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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Brooks
Read between
July 6 - August 7, 2024
A commitment is making a promise to something without expecting a reward. A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.
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.
We all grew up in one 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.
Our natural enthusiasm trains us to be people pleasers, to say yes to other people. But if you aren’t saying a permanent no to anything, giving anything up, then you probably aren’t diving into anything fully.
A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.
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.
Never underestimate the power of the environment you work in to gradually transform who you are.
Eventually there’s no escaping the big questions. What’s my best life? What do I believe in? Where do I belong?
In 1950, less than 10 percent of households were single-person households; now nearly 30 percent are.
“And of all kinds of aloneness, moral aloneness is the most terrible.”
“Loneliness is the common ground of terror,”
True loneliness, Nabeelah Jaffer writes, is not only solitude; it is also a sort of spiritual emptiness, the loss of faith in oneself to come up with answers, “the loss of one’s own self.”
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 community for lonely narcissists.
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. But sometimes, when suffering can be connected to a larger narrative of change and redemption, we can suffer our way to wisdom. This is the kind of wisdom you can’t learn from books; you have to experience it yourself. Sometimes you experience your first taste of nobility in the way you respond to suffering.
Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil.
All decisions involve a large measure of uncertainty about the future. What makes transformational choices especially tough is that you don’t know what your transformed self will be like or will want, after the vagaries of life begin to have their effects.
The Greeks had a concept, later seized by Goethe, called the daemonic. A daemon is a calling, an obsession, a source of lasting and sometimes manic energy. Daemons are mysterious clusters of energy deep in the unconscious that were charged by some mysterious event in childhood that we imperfectly comprehend—or by some experience of trauma, or by some great love or joy or longing that we spend the rest of our lives trying to recapture.
The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
Swaniker believes that we are defined by these moments of obligation, which are “usually caused by a sense of outrage about some injustice, wrong-doing or unfairness we see in society.” But he goes on to argue that “you should ignore 99% of these moments of obligation,” no matter how guilty it makes you feel.
The world is full of problems, but very few are the problems you are meant to address. When you feel the tug of such a moment, Swaniker advises, ask three big questions: First, Is it big enough? Those who have been fortunate to receive a good education, who are healthy, and have had great work experiences should not be solving small problems. If you were born lucky, you should solve big problems. Second, “Am I uniquely positioned…to make this happen?” Look back on the experiences you have had. Have they prepared you for this specific mission? Third, “Am I truly passionate?” Does the issue
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“If one is cautious but does it without ritual, one becomes timid; if one is bold but does it without ritual, then one becomes reckless; if one is forthright but does it without ritual, then one becomes rude.”
All real work requires a dedication to engage in deliberate practice, the willingness to do the boring things over and over again, just to master a skill.
“Self-discipline is a form of freedom,” he writes. “Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt.”
but we also need to learn the virtue of staying put and staying true, of choosing again what we chose before.
The deeper and more potent fear is that in exposing yourself to others you will actually understand yourself.
Down in the unconscious layer of our minds, there are complexes and wounds that lead us to act in the same self-destructive ways again and again. Your personality is the hidden history of the places where love entered your life or was withdrawn from your life. It is shaped by the ways your parents loved you, the ways they did not love you. All of us have certain attachment patterns lodged deep in our minds. Some people provoke a crisis because they are scared of intimacy. Some withdraw at exactly the moment things are getting close.
When you choose to marry someone, you had better choose someone you’ll enjoy talking with for the rest of your life. It doesn’t work unless two people can fall into a state of fluid conversational flow. The phone calls can last hours. They can spend a fourteen-hour day together and the words don’t stop. Everything can eventually be said, and every topic can be discussed. This is what Martin Buber called “pure relation,” when I–It becomes I–Thou. This is what it feels like to be known.
But life is defined by the moments we’re asked to go against ourselves.
suppose this happens to most of us as we age: We get smaller, and our dependencies get bigger. We become less fascinating to ourselves, less inclined to think of ourselves as the author of all that we are, and at the same time we realize how we have been the ones shaped—by history, by family, by forces beyond awareness. And I think what changed, in the most incremental, boring way possible, is that at some point I had the sensation that these stories are not fabricated tales happening to other, possibly fictional, people: They are the underlying shape of reality. They are renditions of the
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We are alive in the natural world, and we use science to understand that layer of aliveness. We are also alive in another dimension, the dimension of spirit and meaning. We use the biblical stories to understand that dimension of aliveness.
“We human beings are all fundamentally the same,” he wrote. “We all belong to a common, broken humanity. We all have wounded, vulnerable hearts. Each one of us needs to feel appreciated and understood; we all need help.”
What I’ve really tried to describe here is something we don’t talk about in the newspapers—how the process of inner transformation happens. One doesn’t really notice it day by day, but when I look back at who I was five years ago it’s kind of amazing, as I bet it is for you in your journey. It’s a change in the quality of awareness. It’s a gradual process of acquiring a new body of knowledge that slowly, slowly gets stored in the center of your being.
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
“The secret of life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once said, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”
The best adult life is lived by making commitments and staying faithful to those commitments: commitments to a vocation, to a family, to a philosophy or faith, to a community. Adult life is about making promises to others, being faithful to those promises. The beautiful life is found in the mutual giving of unconditional gifts.
Commitments organize the hours and the days of a life. A committed person achieves consistency across time. His character is built through the habitual acts of service to the people he loves. His character is built by being the humble recipient of other people’s gifts and thus acknowledging his own dependency. A contract gets you benefits, but a commitment transforms who you are.
Most of us get better at living as we go. There comes a moment, which may come early or later in life, when you realize what your life is actually about. You look across your life and review the moments when you felt more fully alive, at most your best self. They were usually moments when you were working with others in service of some ideal. That is the agency moment. That is the moment when you achieve clarity about what you should do and how you should live.
