The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

The goals on that first mountain are the normal goals that our culture endorses—to be a success, to be well thought of, to get invited into the right social circles, and to experience personal happiness. It’s all the normal stuff: nice home, nice family, nice vacations, good food, good friends, and so on.

Some people get to the top of that first mountain, taste success, and find it…unsatisfying. “Is this all there is?” they wonder. They sense there must be a deeper journey they can take. Other people get knocked off that mountain by some failure. Something happens to their career, their family, or their reputation. Suddenly life doesn’t look like a steady ascent up the mountain of success; it has a different and more disappointing shape.

Whatever the cause, these people are no longer on the mountain. They are down in the valley of bewilderment or suffering. This can happen at any age, by the way, from eight to eighty-five and beyond. It’s never too early or too late to get knocked off your first mountain.

Some shrivel in the face of this kind of suffering. They seem to get more afraid and more resentful. They shrink away from their inner depths in fear. Their lives become smaller and lonelier. We all know old people who nurse eternal grievances. They don’t get the respect they deserve. They live their lives as an endless tantrum about some wrong done to them long ago.

But for others, this valley is the making of them. The season of suffering interrupts the superficial flow of everyday life. They see deeper into themselves and realize that down in the substrate, flowing from all the tender places, there is a fundamental ability to care, a yearning to transcend the self and care for others.

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 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.

want their organizations to be thick places, where people find purpose, and not thin places, where people come just to draw a salary.

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

My first mountain was an insanely lucky one. I achieved far more professional success than I ever expected to. But that climb turned me into a certain sort of person: aloof, invulnerable, and uncommunicative, at least when it came to my private life.

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: evasion, workaholism, conflict avoidance, failure to empathize, and a failure to express myself openly.

book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” Kafka wrote.

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. If you lie or behave callously or cruelly toward someone, your personality degrades, and it is easier for you to do something even worse later on. As the criminologists say, the people who commit murder don’t start there. They have to walk through a lot of doors before they get to the point where they can take another human life.

Often it happens in what geographer Ruth DeFries calls the “ratchet, hatchet, pivot; ratchet” pattern. People create a moral ecology that helps them solve the problems of their moment. That ecology works, and society ratchets upward. But over time the ecology becomes less relevant to new problems that arise. The old culture grows rigid, and members of a counterculture take a hatchet to it. There’s a period of turmoil and competition as the champions of the different moral orders fight to see which new culture will prevail. At these moments—1848, 1917, 1968, today—it’s easy to get depressed and to feel that society is coming apart at the seams. There are gigantic and often brutal wars of consecration, battles about what way of life is admired most. Eventually society pivots over and settles on a new moral ecology, a new set of standards of right and wrong. Once that’s in place, there is a new ratchet of progress, and the stumble of progress takes another step.

Iris Murdoch’s words: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”

The goal of life is to climb Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and achieve self-actualization and self-fulfillment.

The privatization of meaning. It’s a mistake to simply accept the received ideas of the world around you. You have to 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 life.”

You could add other ideas to my list of things that characterize the culture of a hyper-individualistic society: consumerism, a therapeutic mindset, the preference for technology over intimacy. The big fact is that these ideas, spreading for half a century, have made it harder to live bonded, communal lives.

As Annie Dillard put it, how you spend your days is how you spend your life. If you spend your days merely consuming random experiences, you will begin to feel like a scattered consumer. If you want to sample something from every aisle in the grocery store of life, you turn yourself into a chooser, the sort of self-obsessed person who is always thinking about himself and his choices and is eventually paralyzed by self-consciousness.

Comparison is the robber of joy.

terminally distracted, with sentences stringing along and doubling back on one another, thoughts just popping up here and there. In such a world, everybody is buzzingly entertained but not necessarily progressing.

You know that at some point you should sit down and find some overall direction for your life. But the mind wants to wander from the meaty big questions, which are completely daunting and unanswerable, to the diverting candy right on your phone—the tiny dopamine lift.

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.

This group of emerging adults are pragmatists. They are good at solving problems. The problem for a college junior and senior is anticipated ambiguity. Graduation is approaching, and you don’t know what comes next. The pragmatists solve this problem by flocking to companies and such that can tell them, even as juniors in college, what they will be doing for at least a few years hence. The uncertainty is over. Plus, now they will have a good answer when adults ask them, as they are prone to do, what they are going to do after graduation. In order to keep the existential anxiety about what to do with their life carefully suppressed underneath the waterline of consciousness, they grab the first job that comes along. Unfortunately, this pragmatic route doesn’t spare you from the ditch, either. Never underestimate the power of the environment you work in to gradually transform who you are. When you choose to work at a certain company, you are turning yourself into the sort of person who works in that company. That’s great if the culture of McKinsey or General Mills satisfies your very soul. But if it doesn’t, there will be some little piece of yourself that will go unfed and get hungrier and hungrier.

Furthermore, workaholism is a surprisingly effective distraction from emotional and spiritual problems. It’s surprisingly easy to become emotionally avoidant and morally decoupled, to be less close to and vulnerable with those around you, to wall off the dark jungle deep inside you, to gradually tamp down the highs and lows and simply live in neutral. Have you noticed how many people are more boring and half-hearted at age thirty-five than they were at twenty?

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. You lose your sense of agency, because the rungs of the professional ladder determine your schedule and life course. The meritocracy gives you brands to attach to—your prestigious school, your nice job title—which work well as status markers and seem to replace the urgent need to find out who you are. 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.

When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others. You are haunted by your conception of yourself. People who live in this way imagine that there are other people who are enjoying career splendor and private joy. That loser in college who did nothing but watch TV is now a big movie producer; that quiet guy in the training program is now a billionaire hedge fund manager. What does it profit a man to sell his own soul if others are selling theirs and getting more for it?

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? My life came to a stop. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep; indeed, I could not help but breathe, eat, drink, and sleep. But there was no life in me because I had no desires whose satisfaction I would have found reasonable. If I wanted something, I knew beforehand that it did not matter whether or not I got it. Life began to feel absurd and useless. He removed all the ropes from his room so he would not hang himself. He kept himself away from his hunting rifles so he would not shoot himself. He began to regard his former writing intellectual life as a form of madness. Who could really care if he got a good review in this or that journal? It now seemed that he and his cronies hadn’t been improving the world, just writing to become rich and famous. Tolstoy was sick of life and saw no point in it. He was in the valley. If this sense of lostness can happen to a Tolstoy, then it can happen to anybody. 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.

In an essay for Oprah.com, writer Ada Calhoun described the way many women even in their thirties and forties feel adrift, like they’re misleading their lives. One of her friends, forty-one, told her, “Sometimes, I have these moments of clarity, usually during lengthy conference calls,” she said. “This voice in my head suddenly starts shouting: What are you doing? This is pointless and boring! Why aren’t you out there doing something you love?”

A telos crisis is defined by the fact that people in it don’t know what their 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. But when you don’t know what your purpose is, any setback can lead to total collapse. As Seamus Heaney put it, “You are neither here nor there, / A hurry through which known and strange things pass.”

She is living with the psychological awareness that she is settling. I had a friend named Casey Gerald who was being interviewed for a job. At the end of the interview he turned the tables on the interviewer and asked her a question: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” The interviewer burst out crying. If she wasn’t afraid, she wouldn’t be doing HR for that company. That’s a walking telos crisis.

David Foster Wallace noticed it in a lot of his friends: “Something that doesn’t have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news. It’s more like 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.”

Eventually there’s no escaping the big questions. What’s my best life? What do I believe in? Where do I belong?

Former surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote in the Harvard Business Review, “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.”

People in that earlier generation generally assumed that self-sacrifice made sense, because if you served your organization, it would serve you back. But, as the pollster Daniel Yankelovich pointed out decades ago, 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.

Robert Putnam of Harvard points out, that’s for a very good reason: People are less trustworthy. It’s not that perception is getting worse. It’s actual behavior. The quality of our relationships is worse. Distrust breeds distrust. When people feel distrustful they conclude that the only person they can rely on is themselves. “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch.

“Man has a horror of aloneness,” Balzac writes. “And of all kinds of aloneness, moral aloneness is the most terrible.”

Tribalists seek out easy categories in which some people are good and others are bad. They seek out certainty to conquer their feelings of unbearable doubt. They seek out war—political war or actual war—as a way to give life meaning. They revert to tribe.

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. The ends justify the means. Politics is war. Ideas are combat. It’s kill or be killed. Mistrust is the tribalist worldview. Tribalism is community for lonely narcissists.

When we’re on the first mountain, we’re living in what Keats called the “thoughtless chamber.” This is the default chamber; we just unthinkingly absorb the values and ways of life that happen to be around us. We want to stay in this chamber. It’s comfortable, and everybody nods at you with approval. In The Age of Anxiety, W. H. Auden wrote, 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.