The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

what these people are going through: acedia. This word is used much less frequently today, which is peculiar since the state it describes is so common. Acedia is the quieting of passion. It is a lack of care. It is living a life that doesn’t arouse your strong passions and therefore instills a sluggishness of the soul, like an oven set on warm. The person living in acedia may have a job and a family, but he is not entirely grabbed by his own life. His heart is over there, but his life is over here. Desire makes you adhesive. Desire pushes you to get close—to the person, job, or town you love. But lack of desire makes you detached, and instills in you over time an attitude of emotional avoidance, a phony nonchalance. In short, the meritocracy encourages you to drift into a life that society loves but which you don’t. It’s impossible to feel wholehearted. A person who tries to treat life as if it were an extension of school often becomes what the Danish novelist Matias Dalsgaard calls an “insecure overachiever”: “Such a person must have no stable or solid foundation to build upon, and yet nonetheless tries to build his way out of his problem. It’s an impossible situation. You can’t compensate for having a foundation made of quicksand by building a new story on top. But this person takes no notice and hopes that the problem down in the foundation won’t be found out if only the construction work on the top keeps going.”