In a time largely defined by social disconnection and hopelessness, John Green’s work, across multiple formats and platforms, has been a beacon of humane connection and hope. His beloved young-adult novels, including the mega-best-selling “The Fault in Our Stars,” have shown his gift for both capturing and speaking the emotional language of teenagers. On YouTube, Green and his younger brother and best friend, Hank, post earnest and charmingly wonky videos under the Vlogbrothers banner for a devoted audience of millions. They explore all sorts of weighty subjects: mental health, religion, the meaning of life, you name it. If it’s something that has kept you up at night, the Greens have probably talked about it. (They also have a podcast, “Dear Hank & John,” in which they do much the same thing.)
More recently, John Green turned his attention to global health, with this year’s nonfiction best seller “Everything Is Tuberculosis.” In addition to using TB as a prism through which to examine various forms of medically related injustice — such as the disproportionate toll the disease takes on poor countries — the book also makes an argument for the equality of all lives at a time when the Trump administration is enacting drastic cuts to global health initiatives.
Despite all his good work, Green himself has struggled over the years with feelings of alienation from, among other things, his fiction writing, his vast fan base and his sense of purpose. Those are battles that the 48-year-old knows are never fully won, but he’s keen to keep on fighting.
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I’m going to start with a heavy question. Underneath a lot of your work is the idea of hope, and you have said, “Hope is the correct response to consciousness.” Where are you with hope right now? Despair is a daily presence in my life and something that I have to try to ward off using all of the magic and meaning that I can find. I’ve lived with major depression. I have pretty severe O.C.D. and a lot of anxiety. I can’t afford despair. I don’t think humanity can afford despair, because the problem with despair is that all it does is make more of itself. I wouldn’t have an issue with despair if it caused me to be a better human or a better dad. But despair just sinks me deeper and deeper into the couch, and that is my daily temptation.
Do you think hope multiplies itself in the way that despair does? I think it can. I don’t know that it always does. The problem with hope is that it feels like a very easy word, a convenient kumbaya. But I’m interested in the kind of hope that holds up to the worst things that happen to us. That’s much harder to come by.
When you were a much younger man, you were a chaplain in a children’s hospital and witnessed a lot of incomprehensible suffering. How did you take opportunities for hope away from all the unhopeful experiences you had there? Because I could very easily imagine somebody working in a children’s hospital and seeing kids die from cancer then leaning toward despair. I think that’s fairly common. Working at the hospital is the axis mundi around which my life spins. That six months is the most important six months of my life in a lot of ways, because I was on one clear trajectory — I was going to become an Episcopal minister — and then suddenly I wasn’t, because my experiences at the hospital so fundamentally challenged my understanding of the universe, my understanding of God, that I just couldn’t go through with it. So I don’t want to pretend that I emerged from that all hopeful and happy. I emerged from it feeling scared and overwhelmed and devastated by what I’d seen. A lot of the questions that interested me before the hospital just don’t interest me anymore. I’m not really interested, for instance, in the question of whether God is real. The question that’s important to me is how can we work together to bring about the world that God, as I understand it, wants us to have.
Why does what you just described not fit within the religious or intellectual purview of being a minister? What was the disconnect you felt? There’s two things. First off, on a very functional, practical level, I was in a church basement with my mentor, and he was ordering candles out of a catalog. I was like: Wait a second. This isn’t all just worshiping God and helping people? You have to order candles through a catalog? That’s a deal-breaker for me. I can’t do that.
Because it was too mundane? It’s just the kind of thing that I’m bad at, David. So that was one thing. But then there was the much deeper philosophical theological thing, which is that I felt like there were aspects of the liturgy that I would be asked to repeat as good news that I just wasn’t sure I believed.
Whether it’s writing about teenagers who are extremely ill in “The Fault in Our Stars” or about global-scale illness in “Everything Is Tuberculosis,” both connect to the idea of suffering. Are you drawn to suffering? I’m drawn to people who are suffering and trying to make sense of suffering and trying to be with people in a meaningful way who are going through difficulty. I’ve always felt like that. I don’t know why.
What’s your hunch? Well, it’s a big deal, for lack of a better term. Suffering is a huge part of the human experience, and it is a part we often deny or minimize or attempt to look away from. In doing that, I worry that sometimes we deny or minimize or look away from the humanity of people who are suffering. Then also in my own life, I’ve known some suffering. I haven’t been dying before, but I’ve been really sick. I’ve been really scared.
How much can one prepare for suffering? You just described experiencing suffering in your own life. Did that help you when your brother and best friend, Hank, had to deal with a cancer diagnosis a few years ago? Nothing prepared me for Hank getting cancer. When I found out he had cancer — before we knew what kind of cancer, which is a terrifying couple of weeks — I went for this walk through the woods, just knowing that being in the forest would calm me down a little bit. I could barely put one foot in front of the other, and I remember thinking, You’ve been with so many people who had this experience, and it has in no way helped you have this experience. So I don’t think it helps, to be honest with you.
What are the implications of that for your work? How much can it help other people? I think art does help us feel less alone. I really believe that. But I also think that one of the reasons I stopped writing fiction was because I forgot or didn’t understand what fiction was for anymore. When you write a nonfiction book about tuberculosis, you know exactly what you’re trying to do, which is raise attention to the fact that 1.5 million people are dying every year of a disease we’ve known how to cure since the 1950s. When you’re writing fiction, the mission is a lot more amorphous and abstract. When fiction works for me, it’s because [as a reader] I’m also bringing my deepest self to the story, just like the writer did. I’m bringing my own experiences of loss and grief. I’m bringing my own joys and hopes to the novel. And there is a magic in that. Fiction can be transformative, but part of the reason I haven’t written a novel in eight years is because I lost track of how that works.
What were some things you lost track of? I wasn’t sure what roles my novels could play in the moment I found myself, starting in 2018. Another factor was that lots of readers were inevitably reading me into my stories. That was very uncomfortable. I mean, I wrote a novel about a girl with O.C.D. [“Turtles All the Way Down”]. I also have O.C.D. Navigating the distance between that girl and me became very complicated and fraught in a world where everyone assumed that my O.C.D. was identical to Aza’s O.C.D.
Your book “Everything Is Tuberculosis” is not just about tuberculosis but also about global health. It’s undeniable that the Trump administration has pulled back from aiding global health. To varying degrees of plausibility, there are all sorts of political or economic arguments that could be made for why. I was talking to a friend about that, and his attitude was, Well, that’s what evil is. Now, to my mind, that may be an exaggeration, but how do you understand the decision to make moves that result in more suffering? I would say that the belief that some human lives have more value than others is the root of all evil, and this is clearly an expression of that belief. I don’t understand it. I guess I understand it as a belief that the United States, with its limited resources, should focus on the needs of the United States. But that’s such a narrow-minded way to think about how the United States became the country that it has become in terms of its power, its relative wealth, its ability to have some say in what happens in the world. If you want to take a traditional conservative approach to it, it’s the best use of soft power that the United States has ever had. If you want to take a moral, philosophical approach, the U.S. is directly responsible for saving tens of millions of lives through PEPFAR [the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief], its support of the Global Fund and U.S.A.I.D. So it’s something that, traditionally, Americans have had real cause to feel proud about. To be honest, I can’t look back, because if I look back, I feel such grief and anger. I can only look forward and say, OK, given the world in which we now live, what can we do together?
I want to turn to the subject of YouTube. There’s all sorts of evidence that social media and watching videos and living online is bad for young people. There’s very little evidence that it’s good for them. Do you have any ambivalence about participating in that ecosystem? Yeah, I made a video a while back called “Am I Cigarettes?” where I wondered if just by creating content on the social internet I might be a form of tobacco consumption. I do have a lot of ambivalence about it.
Where did you land on that question? I came out of that video quite unsure as to whether I’m cigarettes. My brother then made a follow-up video where he was like, We’re food, and there’s a lot of bad food, but hopefully we’re good food. I thought that was a good point. Abandoning the space is probably the wrong response.
The nonfiction book that you published before “Everything Is Tuberculosis,” called “The Anthropocene Reviewed,” consists of short essays where you review all sorts of things in the world and then give them a star rating. One of the reviews is of the internet, which you gave three out of five stars. At the end of that review, you ask a bunch of rhetorical questions, including: “What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped by machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me?” I want to know your answers to those questions. The easy answer is that when the internet becomes part of you, you cede a certain amount of your overall sense of self to online experience, which can be wonderful in some ways. This is going to surprise you, David, but I was a big nerd when I was a kid.
I had you pegged for captain of the football team! [Laughs.] I would have loved to be able to connect with young people the way that young people can connect with each other now across time and space around shared interests. It would have been amazing for me to have a relationship with other people who were obsessed with collecting every version of the 1986 Chicago Cubs baseball cards. The internet has facilitated communication in lots of really beautiful ways. And then there is the cost, and I feel like I have lived both sides of that coin.
How? Well, you weren’t on Tumblr in 2012 when Tumblr loved me, but you also weren’t on Tumblr in 2014 when Tumblr didn’t love me as much.
What was going on in 2014? Just a lot of bad-faith interpretations of my work.
Was any of that illuminating? No.
The rise of YouTube and social media has also resulted in a rise in young people wanting to be on YouTube and social media. Is there something that you, as a public figure, wish that teenagers understood about what it means to put yourself out there in that way? I understand the urge to have outside affirmation. That’s something we all have. And when we’re young, we have it perhaps most profoundly. I know that when I was a teenager, I wanted to be known and loved, and being famous on the internet feels like a wonderful shortcut to that. It feels like everyone knows you and everyone loves you. But in fact, no one knows you. There’s a lot to recommend making stuff online for people. I’m very grateful that I get to do it every week. I also think that the feeling that somehow being famous or achieving a million subscribers will fill the hole inside of you — it will not. There is no filling the hole inside of you with the internet. Well, I don’t want to say that. That’s not always true.
What were you saying that felt dishonest? Just that I don’t know what it’s like to get famous when I’m 16, and it’s not my job to preach to them.
The success of Jonathan Haidt’s book “The Anxious Generation” speaks to a real feeling that our kids are more anxious than they used to be. Yeah, but I was anxious way before they were. [Laughs.]
So as someone who has struggled with anxiety, what do you say to young people when they want to know how to reduce or manage anxiety? Living with intense anxiety is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. That’s the first thing: acknowledging that it’s really hard and that surviving it is itself a win. I find going outside helpful. I find exercise helpful. A lot of the things that make me feel less anxious in the moment make me feel more anxious in the long run. If I’m at a party, I’m already anxious, because who wants to go to a party? But sometimes I will deal with that anxiety by getting on my phone at the party. That makes me feel better in the moment but worse in the long run. What makes me feel better in the long run is engaging with other human beings, even though that causes me more initial anxiety. It’s funny, because anytime things are good — and things are relatively good right now — I understand that that’s temporary. When things are bad, that feels very permanent. It’s hard to remind myself that it’s temporary when things are bad.
Earlier, you said that your fiction tends to work best when you can bring your full self to the story that you’re working on. Why is it that you’re able to bring your full self to the writing of Y.A. fiction in particular? My own teenage years were so important because so many things happened for the first time. I lost a friend for the first time, and that meant grappling not just with grief but with the unjust distribution of suffering in our world. I fell in love for the first time, which meant not just the feelings of falling in love but also the way that it narrows your vision and becomes overwhelmingly the most important thing in your life. I grappled with the questions of what I owe other people and what I owe myself for the first time, independent of my parents. That time of my life was so important to me, partly because I was at boarding school and with my friends all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week — and my enemies, it should be noted. The first embrace of those feelings is just so intense. There’s no irony to it. There’s no emotional distance. There is only the reality of experience, and I want to go back to that in my fiction. I want to have that feeling where I don’t have ironic distance between me and the question the way that I do now. I want to get back to where you look at the stars and you are truly overwhelmed by the size of the universe. And for me, that was high school.
Do you think you could approach fiction with the same level of emotional intensity if you were writing for adults? Well, the novel that I’m working on now is about and for grown-ups, so I guess we’ll see.
We also talked earlier about faith, and you said that you’re not really interested in the question of whether God is real. That really bugs people.
I’m sure it does. But I’ve had conversations in my life — I’m thinking of one in particular that I had with a Catholic priest. I presented the idea to him that I feel as if I can have transcendental or spiritual or religious-like experiences without necessarily having to connect them to a belief in a higher power. And this father said, very respectfully, “Actually, belief in God is the whole deal, and if you’re not there, then you’re kind of missing the point.” Why is it not the case for you? Well, I do hear that from a lot of theologians, and I think that their experiences of the numinous or the sacred might be different from mine, and theirs might be contingent upon God being real, whatever that means. For me, those experiences of the sacred, of God’s presence in my life and in the life of the world, they are real. Whether or not those experiences are constructed by my brain or are experiences of a living God is irrelevant to whether the experience was real for me. What I’m interested in is: How do I get more of that experience of feeling proximal to the sacred, that experience of feeling close to a justice-loving God? How do I get more of that experience and how do I help, in whatever small way I can, bring about the world that God would wish to see on Earth?
How does one get more experience of the sacred? Through practice mostly, in my experience. I think that’s why people who pray a lot have it more. But also, I mean, I was in this deeply impoverished neighborhood in Manila with Doctors Without Borders a couple of days ago, watching these profoundly committed health care workers try in very difficult circumstances to get people access to good care. That makes me feel close to God. That’s a sacred experience for me.
In ways both explicit and implicit, we’ve touched on the idea of hope throughout our conversation. Are there things that adults could learn from teenagers about hope? We need to put down our armor of cynicism and irony and thinking that we know about everything that matters, and that everything that matters is how well the minivan handles and how much the mortgage is. We need to put that down sometimes and try to grapple with the beauty of the world as young people do: in an open, vulnerable way. For me, that’s where the real magic is. It’s cheesy as all get out, but I said earlier that when you’re lying down with your friends under a big sky at night and you’re looking at the stars and you’re conscious of how large the universe is, that’s a borderline sacred experience. If you lose that in adulthood, you’ve lost something really important.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeart, or Amazon Music
Director of photography (video): Danielle Elise Bartley
David Marchese is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a regular series featuring influential people across culture, politics, business, sports and beyond.
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