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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?
These people are not keeping their options open. They are planted.
But it is still important to set a high standard.
But when I look back generally on the errors and failures and sins of my life, they tend to be failures of omission, failures to truly show up for the people I should have been close to. They tend to be the sins of withdrawal:
So we as people and as a society have to find our second mountain. This doesn’t mean rejecting the things we achieved on the first mountain—the nice job, the nice home, the pleasures of a comfortable life. We all need daily ego boosts throughout our lives. But it does require a shift in culture—a
Most of the time we aim too low. We walk in shoes too small for us. We spend our days shooting for a little burst of approval or some small career victory.
We were tightly packed, circling around him, and he was in the center of the whirl, jumping up and down with wild abandon. Every few minutes he would call different people—his grandfather, a friend, even me—to come to the white-hot center and bounce with joy with him and swing our arms and roar in laughter.
Such transcendent moments can last only a few minutes, but they can alter a lifetime. 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.
There’s always something flowing out of the interiority of our spirit. For some people it’s mostly fear or insecurity. For the people we call joyful, it’s mostly gratitude, delight, and kindness.
“Before having that personal load to carry, I was somewhat complacent. I lacked the urgency. I didn’t have the traction to move forward,” he writes. “A life of ease is not the pathway to growth and happiness.
Happiness is something you pursue; joy is something that rises up unexpectedly and sweeps over you.
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.
But many ideas become false when taken to the extreme.
They are thrown into a world that is unstructured and uncertain, with few authorities or guardrails except those they are expected to build on their own. Among other things, it becomes phenomenally hard to launch yourself into life.
Many young people are graduating into limbo. Floating and plagued by uncertainty, they want to know what specifically they should do with their lives. So we hand them the great empty box of freedom!
The students in the audience put down that empty box because they are drowning in freedom.
What they’re looking for is direction. What is freedom for? How do I know which path is my path?
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. So they put down that empty box.
They want to know why they should do this as opposed to that. And we have nothing to say except, Figure it out yourself based on no criteria outside yourself.
When you’re a student, life is station to station. There’s always the next assignment, the next test, the next admissions application to structure a student’s schedule and energies. Social life has its dramas, but at least it’s laid out right there in front of you in the dining hall and the dorm. Then, from the most structured and supervised childhood in human history, you get spit out after graduation into the least structured young adulthood in human history.
Today the approval bath stops.
You have thousands of conversations and remember none.
The problem is that the person in the aesthetic phase sees life as possibilities to be experienced and not projects to be fulfilled or ideals to be lived out.
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.
you aren’t saying a permanent no to anything, giving anything up, then you probably aren’t diving into anything fully.
Comparison is the robber of joy.
Do not flatter yourself in thinking that you’re brave enough or capable enough to see into the deepest and most important parts of yourself.
Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.
Never underestimate the power of the environment you work in to gradually transform who you are.
satisfies your very soul.
While it pretends not to, it subliminally sends the message that those who are smarter and more accomplished are actually worth more than those who are not.
acedia.
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.
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.
What does it profit a man to sell his own soul if others are selling theirs and getting more for it?
But when you don’t know what your purpose is, any setback can lead to total collapse.
She is living with the psychological awareness that she is settling.
He is paralyzed by self-focus.
What’s my best life? What do I believe in? Where do I belong?
Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, in the sense I’m using it here, is connection based on mutual hatred.
There’s nothing intrinsically noble about suffering. Sometimes grief is just grief, to be gotten through. 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.
The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that suffering upsets the normal patterns of life and reminds you that you are not who you thought you were.
Climbing out of the valley is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.
There’s just the same eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service.
or your tendency to be incommunicative and to withdraw at the first sign of stress.
You don’t find your vocation through an act of taking charge. “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.”
Over the years, your ego has found a specific way it wants you to be in order to win the most approval—what
The ego wants you to point your life to the role that will make you seem smart, good-looking, and admirable. It’s likely you have spent a lot of time so far conforming to the ego ideal.
“To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.”
There is something in them that animates them, the dream of being a star, the drive of pleasing a teacher or making a difference in the world or simply being great.
Is this not the egative ego he as just describing?
