The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

Every once in a while, I meet a person who radiates joy. These are people who seem to glow with an inner light. They are kind, tranquil, delighted by small pleasures, and grateful for the large ones. These people are not perfect. They get exhausted and stressed. They make errors in judgment. But they live for others, and not for themselves. They’ve made unshakable commitments to family, a cause, a community, or a faith. They know why they were put on this earth and derive a deep satisfaction from doing what they have been called to do. Life isn’t easy for these people. They’ve taken on the burdens of others. But they have a serenity about them, a settled resolve. They are interested in you, make you feel cherished and known, and take delight in your good. When you meet these people, you realize that joy is not just a feeling, it can be an outlook. There are temporary highs we all get after we win some victory, and then there is also this other kind of permanent joy that animates people who are not obsessed with themselves but have given themselves away.

Second, they rebel against the mainstream culture. 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. They want to want the things that are truly worth wanting. They elevate their desires. The world tells them to be a good consumer, but they want to be the one consumed—by a moral cause. The world tells them to want independence, but they want interdependence—to be enmeshed in a web of warm relationships. The world tells them to want individual freedom, but they want intimacy, responsibility, and commitment. The world wants them to climb the ladder and pursue success, but they want to be a person for others. The magazines on the magazine rack want them to ask “What can I do to make myself happy?” but they glimpse something bigger than personal happiness.

The people who have been made larger by suffering are brave enough to let parts of their old self die. Down in the valley, their motivations changed. They’ve gone from self-centered to other-centered.

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 building up the ego and defining the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the 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 don’t climb the second mountain the way you climb the first mountain. You conquer your first mountain. 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 the call and address the problem or injustice that is in front of you. On the first mountain you tend to be ambitious,...

Our society suffers from a crisis of connection, a crisis of solidarity. We live in a culture of hyper-individualism. There is always a tension between self and society, between the individual and the group. 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.

People on the first mountain have lives that are mobile and lightly attached. People on the second mountain are deeply rooted and deeply committed. The second-mountain life is a committed life. When I’m describing how second-mountain people live, what I’m really describing is how these people made maximal commitments to others and how they live them out in fervent, all-in ways.

People on the second mountain have made strong commitments to one or all of these four things: A vocation A spouse and family A philosophy or faith A community

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 thing to have—moral joy. And that serenity arrives as you come closer to embodying perfect love.

When a whole society is built around self-preoccupation, its members become separated from one another, divided and alienated. And that is what has happened to us. We are down in the valley. The rot we see in our politics is caused by a rot in our moral and cultural foundations—in the way we relate to one another, in the way we see ourselves as separable from one another, in the individualistic values that have become the water in which we swim. The first-mountain culture has proven insufficient, as it always does.

When I meet people leading lives of deep commitment, this fact hits me: Joy is real.

it’s important to make a distinction between happiness and joy. What’s the difference? Happiness involves a victory for the self, an expansion of self. Happiness comes as we move toward our goals, when things go our way. You get a big promotion. You graduate from college. Your team wins the Super Bowl. You have a delicious meal. Happiness often has to do with some success, some new ability, or some heightened sensual pleasure. 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.

When people make generosity part of their daily routine, they refashion who they are. The interesting thing about your personality, your essence, is that it is not more or less permanent like your leg bone. Your essence is changeable, like your mind. Every action you take, every thought you have, changes you, even if just a little, making you a little more elevated or a little more degraded. If you do a series of good deeds, the habit of other-centeredness becomes gradually engraved into your life. It becomes easier to do good deeds down the line.

The people who radiate a permanent joy have given themselves over to lives of deep and loving commitment. Giving has become their nature, and little by little they have made their souls incandescent. 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.

“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.”

Happiness can be tasted alone. But permanent joy comes out of an enmeshed and embedded life. Happiness happens when a personal desire is fulfilled. Permanent moral joy seems to emerge when desire is turned outward for others.

Happiness is the proper goal for people on their first mountain. And happiness is great. But we only get one life, so we might as well use it hunting for big game: to enjoy happiness, but to surpass happiness toward joy.

If “We’re All in This Together” was about the group, this new moral ecology was all about freedom, autonomy, authenticity. You might summarize it with the phrase “I’m Free to Be Myself.” This individualistic ethos, which has sometimes been called “selfism,” was pumped into the boomers with their breast milk, and it will be drained from every cavity by their morticians.

If you say yes to everything year after year, you end up leading what Kierkegaard lamented as an aesthetic style of life. The person leading the aesthetic life is leading his life as if it were a piece of art, judging it by aesthetic criteria—is it interesting or dull, pretty or ugly, pleasurable or painful?

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. He will hover above everything but never land. In the aesthetic way of life, each individual day is fun, but it doesn’t seem to add up to anything. The theory behind this life is that you should rack up experiences. 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.

Living online often means living in a state of diversion. 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. If you can’t focus your attention for thirty seconds, how on earth are you going to commit for life?

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 yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.

The meritocracy’s soul-flattening influence is survivable if you have your own competing moral system that exists in you alongside it, but if you have no competing value system, the meritocracy swallows you whole.

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.

As the young writer Veronica Rae Saron put it, “Conversation after conversation, it has become more and more clear: 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.”

In 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the life span of the average American had declined for the third consecutive year. This is an absolutely stunning trend. In affluent, cohesive societies, life spans get gradually longer as a matter of course. The last time the American life span contracted for this length of time was 1915 to 1918, when the country was enduring a world war and a flu 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 us.

Tribalism seems like a way to restore the bonds of community. It certainly does bind people together. But it is actually the dark twin of community. 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. Tribalism is always erecting boundaries and creating friend/enemy distinctions. The tribal mentality is a warrior mentality based on scarcity: Life is a battle for scarce resources and it’s always us versus them, zero-sum.

People often use partisan identity to fill the void left when their other attachments wither away—ethnic, neighborhood, religious, communal, and familial. This is asking more from politics than politics can deliver. 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.

Seasons of pain expose the falseness and vanity of most of our ambitions and illuminate the larger reality of living and dying, caring and being cared for. Pain helps us see the true size of our egotistical desires. Before they seemed gigantic and dominated the whole screen. After seasons of suffering, we see that the desires of the ego are very small desires, and certainly not the ones we should organize our lives around.

The valley is where we shed the old self so the new self can emerge. There are no shortcuts. There’s just the same eternal three-step process that the poets have described from time eternal: from suffering to wisdom to service. Dying to the old self, cleansing in the emptiness, resurrecting in the new.

“If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would be something like this: 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.”

The teacher Parker Palmer echoes the theme: “As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race.” The core of that, for Palmer, was listening. “Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and even do great damage.”

This is the pivotal point, maybe of this whole book. On the surface of our lives most of us build the hard shell. It is built to cover fear and insecurity and win approval and success. When you get down to the core of yourself, you find a different, more primeval country, and in it a deep yearning to care and connect. You could call this deep core of yourself the pleroma, or substrate. It is where your heart and soul reside.

The ego, says Lee Hardy, wants you to choose a job and a life that you can use as a magic wand to impress others.

“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 some deep part of ourselves from where desires flow. We’re defined by what we desire, not what we know.

When you go down inside yourself, you find that there are longings in there that are only completed when you are loving and serving others. “And then,” says the poet Rilke, “the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life.”

Individualism says, Shoot for personal happiness, but the person on the second mountain says, No, I shoot for meaning and moral joy. That individualism says, Celebrate independence, but the second-mountain hero says, I will celebrate interdependence. I will celebrate the chance to become dependent on those I care for and for them to become dependent on me. Individualism celebrates autonomy; the second mountain celebrates relation. Individualism speaks with an active voice—lecturing, taking charge—and never the passive voice. But the second-mountain rebellion seeks to listen and respond, communicating in the voice of intimate exchange.

the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.

A thick life is defined by commitments and obligations. The life well lived is a journey from open options to sweet compulsions.

it’s worth remembering, as Alasdair MacIntyre has pointed out, that the concept of altruism was invented only in the eighteenth century. Once people decided that human nature is essentially egoist and selfish, then it was necessary to invent a word for when people weren’t driven by selfish desires. But before that, what we call altruism—living for relationships—was just how people lived. It wasn’t heroic or special.

when you actually look around the world—parents looking after their kids, neighbors forming associations, colleagues helping one another, people meeting and encountering each other in coffee shops—you see that loving care is not on the fringe of society. It’s the foundation of society. These community builders are primarily driven by desires four through six—by emotional, spiritual, and moral motivations: a desire to live in intimate relation with others, to make a difference in the world, to feel right with oneself. They are driven by a desire for belonging and generosity.

They often use the phrase “radical hospitality” to describe their philosophy of life, because their goal is that nobody should ever be shut out from their welcome.

Community builders believe in radical mutuality. They utterly reject the notion that some people have everything in order, and others are screwups. In their view, we are all stumblers. As W. H. Auden put it, the task in life is to “love your crooked neighbor with all your crooked heart.” “Charity” is the ultimate dirty word. We are all equal, and we all need one another.

One task in life is synthesis. It is to collect all the fragmented pieces of a self and bring them to a state of unity, so that you move coherently toward a single vision.

“Happiness,” Dr. William H. Sheldon wrote, “is essentially a state of going somewhere, wholeheartedly, one-directionally, without reservation or regret.” The practical way we do that is through commitments—through making maximal commitments to things we really care about and then serving them in a wholehearted way. The core challenges of the second-mountain life are found in the questions, How do I choose my commitments? How do I decide what is the right commitment for me? How do I serve my commitments once they have been chosen? How do I blend my commitments so that together they merge into a coherent, focused, and joyful life?

the tricky part of an annunciation moment is not having it, but realizing you’re having it. The world is full of beautiful things and moments of wonder. But sometimes they pass by without us realizing their importance. Often, we’re not aware of our annunciation moments except in retrospect. You look back and realize, “Okay, that’s when this all started….That was the freakishly unlikely circumstance that set things off on this wonderful course.” The

What most people seek in life, especially when young, is not happiness but an intensity that reaches into the core. We want to be involved in some important pursuit that involves hardship and is worthy of that hardship. The mentors who really lodge in the mind are the ones who were hard on us—or at least were hard on themselves and set the right example—not the ones who were easy on us. They are the ones who balanced unstinting love with high standards and relentless demands on behalf of something they took seriously.

When making the big choices in life, as L. A. Paul puts it, “You shouldn’t fool yourself—you have no idea what you are getting into.”

Over time, a commitment to addressing a problem often eclipses the love of the activity that led someone to tackle the problem in the first place. For example, there comes a time in many careers when people face a choice between helping a small number of people a lot or helping a large number of people a little.