More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Brooks
Read between
August 23 - September 12, 2019
most structured and supervised childhood in human history, you get spit out after graduation into the least structured young adulthood in human history.
clinical psychologist Meg Jay calls “identity capital.” At every job interview and dinner party for the next three decades, somebody will want to ask you what it was like teaching English in Mongolia, and that will distinguish you from everybody else.
The person leading the aesthetic life is leading his life as if it were a piece of art, judging it by aesthetic criteria—is
but after you’ve had twenty social encounters in a week you forget what all those encounters are supposed to build to.
person in the aesthetic phase sees life as possibilities to be experienced and not projects to be fulfilled or ideals to be lived out. He will hover above everything but never land.
But if you live life as a series of serial adventures, you will wander about in the indeterminacy of your own passing feelings and your own changeable heart. Life will be a series of temporary moments, not an accumulating flow of accomplishment. You will lay waste to your powers, scattering them in all directions.
But if you aren’t saying a permanent no to anything, giving anything up, then you probably aren’t diving into anything fully.
When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace. Online life is saturated with decommitment devices.
After several years of pursuing open options, it’s not so much that you lose the thread of the meaning of your life; you have trouble even staying focused on the question.
The person who graduates from school and pursues an aesthetic pattern of life often ends up in the ditch. It’s only then that they realize the truth that somehow nobody told them: Freedom sucks. Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant
...more
It turns out that the people in your workplace don’t want you to have a deep, fulfilling life. They give you gold stars of affirmation every time you mold yourself into the shrewd animal the workplace wants you to be.
Suddenly it occurs to you that you have become your own boss and your own exploiter. You begin to view yourself not as a soul to be uplifted but as a set of skills to be maximized. It’s fascinating how easy it is to simply let drop those spiritual questions that used to plague you,
Have you noticed how many people are more boring and half-hearted at age thirty-five than they were at twenty?
“Character” is no longer a moral quality oriented around love, service, and care, but a set of workplace traits organized around grit, productivity, and self-discipline.
The meritocracy defines “community” as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another. It organizes society into an endless set of outer and inner rings, with high achievers at the Davos center and everybody else arrayed across the wider rings toward the edge.
if you have no competing value system, the meritocracy swallows you whole. You lose your sense of agency, because the rungs of the professional ladder determine your schedule and life course.
Work, the poet David Whyte writes, “is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself.”
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.
meritocracy encourages you to drift into a life that society loves but which you don’t. It’s impossible to feel wholehearted.
“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.
His brain is moving and his status is rising, but his heart and soul are never fully engaged.
When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to
You are haunted by your conception of yourself. People who live in this way imagine that there are other people who are enjoy...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
What does it profit a man to sell his own soul if others are selling theirs and getting more for it?
Therefore, my judgments must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do.
Tolstoy had thus far bet his life on the enlightenment project, on reason, progress, intellectuals, public approval, and progress. And now he lost faith in that project. What was the point of life?
After all, the rest of us can be haunted by the idea that we haven’t accomplished as much as we could. But Tolstoy was one of the greatest writers who ever lived and knew it. Wealth and fame and accomplishment do not spare anybody from the valley.
For some people this feeling is not a dramatic crisis. It’s just a creeping malaise, a gradual loss of enthusiasm in what they are doing. The Jungian analyst James Hollis had a patient who explained it this way: “I always sought to win whatever the game was, and only now do I realize how much I have been played by the game.”
First, they deny that there’s something wrong with their life. Then they intensify their efforts to follow the old failing plan. Then they try to treat themselves with some new thrill: They have an affair, drink more, or start doing drugs. Only when all this fails do they admit that they need to change the way they think about life.
purpose is. When this happens, they become fragile. Nietzsche says that he who has a “why” to live for can endure any “how.” If you know what your purpose is, you can handle the setbacks.
when you don’t know what your purpose is, any setback can lead to total collapse.
stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.” Beneath the psychological manifestations, Wallace noticed that the fundamental cause was moral directionlessness. “This is a generation that has an inheritance of absolutely nothing as far as meaningful moral values.”
those among us with flashy Instagram accounts, perfectly manufactured LinkedIn profiles, and confident exteriors (yours truly) are probably those who are feeling the most confused, anxious, and stuck when it comes to the future. The millennial 20-something stuck-ness sensation is everywhere, and there is a direct correlation between those who feel it and those who put off a vibe of feeling extremely secure.”
pandemic that killed 675,000 Americans. The reason American lives are shorter today is the increase in the so-called deaths of despair—suicide, drug overdose, liver problems, and so on. And those, in turn, are caused by the social isolation that is all around
faith in that giving-getting compact has broken down. Now it is assumed that if you give, they will take. If you sacrifice, others will take advantage. The reciprocity is gone, and people feel detached from their neighbors and disgusted by the institutions of public life.
“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”
All of these numbers suggest people do not feel they are part of some larger story that they can believe in and dedicate their lives to.
Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, in the sense I’m using it here, is connection based on mutual hatred. Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on common foe.
Once politics becomes your ethnic or moral identity, it becomes impossible to compromise, because compromise becomes dishonor. Once politics becomes your identity, then every electoral contest is a struggle for existential survival, and everything is permitted.
We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die.
Many bad things happen in life, and it’s a mistake to try to sentimentalize these moments away by saying that they must be happening to serve some higher good. But sometimes, when suffering can be connected to a larger narrative of change and redemption, we can suffer our way to wisdom.
Paul Tillich wrote that suffering upsets the normal patterns of life and reminds you that you are not who you thought you were. It smashes through the floor of what you thought was the basement of your soul and reveals a cavity below, and then it smashes through that floor and reveals a cavity below that.
Pain helps us see the true size of our egotistical desires.
those low moments the protective shells are taken off, humility is achieved, a problem is clearly presented, and a call to service is clearly received.
At the moment when you are most confused about what you should do with your life, the smartest bet is to do what millions of men and women have done through history. Pick yourself up and go out alone into the wilderness. A lot is gained simply by going into a different physical place. You need to taste and touch and feel your way toward a new way of being.
Solitude in the wilderness makes irrelevant all the people-pleasing habits that have become interwoven into your personality. “What happens when a ‘gifted child’ finds himself in a wilderness where he’s stripped of any way of proving his worth?” asks Belden Lane in Backpacking with the Saints.
“What does he do when there’s nothing he can do, when there’s no audience to applaud his performance, when he faces a cold, silent indifference, if not hostility?
The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow
suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.
Listen to your life,” Frederick Buechner wrote. “See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
