Harvard study does not appear to make any kind of distinction between religions. So, if one were to use this study to endorse being a devout Christian, then the same could be said for being a Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu etc.

Secondly, if the church tells people that becoming a Christian will statistically increase their chances of happiness, it’s doing them a disservice because Jesus never promised that. He distinctly told his followers: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life[a] will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.” That’s a difficult line to swallow in the world of retail religion, but it borders on false advertising to ignore it.

Lastly, as critics have pointed out, even if faith improves happiness, it doesn't make the beliefs automatically true! If used as a guiding principle, the pursuit of happiness could have you swapping churches, denominations, even religions until you find what makes you happiest.

These two shows stimulate an interesting thought experiment; whether a relationship with God would have made a difference in their lives? For Kate and Jack in The Four Seasons, the answer may well have been yes. For Molly in Dying for Sex the answer is a little trickier. Jesus doesn’t condone a promiscuous lifestyle, but the drive towards that was borne out of a fundamental lack of connection with her husband. The main thing that Jesus does promise his followers is connection, either directly with him, or with those walking the same path.

You can have a fulfilling life outside of God, it would be disingenuous to say otherwise. Yet one constant remains for believers and non-believers, and it is as trite as it is true; love is the key to a fulfilled life. Molly finally attains it when she finds true love, Jack and Kate begin to lose it when they fear their love might be slipping beyond their grasp.

But the one area where faith might just differ from the secular is that Jesus lived out his time on this earth as a walking talking example of perfect love. Patient, kind, quick to forgive. The kind of example that’s impossible to completely emulate, but still worth trying.

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Explainer

Belief

Books

Creed

Poetry

23 May 2025

6 min read

Why a book? The words that change the world and me

Living by a literature that’s imbibed in countless cultures.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

A man sits on a pier intently reading a book on his lap.

Ben White on Unsplash.

I have a belief system, a story that I live by, a lens through which I perceive the world. That doesn’t make me unusual or in any way different to you – we all have those, whether we’re aware of them or not. What may make me different to you is that mine are primarily explained to me through a book – or, more accurately, a library of sixty-six books – which we call the Bible.

The story that I live by, that I breathe in and out, is bound. It sits within a cover, it moves through pages, it unfolds according to a contents page – it has genre, it has authors, it has punctuation.

And I’ve never really found this odd.

I think it’s because I’m what Charles Taylor would call a ‘storied creature’, my default is to make sense of the world on a largely imaginative level. I’m also quite romantic; poetically inclined, one could say. It sometimes feels as though words flow through my veins – if you were to cut me open, I may just bleed a puddle of my favourite Jane Austen monologues straight onto the floor. And so, my personality happens to lend itself spectacularly well to living my life according to a spiritual, sixty-six book wide, library. I’ve never really had to wrestle with the strangeness of such a thing, I’ve never sat down and stared the oddness of it in the eye, I’ve never even really asked myself (or God): why a book?

I feel I should pause here, and offer a quick Rory Stewart-esque explainer, just so that we’re all on the same page.

What I, and Christians through time and place, call the Bible is an anthology of sixty-six books, written by around forty authors, in three languages, over the span of 1,400-ish years. Within it, one can find poetry, narrative, apocalyptic literature, erotic literature, lists and figures, instructions and explanations. It is – year in and year out – the bestselling book in the world, with over 100 million copies sold or gifted each year. The New York Times Bestseller List actually omits it from its rundown, because otherwise it would always be so boringly there – sitting comfortably right at the top. No other book ever comes close. Words from this anthology of literature are graven into the floors and walls of the Houses of Parliament, they’re woven into almost every work of Shakespeare, they’re spray-painted clumsily onto billboards in the city I call home.

And so, I guess, in one way, the answer to my question – why a book? – is all of that. The peculiar far-reaching resonance of the methodology speaks for itself. I think of Robin Williams’ impassioned monologue in Dead Poets Society…

‘No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.’

… And I get it. I understand why it was literature that was compiled, why language and words were the tool of choice. For better and for worse, biblical words and ideas have changed the world – they have been ‘the making of the western mind’, just ask Tom Holland. And so, pragmatically, one could argue that the Bible being a book (or a book of books) means that it has successfully imbedded itself in countless cultures, while also transcending them. It’s gone further, lasted longer, sunk deeper than any other form of communication could. Such is the power of words.

But to stop my pondering there feels like I’d be stopping short. I’m not sure that a distant, pragmatic, academic answer is one that I feel satisfied with.

So, this morning, I sat down with a cup of tea, a pen, my notebook, and a newfound curiosity - and I asked myself, and God, why a book?

Why poetry?

Why story?

Why wordplay?

Why have I – an educated, arguably disenchanted, most definitely left-brained, twenty-first century adult - been so willing to let these things mould my interior life? Why am I so moved by them? Moved to action, moved to tears, moved to rage. How can I read something that was written a millennia ago, in a part of the world I have never trod on, and somehow feel as if it is a love letter written exclusively to my own soul?

I think that those are the real questions - the questions to which I have both a thousand and zero answers.

And, like any work of literature, it does not give its meaning up easily – it requires me to sit with it, to excavate it, to gnaw on it like a dog with a bone.

Zero answers, because I fundamentally think that it’s a spiritual thing, a God-designed thing, a thing that sits beyond any explanation I could piece together. The God that I believe exists wants me to know about him, wants me to learn and study, wants me to get glimpses of how thinks, how he works, he feels about me – and you. That’s a wild and wonderous thing. That reality leads me be stunned not only at the methodology, but the desire behind it, as St. Augustine wrote,

‘the whole Bible does nothing but tell of God’s love’.

And so, this literature, to me, is a source of truth, leaning into Iain McGilchrist’s inkling that,

‘the fact that religions and mystical and spiritual traditions have always had to use language in a poetic way doesn’t mean that what they’re talking about is not real, it means it is ultimately real.’

The biblical literature uses words to take us to the edge of them.

And, like any work of literature, it does not give its meaning up easily – it requires me to sit with it, to excavate it, to gnaw on it like a dog with a bone.

Sometimes reading it feels like a balm on my heart, other times it feels like a wrestle in the dirt. But I guess that’s the beauty of it being a book, right? My worldview sits within a piece of literature that is adorned with my scribbles, tear stains, tea spills. A book that meets me every single day, ready to read me as I read it, giving my as many questions as it does answers.

So, why a book? Because now that I think about it, it is odd. The powerful resonance of words for all cultures at all times, perhaps? Or the way that poetry was designed to make a bee line for the deepest parts of us? Or the fact that it is only through language that we can talk about the things that go beyond it?

There are a thousand human-sized answers, if you really need them. I happen to enjoy the mystically-charged zero answers, myself.

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If you enjoy Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

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