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by
David Brooks
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August 23 - September 12, 2019
other kind of permanent joy that animates people who are not obsessed with themselves but have given themselves away.
reputation management. They are always keeping score. How do I measure up? Where do I rank? As the psychologist James Hollis puts it, at that stage we have a tendency to think, I am what the world says I
they are not just the parts of themselves that they put on display. There is another layer to them they have been neglecting, a substrate where the dark wounds, and most powerful yearnings live.
All their lives they’ve been taking economics classes or living in a culture that teaches that human beings pursue self-interest—money, power, fame. But suddenly they are not interested in what other people tell them to want.
The world tells them to want independence, but they want interdependence—to be enmeshed in a web of warm relationships.
They’ve gone from self-centered to other-centered. At this point, people realize, Oh, that first mountain wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain.
That’s the crucial way to tell whether you are on your first or second mountain. Where is your ultimate appeal? To self, or to something outside of self?
If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution. If the first mountain is elitist—moving up—the second mountain is egalitarian—planting yourself amid those who need, and walking arm in arm with them.
You identify the summit, and you claw your way toward it. You are conquered by your second mountain. You surrender to some summons, and you do everything necessary to answer
ambitious, strategic, and independent. On the second mountain you tend to be relational, intimate, and relentless.
The first-mountain people are often cheerful, interesting, and fun to be around. They often have impressive jobs and can take you to an amazing variety of great restaurants. The second-mountain people aren’t averse to the pleasures of the world. They delight in a good glass of wine or a nice beach. (There’s nothing worse than people who are so spiritualized they don’t love the world.) But they have surpassed these pleasures in pursuit of moral joy,
Over the past sixty years we have swung too far toward the self. The only way out is to rebalance, to build a culture that steers people toward relation, community, and commitment—the things we most deeply yearn for, yet undermine with our hyper-individualistic way of life.
Most of us get better at living, get deeper and wiser as we go, and this book seeks to capture how that happens.
These people are not keeping their options open. They are planted. People on the second mountain have made strong commitments
I no longer believe that character building is like going to the gym: You do your exercises and you build up your honesty, courage, integrity, and grit. I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you. Character is a good thing to have, and there’s a lot to be learned on the road to character. But there’s a better
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we try to teach what it is that we really need to learn.
look at those dear friendships with a gratitude mixed with shame, and this pattern—not being present to what I love because I prioritize time over people, productivity over relationship—is a recurring motif in my life. The
realized I had a lot of friendships that didn’t run deep. Few people confided in me, because I did not give off a vibe that encouraged vulnerability. I was too busy, on the move. I was unplanted, lonely, humiliated, scattered.
how to give your life meaning after worldly success has failed to fulfill. This book is a product of that search.
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” Kafka wrote. It should wake us up and hammer at our skull. Writing
they have made it seem that the only human motives that are real are the self-interested ones—the desire for money, status, and power.
They silently spread the message that giving, care, and love are just icing on the cake of society. When a whole society is built around self-preoccupation, its members become separated from one another, divided and alienated.
We have become too cognitive when we should be more emotional; too utilitarian when we should be using a moral lens; too individualistic when we should be more communal. So we as people and as
We spend our days shooting for a little burst of approval or some small career victory. But there’s a joyful way of being that’s not just a little bit better than the way we are currently living; it’s a quantum leap better.
Joy tends to involve some transcendence of self. It’s when the skin barrier between you and some other person or entity fades away and you feel fused together.
Joy is present when mother and baby are gazing adoringly into each other’s eyes, when a hiker is overwhelmed by beauty in the woods and feels at one with nature, when a gaggle of friends are dancing deliriously in unison. Joy often involves self-forgetting. Happiness is what we aim for on the first mountain. Joy is a by-product of living on the second mountain.
We are pleased by happiness, but we are transformed by joy. When we experience joy we often feel we have glimpsed into a deeper and truer layer of reality. A narcissist can be happy, but a narcissist can never be joyful, because the...
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deep intentionality and self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but becomes a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.
What seems to be “me” doesn’t stop at the fixed boundary of my skin.
People have a sense that they are seeing into the hidden reality of things, and afterward they can never go back and be content to watch pale shadows dancing on the wall of the cave. Ralph Waldo Emerson built a philosophy
“A life of ease is not the pathway to growth and happiness. On the contrary, a life of ease is how you get stuck and confused in life.”
To live with joy is to live with wonder, gratitude, and hope.
moral ecology or another. We all create microcultures around us by the way we lead our lives and the vibes we send out to those around us. One of the greatest legacies a person can leave is a moral ecology—a system of belief and behavior that lives on after they die.
This group-oriented moral ecology could be summed up by the phrase “We’re All in This Together.”
self-effacement.
There was a lot of commentary in those days about the soul-sucking perils of conformity, of being nothing more than an organization man, the man in the gray flannel suit, a numb status seeker.
you can create a social movement that people want to join, they will bend their energies and ideas to you.
“Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”
Once reticence was admired, but now expressiveness was admired. Once experience was revered, but now youth was celebrated.
Once duty was admired most, now it was personal freedom.
1960s counterculture took the expressive individualism that had been rattling around Romantic countercultures for centuries and made it the mainstream mode of modern life.
Fear of Flying,
individualistic culture that emerged in the sixties broke through many of the chains that held down women and oppressed minorities. It loosened the bonds of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia. We could not have had Silicon Valley
come up with your own values, your own worldview. As Justice Anthony Kennedy put it in a famous Supreme Court decision, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human
Selfishness is accepted, because taking care of and promoting the self is the prime mission. It’s okay to be self-oriented because in a properly structured society, private selfishness can be harnessed to produce public goods, such as economic growth.
When actually given the choice, a lot of people preferred community over self. The story made me think that it’s possible for a whole society to get itself into a place where it’s fundamentally misordered.
There’s always a tension between self and society.
We use these speeches to pass along the dominant values of our age.
If you don’t know what your life is for, how does it help to be told that your future is limitless? That just ups the pressure.
Figure it out yourself based on no criteria outside yourself. They are floundering in a formless desert. Not only do we not give them a compass, we take a bucket of sand and throw it all over their heads!
