The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

The people who are made larger by suffering go on to stage two small rebellions. First, they rebel against their ego ideal. When they were on their first mountain, their ego had some vision of what it was shooting for—some vision of prominence, pleasure, and success. Down in the valley they lose interest in their ego ideal. Of course afterward they still feel and sometimes succumb to their selfish desires. But, overall, they realize the desires of the ego are never going to satisfy the deep regions they have discovered in themselves. They realize, as Henri Nouwen put it, that they are much better than their ego ideal.

At this point, people realize, Oh, that first mountain wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. The second mountain is not the opposite of the first mountain. To climb it doesn’t mean rejecting the first mountain. It’s the journey after it. It’s the more generous and satisfying phase of life.

Still others stay in their same jobs and their same marriages, but are transformed. It’s not about self anymore; it’s about a summons. If they are principals, their joy is in seeing their teachers shine. If they work in a company, they no longer see themselves as managers but as mentors; their energies are devoted to helping others get better. They want their organizations to be thick places, where people find purpose, and not thin places, where people come just to draw a salary.

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.

Their days are often exhausting, because they have put themselves out for people, and those people fill their days with requests and demands. But they are living at a fuller amplitude, activating deeper parts of themselves and taking on broader responsibilities. They have decided that, as C. S. Lewis put it, “The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken.”2

But it is still important to set a high standard. It is still important to be inspired by the examples of others and to remember that a life of deep commitments is possible. When we fall short, it will be because of our own limitations, not because we had an inadequate ideal.

My ex-wife and I have an agreement that we don’t talk about our marriage and divorce in public. 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.

I look at those dear friendships with a gratitude mixed with shame, and this pattern—not being present to what I love because I prioritize time over people, productivity over relationship—is a recurring motif in my life.

Make time to speak to others

Writing it was my attempt to kick myself in my own rear, part of my continual effort to write my way to a better life. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” Kafka wrote. It should wake us up and hammer at our skull. Writing this book has served that purpose for me. I’ve also written it, I hope, for you. When it comes to what we writers do, I like to apply an observation by D. T. Niles: We are like beggars who try to show other beggars where we found bread.

Great quote

In Anna Karenina, Levin is out cutting grass with the men who work on the farm. At first Levin is clumsy with his scythe, but then he learns the motion and cuts clean, straight rows. “The longer Levin mowed, the more often he felt those moments of oblivion during which it was no longer his arms that swung the scythe, but the scythe itself that lent motion to his whole body, full of life and conscious of itself, and, as if by magic, without a thought of it, the work got rightly and neatly done on its own.3 These were the most blissful moments.”

McNeill experienced that after he was drafted into the army in 1941. In boot camp he was taught to march with the other men in his unit. He began to experience strange sensations while marching: “Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved.4 A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual.”

The writer David Whyte makes the core point. “Joy,” he writes, is the meeting place, of deep intentionality and self-forgetting, the bodily alchemy of what lies inside us in communion with what formally seemed outside, but is now neither, but becomes a living frontier, a voice speaking between us and the world: dance, laughter, affection, skin touching skin, singing in the car, music in the kitchen, the quiet irreplaceable and companionable presence of a daughter: the sheer intoxicating beauty of the world inhabited as an edge between what we previously thought was us and what we thought was other than us.7

“Wish for something,” she whispered. Then the falcon turned its head and locked his eyes with Wiman’s, and Wiman felt some bottom fall out within him. He later wrote a poem about that moment, which includes this stanza: For a long moment I’m still in8 I wished and wished and wished the moment would not end. And just like that it vanished.

In Backpacking with the Saints, Belden Lane describes the experience of hiking this way: Whenever I plunge into wilderness, my body and the environment move in and out of each other in an intimate pattern of exchange.9 I wade through water and inhale air filled with the scent of honeysuckle. I’m wrapped in cobwebs and pierced by briars. I swallow gnats drawn to the sweat on my body and feel the rocks on the trail through my boots. Where I “end” and everything else “begins” isn’t always clear. What seems to be “me” doesn’t stop at the fixed boundary of my skin.

Other people, though not explicitly religious, also experience moments when love seems to shine down on them. Jules Evans was skiing at age twenty-four when he fell off a cliff, dropped thirty feet, and broke his leg and back. “As I lay there I felt immersed in love and light.10 I’d been suffering from emotional problems for six years and feared my ego was permanently damaged. In that moment, I knew that I was OK, I was loved, that there was something in me that could not be damaged, call it ‘the soul,’ or ‘the self,’ ‘pure consciousness’ or what have you.”

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.

“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. On the contrary, a life of ease is how you get stuck and confused in life.”

Gregory Boyle ministers to gang members in Los Angeles and captures the difference between a life lived for self and one lived for others: “Compassion is always, at its most authentic, about a shift from the cramped world of self-preoccupation into a more expansive place of fellowship.” It’s one of the inescapable truisms of life: You have to lose yourself to find yourself, give yourself away to get everything back.

“There is joy in self-forgetfulness,” Helen Keller observed. “So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.”

“Joy is not merely external to the good life, a mint leaf on the cake’s whipped cream.11 Rather, the good life expresses and manifests itself in joy. Joy is the emotional dimension of life that goes well and that is led well, a positive affective response to life going well and life being led well.”

There was a lot of commentary in those days about the soul-sucking perils of conformity, of being nothing more than an organization man, the man in the gray flannel suit, a numb status seeker. There was a sense that the group had crushed the individual, and that people, reduced to a number, had no sense of an authentic self.

As Joseph Campbell put it in an interview with Bill Moyers, there are two types of deed. There is the physical deed: the hero who performs an act of bravery in war and saves a village. But there is also the spiritual hero, who has found a new and better way of experiencing spiritual life, and then comes back and communicates it to everyone else.

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

In eighteenth-century America, Colonial society and Native American society sat, unhappily, side by side. As time went by, settlers from Europe began defecting to live with the natives. No natives defected to live with the colonials. This bothered the Europeans. They had, they assumed, the superior civilization, and yet people were voting with their feet to live in the other way.

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 purpose of life is to be free. Freedom leads to happiness! We’re not going to impose anything on you or tell you what to do. We give you your liberated self to explore. Enjoy your 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?

So we hand them another big box of nothing—the big box of possibility! Your future is limitless! You can do anything you set your mind to! The journey is the destination! Take risks! Be audacious! Dream big! But this mantra doesn’t help them, either. 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.

Kierkegaard once summarized the question that these graduates are really asking: “What I really need to be clear about is what am I to do, not about what I must know …. It is a question of finding a truth that is truth for me, of finding the idea for which I am willing to live and die. … It is for this my soul thirsts, as the deserts of Africa thirst for water.” How is it that on this biggest question of all, we have nothing to say?

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.

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.

Wallace thought the way to fight all this was to focus your individual attention—through a sort of iron willpower. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” Wallace told Kenyon College graduates in his famous commencement address. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

Your mind is afloat and at the play of prompts. 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. One of the reasons you are rushing about is because you are running away from yourself.

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.

As students, they were good at winning gold stars, and so they follow a gold-star-winning kind of life when they enter the workforce, and their parents get to brag that they work at Google or Williams & Connolly, or that they go to Harvard Business School.

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.

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.”

This word is used much less frequently today, which is peculiar since the state it describes is so common. 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.

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.”

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.”

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.

People who are left naked and alone by radical individualism do what their genes and the ancient history of their species tell them to do: They revert to tribe. Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism. Hannah Arendt noticed the phenomenon decades ago. When she looked into the lives of people who had become political fanatics, she found two things: loneliness and spiritual emptiness. “Loneliness is the common ground of terror,” she wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

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. Tribalism threatens to take the detached individual and turn him into a monster.

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.

Suffering calls for a response. None of us can avoid suffering, but we can all choose how we respond to it. And, interestingly, few people respond to suffering by seeking pleasure. Nobody says, I lost my child, therefore I should go out and party. They say, I lost my child, and therefore I am equipped to help others who have lost their child. People realize that shallow food won’t satisfy the deep hunger and fill the deep emptiness that suffering reveals. Only spiritual food will do that. Many people respond to pain by practicing generosity.

The right thing to do when you are in moments of suffering is to stand erect in the suffering. Wait. See what it has to teach you. Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment.

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? His world falls to pieces. The soul hungry for approval starves in a desert like that. It reduces the compulsive achiever to something little, utterly ordinary. Only then is he able to be loved.”

Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment. When you have been away in the wilderness for weeks, you begin to move at kairos time. The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but thick and strong, like the growing of the redwood.

“Your pain is deep and it won’t just go away,” Nouwen continues.3 “It is also uniquely yours, because it is linked to some of your earliest life experiences. Your call is to bring that pain home. As long as your wounded part remains foreign to your adult self, your pain will injure you as well as others.” As the saying goes, suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.

Listen to your life,” Frederick Buechner wrote.4 “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.”