Early Christian ascetics counted seven deadly sins—pride, greed, envy, sloth, gluttony, wrath, and lust—that threaten our ascension to goodness (and, by extension, to heaven). But in an era ruled by an all-knowing Internet, a surreal beauty standard, and an insatiable appetite for material wealth, these vices are more of a playbook for success than a warning. What is a sin in 2026? For the Indulgence issue, we asked seven figures—Jamieson Webster, Dries Van Noten, Christine Sun Kim, Griffin Dunne, Mia Khalifa, Brontez Purnell, and Helen Molesworth—to examine how one sin threads its way through their life and work. Here, Webster reflects on pride.
I think I now suffer from too much pride—I like my independence and self-reliance after more than 40 years of crawling my way there; I must maintain some semblance of professional integrity (for whom?); I want to be what little of what I am that I spent years painstakingly excavating in psychoanalysis (even as I know we are full of misrecognition, especially when it comes to oneself); I am tired of my wounds, which feel like limitations and not endless sources of inspiration. Woundedness feels old, the older I get. I prefer to live with hurt quietly. I know that I sound like a cliché of midlife.
“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine,” Elizabeth Bennet says in Pride and Prejudice. It may be that pride is coded differently for women. Like the American manosphere, we are talking about a certain kind of ambition, grandeur, tragic overreach. A woman with pride is accused of thinking too highly of herself simply for declining to disappear. Pride in women is rarely self-exaltation; it is more often the failure to yield.
When I was younger, strident refusal rarely felt prideful. More like a form of desperate survival. Or, I would yield with aplomb, hit the ground running, relish the gutter. Midlife has brought different movements: a desire to withdraw, to exit certain conversations, and the will to have my way with a little dignity and stay afloat. There’s so much further to fall now, so much intimate knowledge of the distance.
One of my few nostalgias is for the wildness of young ignorance, for the years when humiliation still felt theatrical rather than exhausting. The only reality television then was Girls Gone Wild and The Real World on MTV. Public disgrace still had a grainy, almost local quality to it. Now vanity arrives fully optimized. Was I a close cousin to Lauren Sánchez Bezos at the Met Gala, or that woman stealing champagne during the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ dinner? A little pride, ladies!
Recently, I went to Florence to see Fra Angelico’s The Mocking of Christ. The titular figure shows an almost unbearable restraint amid a fragmented chaos of insult. Surreally, Christ is blindfolded, and as if from thin air, he is struck, spat upon, beaten with a stick. He does not defend himself. The scene is not only about humiliation, but about renouncing the narcissistic demand to restore one’s image before others or cast it off entirely. To survive it without retaliation approaches something holy or terrifying. A simple fresco in a small cell with a little window, I imagined for a second this room as my own.
And yet I have to say I distrust humility too. Humility in women has long been rewarded because it keeps things running smoothly for everyone else. It is difficult not to hear moral injunctions against pride as covert instructions to remain accommodating, even ingratiating. Could my “indulgence” of pride simply be exhaustion with so many demands? The desire to stop apologizing for taking up space, but also to stop turning one’s injuries into prizes.
Midlife brings a strange fantasy of restraint: not disappearance exactly, but containment. A little ground beneath your feet. Just a tad, to survive exposure without either collapsing or making a spectacle of yourself. Perhaps I’ll keep this strange pocket of pride, having made it to mortality, by which I mean really living from having lived.
More Deep Dives on the State of the Seven Deadly Sins
The Laziness Canon: Helen Molesworth on Artists Who Made Great Work by Doing Nothing
What Mia Khalifa Learned From Two Long Years of Celibacy
Deaf Artist Christine Sun Kim on the Anger She Carries in a Hearing World
In an Ozempic-Suffused Scene, Brontez Purnell on Being a ‘Fake Skinny Bitch’
Dries Van Noten Unpacks the Greed That Made Him Step Back From Fashion
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