The Quest for a Moral Life
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Summary
In this episode, we revisit an interview I did with David Brooks back in 2019 about his book, The Second Mountain, The Quest for Your Moral Life. In that episode, Brooks explains why there are two mountains that we climb in life: the first is about the self, getting a college degree, starting your career, buying a home, and making a mark on the world; but at some point, that mountain starts to feel unfulfilling. That s when we discover there's a second mountain to ascend, a path of selflessness, relationships, and greater meaning.
Transcript
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Hey, it's Brett. We're taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday. Going to eat some turkey,
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some sweet potato casserole with the marshmallows on top. Can't wait to dig into that. In the
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meantime, we're going to rebroadcast episode number 518, The Quest for Your Moral Life.
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This is an interview I did with David Brooks back in 2019 about his book, The Second Mountain,
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one of my favorite episodes. Hope you enjoy it. I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving. I know while
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I'm eating my sweet potato casserole with marshmallows on top, I'll be thinking of you
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all. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We'll see you on Monday with a brand
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Do you ever feel
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like you're spinning your existential wheels in life? That outwardly you seem to be doing okay,
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but inwardly you feel kind of empty? I guess they would say that you've got to move on from trekking
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up life's first mountain to begin a journey up its second. His name is David Brooks and he's the
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author of The Second Mountain, The Quest for Immoral Life. In that book, David makes the case that there
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are two mountains that we climb in life. The first is about the self, getting a college degree, starting
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your career, buying a home, and making a mark on the world. But at some point, that mountain starts
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to feel unfulfilling. That's when we discover there's a second mountain to ascend, a path of
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selflessness, relationships, and greater meaning. Today on the show, David tells us what he got
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wrong in his previous book, The Road to Character, and how the second mountain expands his vision of
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the good life. We then discuss why the first mountain of life gets more attention in the West,
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and how the hyper-individualism it encourages has led to an increase in loneliness, anxiety,
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and existential angst. David then walks us through how we shift courses from the first mountain of
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achievement to the second mountain of meaning by making commitments to things outside of ourselves.
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We then discuss the four commitments he thinks bring us real meaning and significance, and how
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we can seek and find them. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash
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All right, David Brooks, welcome back to the show.
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So last time we had you on was a few years ago to discuss your book, The Road to Character.
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You got a new book out, The Second Mountain, The Quest for a Moral Life. Is this book a
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continuation of your thoughts that you fleshed out in The Road to Character, or is it something
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different? It's a bit of a correcting what went wrong with that one, or what are the limitations
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of that one? And so both books are sort of about how do we become better people. And when I wrote
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that, I wrote it about some amazing people. We still have a lot to learn from people like
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Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall and Samuel Johnson and Dorothy Day. And so I don't renounce
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that other book. But when I was thinking about how people built their character, I think I was still
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stuck in an individualistic mindset. And so to me, the way you build characters, you identify your
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core sin, like you might have anger if you're Dwight Eisenhower, and then you work on it every
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day. And so character building is about inner conflict. And I think there's some bit of
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character building is about that. It's like you go to the gym, you work up your honesty muscle,
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your courage muscle, you get stronger at those things. The problem is, I don't think most of us
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have the willpower to do that. And so the question is, how do we really develop the willpower to become
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better people? And I think we do that by falling in love with something. So for example, when my first
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kid was born, we didn't know he had really low APGAR score. We didn't know whether he'd live or die
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that first night. And I remember thinking, would it be worth it for his mom and I to have a lifetime
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of grief for him to live just 30 minutes? And if you'd asked me that before he was born, I would
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have said, no way, what, you know, why should two people suffer a lifetime of suffering for 30 minutes
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if a creature doesn't even know he exists. But after the kid was born, I became aware of a level
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of commitment and love that I didn't even imagine existed beforehand. And when you become aware of that
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level of commitment and love, you want to make promises to the kid, I'll always be there for
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him. And you start behaving a little less selfishly than you would have before. Like, you might want
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to go out and play golf, but instead you care for the kid, push him around in the baby carriage,
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and you start doing things for other people. And over time, I think you get a little less selfish.
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And so now I think character formation is really about keeping up with our commitments. We fall in love
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with something. We make a promise to it. And then we try to live up to the promises we make. So it's
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much more relationship-centered and less individualistic. And did you have any experiences
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or was this, you know, just talking with people after you wrote The Road to Character, where you
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kind of realized that character formation is about relationships and about commitments and not just
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sort of this sort of Nietzschean, you know, will-to-power, ubermensch mission?
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Yeah. I mean, you get some stuff in books, but you only get a little. Like, books name
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things that you experienced. Somebody once said, you can be knowledge, knowledgeable with other
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men's knowledge, but you can't be wise with other men's wisdom. And you sort of have to go through
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stuff. And I went through a period just at the time I was finishing Road to Character,
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but I didn't really put it in the book because I couldn't understand what was happening to me.
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I just went through a bad period of life. And we all go through periods in the valley and some are
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not our fault. Like a couple of years ago, my mother died and that was a bad period in the valley,
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but some kind of are my fault. And in 2013, I went through one that was at least partially my fault.
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And my marriage had ended and my kids were going away to college. And I had lost a lot of the
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friends that I used to have in the, more in the conservative movement. And I realized I had
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weekday friends, like the kinds I could talk to about work, but I didn't have that many weekend
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friends. And I'd sort of gotten to a place where week for work and all the amount of work I did
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had sort of numbed over both the heart, the desire for connection with another and the soul,
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the desire of connection to be good. And so there'd been sort of a moral numbing and a relational
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numbing. And so I was down in the valley for a year or two and learned a few things down there.
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So this idea of valley, this goes back to this metaphor that structures the book. You make the
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case that their life consists of two mountains. What's the first mountain like? And then let's talk
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about the second mountain after that. Yeah. The first mountain is the mountain society wants us
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to climb. You get out of school and you want to have a good career. You want people to think well
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of you and you want to carve out an identity and make a mark in the world. And this, this is what
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our meritocracy tells us to want to, you know, if I make enough money, if I have a good career,
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people will think well of me and I'll be happy. And I think that's a lie. I think there are certain
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lies embedded in our meritocracy. One is that career success leads to fulfillment. I can guarantee
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you that's not true for most people. The second is I can make myself happy. That happiness is an
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individual achievement. If I just lose a few more pounds, I get better at golf or something.
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But if you talk to people on their deathbed, they say, you know, I was happiest when I was least
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self-sufficient, when I was most dependent on others. And that's a living in relationship.
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And then there are a bunch of other lies that you're not a soul to be saved. You're a set of
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skills to be maximized. And the most pernicious lie of our culture is that people who have achieved
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a lot more and are a little smarter are somehow worth more than other people. And so you fall for
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all these lies and they sort of lead you in the wrong direction. And they lead you thinking too much
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about the desires of the ego, which are pretty simple desires, but bad and not enough about the
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desires of the heart and the desires of the soul. So down in the valley, you sort of discover your
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better desires and try to align yourself with them. So this basically, it's created, we have
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a culture of individualism. I mean, how did we, how did we get these assumptions in the West that
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individualism will bring happiness? What's the history of that, the social history of that?
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Yeah. Well, we've always been individualistic, like Tocqueville talked about in the 1830s,
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but we've always had another ethos, which balanced that. And sometimes that ethos was religion,
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which was more about community and more about service to some good. Sometimes it was just like
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bohemianism that you served art. There were a lot of different things that balanced it.
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And in the 1950s, say we had a real belief in hanging together. We had to get through the war,
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we had to get through before that, the great depression. And so there was a culture of,
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we're all in this together. And if you grew up, say in Chicago, you didn't say I'm from Chicago.
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You said I'm from 59th and Pulaski because it was your little neighborhood that really defined your
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life. And that had some wonderful elements of really strong communities, but it became stifling
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to people. And people thought I'm just a soulless cog in this conformist society. And so they rebelled
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in the 60s and they said, I want to be free to be myself. And some of that started in the early 60s
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and some of the late 60s, the Woodstock, but it was symbolized by a moment very early in my
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childhood. The first football game I really paid attention to was Super Bowl III. And on one side
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of the field was a guy named Johnny Unitas from the Baltimore Colts. And he was like a 1950s guy,
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very conformist, crew cuts, very unflashy. And on the other side of the field, there was a guy named
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Joe Namath for the New York Jets. And he was very flashy, long hair, $5,000 for coats. He wrote a
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memoir called, I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow Because I Get Better Looking Every Day. And that was the
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culture of let's rebel. Let's be expressive, not reticent. It's cooler to be young, not old.
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And so we created a much more individualistic culture. I'm free to be myself. And that had a
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right-wing version, which was the economic individualism of the 1980s. It had a left-wing
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version, which was the lifestyle individualism of the 60s and 70s and so. But it was all individualism.
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And when you have a culture really built on the self, self-satisfaction, self-sufficiency,
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self-happiness, you end up weakening the bonds between people. And that's more or less what we've
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done. And how is that manifesting itself in our culture today? What are you seeing? The downsides
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of it, yeah? Yeah, we don't just have as good connections as we do. And so if you ask people,
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a generation ago, people entertained in their homes an average about 16 times a year. Now it's down to
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eight. Only 8% of Americans say they have important conversations with their neighbors.
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And if you ask people over 45, 35% of people over 45 say they're chronically lonely.
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If you look at the suicide rate, which is really a proxy for loneliness, it's up 30% in the last 20
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years. If you look at the teenage suicide rate, it's up 70% in the last eight years. And if you ask
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people, do you trust your neighbors? A generation ago, 60% of Americans said that my neighbors are
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basically trustworthy. Now only 32% say that, and 19% are millennials. So we've become a much
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lonelier culture, much more distrustful culture, and a culture that's much nastier or nastier to
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each other. Right. You talk about, also in the book, the rise of tribalism we're seeing in our
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political discourse. Yeah. Tribalism seems like community because it is a way of bonding with
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others. But to me, it's the dark side of community. It's not based on mutual affection for
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a town or something. It's based on mutual hatred of some other. And so it's a scarcity mentality.
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It's a zero-sum mentality. It's always about fighting distrust and war. And that pretty much
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defines our politics and a lot of else. And do you think social media and the internet has
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amplified all these downsides? I do. I mean, I think when we're on social media, we're not really
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communicating out of our depths. We're either on Twitter, which is a lot of people saying,
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I'm smarter than you are. Or sometimes on Instagram, which is a lot of people saying,
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I'm more fabulous than you are. And it's just a shallow form of communication. It's not a deep
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form of communication. And I think if you look at that teenage suicide rate increase, a lot of that
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has to be tied to the smartphone. It just correlates so perfectly with that. And not only just the actual
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technology, but the fact that it creates this mentality of, I'm manipulating you to get a response.
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I'm competing to get a better response. And so it's just a shallow form of communication.
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I think the good news is we're trying to, I think we are figuring it out. We all know the upside of
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the social media and the technology. And I think people are now experimenting and trying to find
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ways where they can get rid of the downside by limiting the time they spend on their phones or
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limiting what they do on their phones or trying to turn the thing off one day a month. I have a friend
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who, he gets up and before he looks at any screen, he goes outside and just looks at the sky for a few
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minutes and has a few thoughts. It's just a way of getting things in the right order.
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But what's interesting, when I talk to people or whenever newspapers interview young people,
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you can tell there's this desire for meaning and significance. But then you see how people
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look for that. It seems like they go about it at trying to find meaning and significance using that
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first mountain response, right? They don't actually go to the second mountain. They think,
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well, I can just work really hard to find meaning. And that doesn't work.
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Right. Like it's a homework assignment. Yeah. No, because that's the language. If we're raised,
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you know, you start at 15 or 16 and you get put in the college admissions process.
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And so you're raised in an ethos of, well, I have to earn it. It's all about, you know,
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work, doing my homework, working out. And then the thing that's, I think, most treacherous,
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or at least most treacherous for me is you get this productivity mindset. And so much of our day
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is taken up by email and stuff like that. So your little clock in your head says onto the next
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project, onto the next project. And so you never actually sit down and have time for real relationships,
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which do take incredible patience and time. And I found in my worst, I value productivity over
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people, which is an illusion. But I would say among my students, I teach college,
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you know, they, they say we're so hungry, like they're very open that we're so hungry for some
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sort of spiritual nourishment, but we're not sure we have the vocabulary. We're not sure we've been
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given the path. And I do think that's the fault of my generation. Frankly, we haven't passed along
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how to do the hard things like have a good character, have good relationships.
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relationships. And often on the most important subjects of life, we really don't know what to
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say. Well, you mentioned the valley that you went through to get on to the second mountain.
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Does everyone have to go through that valley, like a dark time in their life when they realize
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that they're, they were, they weren't on the necessarily on the wrong mountain, but it's like,
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it's not, it's not all the mountains of life. Yeah. I don't think they have to. I know a lot of
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people, my wife included, who she started on her second mountain, like the second mountain,
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the first mountain is, is, is about building up your ego and acquiring things. The second
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mountain is about contributing things and giving things back. First mountain, you're just trying
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to earn a good reputation. The second mountain, you're just trying to pour forth and you get
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joy from the happiness you bring to others. And a lot of people are just good somehow, just
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all the way through there. They were born in an environment and a family that emphasized the
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right values that put relationship before self. And they are lucky ones to grow up in a, in a
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nurturing family, nurturing culture. But I will say, I don't know anybody in life who hasn't gone
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through hard times of one sort or another. And I was with a 94 year old guy not too long ago who said,
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you know, when I look back on my life, I realize, um, my whole life is defined by how I reacted to my
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moments of adversity. And I do think that's true. And you ask people, you know, what made you,
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if I asked you what, what was the event that really made you who you are? Most people point
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to a moment of struggle and how they reacted to it. So I would point to my vow. I would point to
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two things and one is good and one is bad. And I went to a great summer camp from age five to age
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23 with the same group of people every summer for two months. And that was a great relationship
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because it, it surrounded me in, in friendships, uh, friendships I still have today. And so that was,
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that was one thing that made me who I am and gave me a viewpoint. And then the second was this
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valley I went through in 2013. And that was a hard thing I had to get through.
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Yeah. And you would give examples of different valleys people can go through. It could be a
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divorce. It could be a sickness, could be a job loss, but could also be, you know, your first mountain
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life is great. Everything's on lockdown, but you just feel that existential angst or that soul
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sickness that you think there's something more and then it knocks you off. And then you,
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you find that second mountain. Yeah. There's a great concept that was popular in the middle ages,
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but we sort of don't talk about it today, even though it's very common called acedia. And that's
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the loss of desire. And some people like they were just climbing and they were hungry to get to the
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top. And then somehow they just can't care anymore. They just, the passion is gone. And then they're
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sleepwalking. I had a friend who was, um, being interviewed for a job and he turned around at the end and
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asked the interviewer a question. And the question was, what would you do if you weren't afraid?
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And the woman burst out crying because if she wasn't afraid, she wouldn't be doing HR at that
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company, but she doesn't know what to do with her life. And so she's just trudging through a life.
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She doesn't actually enjoy that doesn't arouse her high desires. And I think there are people like
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that. And there are people who, who, you know, feel, I don't quite know what to do. I'm kind of stuck
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here. And that's a version of a valley and other valleys, you know, everything's going well, but
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you get hit by something that wasn't part of the original plan. You know, you get a cancer scare,
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you lose a loved one. And when you're in suffering over grief or something like that,
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the desires of the first mountain, the desires of the ego, they just don't seem that important anymore.
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And you have trouble mobilizing your whole life around.
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So you argue the second mountain is all about commitment. It's the committed life. And this goes
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contrary to what our individual culture tells us will bring us happiness. So how does,
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how does binding ourself through commitments give life meaning and bring us joy?
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It's really, uh, the two mountain metaphors really, uh, as really about two different value systems
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and one value system is the individualistic one. And the second one is the one where you,
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we make promises to each other. And so in my view, we're not going to go back to the 1950s.
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You know, I defer to their organization. I defer to authority. We're not going back to that culture,
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but we could build a culture around commitment making that our life is really defined by the
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commitments we make. And so most of us make commitments to a several of four things or maybe
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all four things to a spouse and family, to a community, to a vocation and to a philosophy or faith.
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And my argument is that the fulfillment of our lives depends on how well we make and choose those
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commitments. So a lot of the book is just asking basic questions like, how do you choose a marriage
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partner? How do you figure out who to marry? And then once you've married them, how do you figure
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out how to behave? So you make the marriage a full marriage or how do you choose your vocation? How do you
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know what job is the right life fulfilling career for you? And not things like that. How do you,
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how do you come to faith? How do you find a philosophy? How do you serve your town?
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And so these are all very just practical questions of how you lead life. That's about
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really a committed, a really buried life where you've chained yourself down to something you
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really care about and you dedicate yourself to that thing year after year.
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And what's interesting is you highlight in the book, as you commit yourself to something bigger
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than yourself, you can actually, that's how you find yourself. I think oftentimes in America,
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we think, well, I'm going to go off into, I'm going to drive in a van, sleep in a van. I'm
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going to find myself that way. But really, no, it's, it's submitting yourself to something larger
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is how you can develop an identity. Yeah. And everybody says you should serve a cause larger
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than yourself, but cliche is always around, but nobody tells you exactly how, and you got to realize
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you have to chain yourself down. And so there are two, um, two definitions of freedom that are out in
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the world. One is freedom as absence of restraint. I can do whatever I want. And then freedom as
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freedom of capacity. I have the freedom to play piano. You have to chain yourself down and practice
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so you can really play. And a lot of your life is determined by what sort of definition of freedom
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you have unconsciously in your head. And so, you know, I, I'm a writer, so I pay attention to how
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other writers work. And one of the things they do is they tend to have very rigid routines. They get
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up at nine. It was Tony Morrison used to go to a hotel room. She kept in the hotel room. There
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were only four things. There was a typewriter, a Bible, a desk, and a bottle of brandy. And she
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just locked herself in the room and wrote all morning. And that commitment to writing seemed
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like a restraint and it was a restraint, but it really set her free to, to do what she was meant
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to do. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show.
00:20:19.180
Well, let's talk about some of the commitments you talk about in the book. The first one's
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vocation. I think we've all heard that word before, but I think we often confuse our careers
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for vocation. Or in other words, we call our career our vocation, but that's not, our career
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is not necessarily a vocation. Yeah. A career is something you, you look at the skills you have
00:20:38.120
and you look in the marketplace and you say, well, how can I get the most return on my skills?
00:20:43.200
And so I'm good at math. Somebody needs to do accounting. So I'm going to become an accountant.
00:20:47.940
And so that's a career and it doesn't really involve your heart and soul necessarily. It's
00:20:53.480
how you trade your skills for money. But some people are called and in a vocation, you're
00:20:59.080
not, it's not like a choice. You're called and you find something incredibly beautiful.
00:21:03.920
I read about this guy, EO Wilson. When he was seven, he was out in the beach for the first
00:21:09.560
time in his life. He got to see the ocean and he saw jellyfish and animals he'd never imagined.
00:21:14.340
He saw stingrays and he was called by the beauty, like was entranced by the, what he
00:21:20.020
found. And his whole life has been about becoming a naturalist. Read an interview with a painter
00:21:26.200
and she was asked, why'd you become a painter? And she said, I just love the smell of paint.
00:21:30.880
My daughter, when she was five, she went into an ice hockey rink. She just felt at home at
00:21:35.340
a rink and now she teaches hockey in California. It's more a sense that there's some beauty out
00:21:40.620
there that calls you to do what you were meant to do in your life. And it could be accounting.
00:21:45.220
I mean, it could be, I know a guy, he just, he finds beauty in spreadsheets, just in the
00:21:51.280
mathematical elegance of the numbers being in the right place. But it's, it's not really
00:21:56.120
a choice. It's more submitting to something outside you that just seems entrancingly beautiful.
00:22:01.260
And your calling might not necessarily be the way you make your living. You might have a day
00:22:05.740
job, but then in the afternoon or the evening you, you work on your calling.
00:22:09.700
Yeah. There's a great quote in the book that says, sometimes I've been paid for my work
00:22:13.980
and sometimes I haven't been paid for my work, but I'm always doing my work. And I think that's
00:22:19.080
a nice distinction. You know, I know some people who are, they're just great at hospitality and
00:22:25.040
sometimes they might do that as a job and say the hotel business, but oftentimes they do it by
00:22:29.500
organizing barbecues. And I have a friend who says that she's aggressive. She's an aggressive
00:22:34.580
friend. She's aggressively friendly. And that means she's in the friend group. She's the one
00:22:39.180
organizing everything. She's the one putting together the giving circle or putting together
00:22:43.300
the regular dinners that people have. And she just gets great pleasure from cooking and hosting
00:22:48.900
people. And you can do that as a career or you can do that just for fun, but it's still your
00:22:53.640
vocation. And if you ask somebody like, who are you right down? Who are you at, you know,
00:22:59.320
what's your identity? You know, I, part of my identity is being a writer and sometimes I get
00:23:04.860
paid for it. Sometimes I don't, but it's what I am. Right. And I guess the way you figure this out
00:23:09.400
is, you know, it, like you feel it, like, you know, like EO Wilson, like you just feel entranced
00:23:13.380
by the animals, like look for that thing. And that's going to lead you to what your vocation possibly
00:23:18.600
is. Yeah. And Nietzsche said, write down the four most beautiful moments of your life and then see if
00:23:25.140
you can draw a thematic line through them. And that's how you discover what he called the
00:23:29.120
law of your very nature. And so sometimes you get to the point of the double negative.
00:23:34.400
It's like, I can't not do this. This is why I'm a teacher. Like if you get called, you know,
00:23:39.300
often we stumble into the things we do because something happens to us. And sometimes it's a
00:23:44.200
very bad thing. Like, you know, that we're in a town and I know a woman, she was a healthcare
00:23:48.840
executive in New Orleans and she got shot in the face by two boys, 10 and 11 years old,
00:23:55.840
who had to shoot somebody to be as part of their gang initiation ritual. And she remembers she
00:24:01.600
recovered and she remembers look at the look on their face just before they shot her. And it was
00:24:06.980
a look of pure terror. And she realized they were really terrified too. They were, they were put in
00:24:12.660
a situation where to be in a gang and have friends, they had to go shoot some random person. And she
00:24:18.100
said, well, I was collateral damage, but they're the real victims. And so she realized at that moment,
00:24:22.560
her calling was to deal with boys and girls who were in gangs. And so she quit her job as healthcare
00:24:27.660
executive and now works with gang members and works for the city of New Orleans. And sometimes
00:24:32.700
you're just called by bad circumstances, but you get to the point where you say, I can't not do this.
00:24:38.440
I think you talk about Viktor Frankl asking that question, like, what's my responsibility here?
00:24:45.140
Yeah. And in commonsense, we give a lot of garbage advice. And one of the pieces of garbage advice
00:24:49.820
we give is you should ask, what do I want from life? That's too vague a question. You never come
00:24:55.660
up with an answer. The better question, Frankl says, is what is life asking you to meet? So what's
00:25:00.920
the big problem that my generation or I am called to deal with? And what problem am I uniquely suited
00:25:08.960
to deal with? And I gave a commencement this year and I said, listen, if you're graduating from college
00:25:13.720
now, the big problem your generation faces is the social fragmentation, the political division,
00:25:20.720
the lack of connection. So some generations are called to fight wars or battle depressions,
00:25:28.740
but your generation is called to build really strong relationships with one another. That's
00:25:33.680
pretty good calling. That's pretty good responsibility to have. It's hard to do, but it's better than some
00:25:40.120
of the alternatives that earlier generations are called that. So the next commitment is marriage.
00:25:44.400
And it's not just marriage. You say we need to commit ourselves to maximum marriage. What do you
00:25:49.820
mean by maximum marriage? Yeah, there's a style of marriage that's out, that's prevalent today that
00:25:54.960
sociologist Eli Frankl calls, it's sort of a minimal marriage, the self-expressive marriage.
00:26:00.560
That's two people. We, we care for each other and we both have our individual projects in life that
00:26:07.380
we're going to do and we're going to get married and we're going to help each other on our individual
00:26:11.840
projects from time to time. But our life is still mostly about the individual projects. And I'm not
00:26:16.840
sure marriage can survive that. I think marriage is tough and you have to be all in. Tim Keller is a
00:26:22.980
pastor in New York says, when you're in marriage, you get into marriage about two years in, you realize
00:26:28.560
that the person you married who you thought was completely perfect and completely wonderful
00:26:32.160
is actually kind of selfish. And as you're making this realization about her, she's making it about
00:26:37.920
you. And so you have a decision to make. You can either have a truth marriage, in which case you
00:26:43.080
won't talk about each other's flaws and you'll just have a kind of superficial marriage, or you can
00:26:49.340
decide you're going to deal with the flaws, but you're going to realize that, you know, she seems kind
00:26:53.480
of selfish, but actually my own selfishness is the core problem here. I'm going to be alert to my own
00:26:58.700
selfishness. It's my own selfishness is the only selfishness I can control. And Keller says, when
00:27:04.180
you have two people who see their own selfishness as the core problem in the marriage and who are
00:27:09.120
working on it, then you have the makings of a great marriage. But that requires you like to totally
00:27:14.080
throw yourself into it to defeat the ego to serve the marriage. And that's a tough thing to do, but
00:27:19.300
that is the essential moral challenge of marriage. And do you have any, based on your research and
00:27:24.140
your writing and talking to people, any advice for people who aren't married, but want to get
00:27:28.480
married to find that kind of marriage partner who also wants a maximum marriage?
00:27:32.980
Yeah. The first thing I always tell my students is marriage is a 50 year conversation. So you have
00:27:37.980
to be able to talk to the person forever. And so you better have very pure communication. It should
00:27:43.400
be the sort of person that you just love talking to on the phone for hour upon hour. But then there's
00:27:49.480
obviously been a ton of research on how to make this decision and it falls into three buckets.
00:27:54.480
The first is the psychological bucket. What traits does the other person have? And the shorthand
00:28:01.680
answer is go for kindness and avoid neuroticism. And kindness doesn't seem particularly exciting.
00:28:08.300
Sometimes we're attracted to the bad boys or the bad girls, but it's really useful in a marriage.
00:28:13.580
And neurotics, people are making drama out of everything. The research suggests those people
00:28:18.220
never change. They never stop making drama. So kindness is really valuable.
00:28:22.280
Then there's the passion lens, which is what kind of love do you have for this person?
00:28:29.740
And the Greeks used to say there are three different kinds of loves. There's philia,
00:28:33.480
which is friendship. There's eros, which is real passion, lust, and that kind of thing.
00:28:39.480
And then there's agape, the desire to give your selfless love away to the person.
00:28:43.540
If you just have philia and maybe some lust, then you have a relationship, but you don't have a
00:28:48.480
marriage. If you just have agape, you really want to give yourself to this person, but you don't have
00:28:53.420
lust, then you just have sort of admiration. It's best to have all three kinds of loves.
00:28:59.740
And then the final lens is the moral lens, which is, you know, love is going to come and go,
00:29:04.940
but admiration is pretty stable. And do you admire the person? Do they do things that you find morally
00:29:11.060
admirable? A marriage can survive a lot of things, but one thing it cannot survive is disrespect and
00:29:16.780
contempt. So pick someone you really admire. And then the one other good piece of advice I was
00:29:21.580
given was, you know, when we think about getting, marrying someone, we ask a lot of questions about
00:29:27.420
the other person. Are they the right person? We don't ask enough questions about ourselves,
00:29:32.080
which is really, am I ready for this? Am I ready to lead a very different kind of life? Because
00:29:37.880
until you get married, you can live with the illusion that you're easy to live with.
00:29:41.760
But when you get married, somebody is watching you and you become aware of exactly all the ways
00:29:46.980
you're crazy and selfish. And that, so you got to be willing to be changed.
00:29:51.800
And I imagine as if you've been married for a while, being, keeping that idea or being willing
00:29:57.980
to change, keeping that up will help strengthen your marriage as the years go on.
00:30:02.580
Yeah. Some of it is just like practical stuff. Like I pass a lot in the book. I take a lot of the
00:30:07.500
best bits of advice I've read from others and I just pass them along. And one of the things I read
00:30:12.180
was like, sometimes when you're in a relationship, they say, never go to bed mad, but sometimes you're
00:30:17.680
just tired. So you just go to bed and that's, you know, go to bed tomorrow. You'll wake, make waffles
00:30:23.140
together. Things will seem better. Another bit of advice I got for women in marriage was just, if you
00:30:28.780
feel encouraged to bitch about him to somebody, bitch to his mom and not to yours because his mom will
00:30:35.460
forgive him, but yours never will. And so these are just like little practical things and
00:30:39.640
commitments are lived out every day. And so there, there's just got to be practically committed to
00:30:44.640
not just, it's not just theory. So the third commitment is to philosophy and faith. And you
00:30:50.960
make the case that reading the great books of Western civilization or just studying Western
00:30:55.780
civilization can be a way to commit yourself to the intellectual life. How so, and how can that,
00:31:00.520
how can that transform you? Yeah. So I happened to go to college where they taught the great books.
00:31:05.080
It was the University of Chicago. And so we read like Tolstoy and Aristotle and Plato.
00:31:11.620
And the thing about the geniuses of those times is in some ways they are very different,
00:31:16.260
but in some ways they know us better than we know ourselves. And so they really broke things down.
00:31:21.860
How do you become a virtuous person? How do you do forgiveness? How do you experience grace?
00:31:26.640
Or even like George Eliot or Jane Austen, like, how do you think through the marriage decision?
00:31:30.660
And George Eliot wrote a lot about that. And so they are very practical advice. And then they also,
00:31:37.120
they, they touch you on a level that's deeper than, you know, I read for the newspaper book.
00:31:42.060
Newspapers don't really touch you on the level of your soul, your heart. But if you hear,
00:31:46.620
you know, Mozart's, you know, if you hear Ode to Joy, if you see Chartres Cathedral,
00:31:51.020
if you've read, you know, Tolstoy, you've been touched on a much deeper level. And I think one
00:31:57.560
of the things they do is they educate the emotions. And so we all have some crude emotions. But when
00:32:04.240
you've touched, been touched by art, your emotions get much more refined. Now, here's one trivial
00:32:09.700
example. I once saw Taylor Swift interviewed on 60 Minutes. And the interviewer said, you know,
00:32:16.020
you write a lot of sad songs. And she said, well, actually, there are about 17 different kinds of
00:32:21.420
sadness. And she said, there's your boyfriend rakes up with you sadness. And she played a little
00:32:25.400
tune. Your mom is mad at you sadness. She played another tune. You've lost your dog sadness. She
00:32:30.420
played another. And she is an expert on sadness. And if you go through life, you want to go through
00:32:35.520
life with a lot of different repertoire of emotions. So you can feel the right kind of sadness and a
00:32:40.040
different kind of sadness. And you can understand your own feelings a little better. And that's what I
00:32:44.460
think happens with the great books. And you can do this together with other people. I mean,
00:32:48.660
one of the most significant things, you know, meaningful things I've done in my life in the
00:32:52.700
past few years is we have a men's group here in town in Tulsa, where we've been reading the great
00:32:57.100
books. And, you know, started at the Iliad. We're at Shakespeare now. And it's been great meeting with
00:33:01.340
these guys once a month to discuss these ideas. Yeah. One of the phrases I passed along is,
00:33:07.500
there's no such thing as thinking for yourself. Like even the language we think in is a creation of the
00:33:12.960
group. And when you get together and just debate these issues, that to me is one of the great
00:33:17.920
pleasures of life. And just having, just you're in the moment and you each are building on each
00:33:23.320
other's thoughts. That's one of the great gifts of friendship. And I'm in a group like that. And
00:33:27.600
we're sort of sensitive that nobody should talk too much. And a lot of the book is,
00:33:33.140
a lot of my book is just things we discuss together as a group of guys reading a bunch of
00:33:38.620
books that have made us a little less shallow than we otherwise would be.
00:33:41.980
Let's talk about the commitment to faith and religion, because that's a hard sell
00:33:45.200
in a culture that's becoming increasingly secular. I think the number of people who describe
00:33:49.540
themselves as nun when it comes to religious affiliations, the highest it's ever been.
00:33:55.080
How are you defining spirituality in this book? Are you advocating for something like,
00:33:59.400
you know, that spiritual but not religious? Or are you talking about religion as well?
00:34:04.400
I lean toward religion. I get being a nun since I spent most of my life as a nun,
00:34:08.340
not believing in God, even though I was around a lot of organized religions. But I guess,
00:34:14.640
at least for me, over time, my categories, which were pretty atheistic, became inadequate to reality
00:34:21.140
as I experienced it. And so there were just moments of time that seemed mystical, that seemed like there
00:34:28.460
was a presence that couldn't be explained by just material causes. And often that presence was in
00:34:35.020
other people. Like, I'm a journalist. I cover other people's lives. And I just couldn't care
00:34:39.920
about the stories I write about if people were just sacks of genetic material or being blown around
00:34:46.280
by evolutionary forces. I see them as creatures with souls that have something in them that is of
00:34:53.440
infinite value and dignity, something in them that gives them moral responsibility to either behave
00:34:58.320
well or behave badly. And so I said, you know, the people I write about have souls. And we all have
00:35:05.260
souls. And you don't even have to believe in God to believe that there's some invisible piece of
00:35:10.380
yourself that has no size, weight, color, or weight, but that gives you infinite value and dignity,
00:35:15.420
that slavery is wrong because it cuts over another person's soul, and that the soul yearns to lead a good
00:35:22.740
life, which I think we all want to lead a good life. We all want to lead a meaningful, purposeful life.
00:35:28.320
And so once you get that sense that other people have souls, and at every second of every day,
00:35:33.900
their souls are either getting a little more holy or a little more degraded, their souls are getting
00:35:38.220
sick, their souls are yearning, then it's a short step, or at least it was for me, to believe, well,
00:35:44.380
maybe the material world is not the only world, but there's something else as well. And so in the
00:35:49.920
book, I just try to describe a very boring, gradual process toward faith.
00:35:54.100
And what does that commitment to faith look like, for you at least?
00:35:58.820
Well, partly it's, faith is change, as one of the writers I quote says. It's not like,
00:36:04.520
you know, some people, when they talk about God, they say, you know, I prayed and God told me to
00:36:08.720
move to Arizona instead of Nevada. And I respect people who feel they have that contact with God. I
00:36:15.440
can't tell you I've ever felt it that specifically. To me, it's seeking the beauty of certain things.
00:36:21.800
Like, there are certain stories in the Bible that are just morally very beautiful. And I'd like to
00:36:28.520
have opinion my life more on the beauty that are in some of these stories, rather than the
00:36:33.540
ugliness that's in the world. And so I have a sense of what grace is, just this joyous love that
00:36:40.300
you can't earn. And I'd rather pin my life toward that than pin it toward, you know, going to the
00:36:46.140
casino and hitting the jackpot. And I don't know, it's an aesthetic sense of what is truly morally
00:36:51.420
beautiful. And I make a distinction in the book between happiness and joy. And happiness happens
00:36:57.160
when you get a promotion, your team wins the Super Bowl, it's the expansion of self. Joy happens when
00:37:03.200
the barrier between you and something you really care about disappears. And so there's joy when you're
00:37:08.920
with your kids, and you're just playing. Sometimes there's joy in work, where you totally lose
00:37:13.840
yourself in your work, and you experience flow. Sometimes there's joy with someone you love.
00:37:19.200
And you're just so delirious to be together. Sometimes there's joy in nature, you feel part
00:37:25.040
of the natural surroundings, you become one with the forest as you're hiking through it. And one of
00:37:30.840
the messages in the book is happiness is good, but joy is better. And the ultimate joy is transcendent
00:37:36.420
joy. When you've surrendered yourself to some pure good, and you're not even thinking about
00:37:41.600
yourself anymore, you're doing something just because you think it is morally beautiful.
00:37:45.900
Yeah, and I imagine the faith you're talking about too, the examples you gave, it was all
00:37:51.440
about leading back to other people, right? It's not, even the faith you're talking about is not sort
00:37:56.240
of this, you know, personal salvation. It's like, it's a faith that leads me towards action
00:38:02.180
that transcends myself and wants me to love others and, you know, love my group, love my
00:38:09.140
Yeah, I had a camp counselor who then became a friend who was an Episcopal priest, and he
00:38:14.280
was just like a holy child almost. He lived till about 60, and he saw some really hard things.
00:38:21.000
He worked in Honduras among the poor, he worked with women who suffered domestic violence, but
00:38:25.660
he spoke in this enthusiastic, he would always interrupt his sentences with whistles and pops
00:38:31.420
and laughs, and he just didn't think about himself. He was just grateful for every person
00:38:36.500
he met, and he treated every person he met as sort of a miracle. And so he really did live a life of
00:38:43.340
selfless love. And I run to such people who are just glow with joy, maybe once a month or so.
00:38:49.840
I get to work, I've got this project at the Aspen Institute, and I get to work with Yo-Yo Ma,
00:38:55.340
the cellist. And that guy is just happy all the time, and he just delights in his work,
00:38:59.900
he delights in the people he meets, he's filled with gratitude, and, you know, he's got as much
00:39:05.040
fame and money as he could ever handle. And so he's going around the world playing in order to bring
00:39:10.220
angry people together and out of anger. And it's, I'm sure it's hard to be traveling around the world
00:39:15.740
all that time. But he's serving a cause he really believes in. And he's just happy, he's just laughs
00:39:21.840
It's amazing, all these individuals, you can tell they're outside of their head, like they're not
00:39:25.520
neurotic, they're not constantly thinking about themselves. And whenever you see that, you're
00:39:29.900
like, I want that too. I don't want, I'm tired of like journaling about my terrible thoughts,
00:39:34.880
I just don't want to even have to think about it anymore.
00:39:36.960
Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things I learned as I described this in the moments in the
00:39:40.880
valley, is people go out into the wilderness. And if you're the sort of person who's spent a lot of
00:39:47.340
life, you know, trying to be popular, wanting to be liked and performing for others, out in the
00:39:51.640
wilderness, the rocks don't care. So there's nobody left to perform for. And then you, if you get called
00:39:57.560
to do a task, maybe you call to be a community worker in something, maybe you're called, you love
00:40:03.920
a certain company you're starting up, and you think it'll really do some good in the world.
00:40:07.020
And you're so busy caring about the commitment you've made, you yourself seem much less important.
00:40:12.800
And I've always thought that you can't replace a bad with a, or you can't replace one thing with
00:40:18.040
nothing, you have to replace it with a better thing. And so finding a better love, like something
00:40:22.600
you love more than you love yourself is just the way to do that.
00:40:26.320
Let's talk about the last commitment, which is to community. You mentioned earlier that you think
00:40:31.100
that the rebuilding community is probably the great challenge of my generation. What for you,
00:40:40.500
There was a book by a woman named Jane Jacobs, which was written somewhere around 1962, called
00:40:45.180
The Death and Life of Great American Cities. And she lived in Greenwich Village in New York,
00:40:49.800
in a little community, a little neighborhood there, which was then a middle-class neighborhood.
00:40:53.520
Now it's really rich, but back then it was middle-class.
00:40:55.560
And she was looking out her street, at her street from her second story window.
00:41:00.740
And she realized that her street was like a ballet, that early in the day that people picking up the
00:41:06.440
trash would come by, then the people would taking their kids off to school would come by, then the
00:41:11.260
shopkeepers would open their shops. And it was like all this movement on the block. And there was
00:41:16.660
always something happening, teenagers hanging out, people heading off to the bars. And she said,
00:41:22.480
all this movement is just like a ballet. We're all sort of moving around each other and keeping an eye
00:41:26.880
on each other. And at one point, she's looking out her window and she sees a guy tugging on a nine-year-old
00:41:34.320
girl, pulling her to where the girl clearly does not want to go. And Jane Jacobs wonders, am I watching
00:41:41.080
a kidnapping? And she's about to go down and intervene. And then she says, oh, wait. And she sees that the
00:41:48.420
fruit vendor has stepped out of his store. The locksmith has come out of his store. Two other
00:41:52.620
people have come out. And she says, the guy didn't realize, but he was surrounded. And there were just
00:41:58.000
eyes on the street. We're all watching each other. We're all taking care of each other. And it turned
00:42:02.320
out to be only a dad pulling on his nine-year-old daughter to do something. But that's to me what a
00:42:07.440
community is. It's like a ballet, a collection of people who are moving together organically and
00:42:12.780
dynamically, but keeping an eye on each other and helping each other out when that has to happen.
00:42:18.780
And I'm afraid what's happened in our society is we don't have a lot of those dense places where
00:42:22.580
people live on a street and really can look at each other. We're locked in the privacy of our
00:42:27.180
own homes. And I don't know about your neighborhood, but in my neighborhood, if you went on to somebody's
00:42:32.600
home unannounced at 830 at night and knocked on the door just to hang out, that would be considered
00:42:37.880
an amazing violation of privacy. And so we've put privacy above community and sometimes work above
00:42:43.720
community. And so as a result, the social capital is much lower. And what I admire are people who
00:42:50.740
go out of their way to build community. And sometimes they do it by organizing annual dinners
00:42:56.620
or your book club or there are a zillion ways that, you know, you can have a whiskey club and that's a
00:43:02.480
fun way to have community. Community should be fun and not just like a chore.
00:43:05.940
Yeah. And definitely think it's going to be, it's a skill that has to be relearned because I think a
00:43:09.440
lot of particularly young people, they don't know how to do this stuff. Here's a pretty great example.
00:43:13.540
My mom, my parents still live in the neighborhood that I grew up in when I was a kid. And when I was
00:43:18.460
a kid, there was a very active mother's association. So there was Christmas parties,
00:43:22.340
Easter parties, 4th of July parades, Halloween parties. And then after all the kids my age
00:43:28.220
graduated and left home, that stuff stopped and it wasn't there for 25 years. And so my mom,
00:43:36.380
so they're all grandmas now, my mom and all her friends in the neighborhood decided we got to get
00:43:40.460
this going again. So they started the mom's organization again. There's these grandmas and
00:43:45.760
they're teaching these young millennial moms how to organize an Easter party or an Easter parade.
00:43:51.240
And like, they're loving it. And these, these young moms are like, we don't know how to do this.
00:43:54.640
We're so grateful that you're showing us how to do this.
00:43:56.880
That is great. I've never heard of anything quite like that, but that is fantastic.
00:44:00.820
They're just tricks people can do to build community. I have a friend who was in college. He's
00:44:04.680
probably 34 now. And he said, I've got a really good group of friends here in college. I'm
00:44:09.800
terrified. I'm going to lose them as we, you know, we drift apart in life. And one of his
00:44:13.320
professors said, well, start a giving circle. All of you put money into a pot every year and
00:44:18.540
every year get together for four days and decide where, where you're going to donate that money.
00:44:23.940
And the charity is sort of the pretext together to get together. But the reality is they are now
00:44:29.340
13 years out of college and every year they get together and they're walking through life
00:44:33.640
together. And so you got to invent something. There's got to be some technology of convening
00:44:38.040
that will pull you into community. But it's just a question of finding what your best technology is.
00:44:44.280
Does a person need to like have all four commitments in their life to have a meaningful
00:44:47.700
life? Or is it, it can just have one or two, or there's going to be, you know, one in one part
00:44:52.680
of your life and another part in your other life? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people never get married and
00:44:56.940
they're very fulfilled lives. So I would not say you have to have all four. And then sometimes
00:45:01.440
sometimes are in different phases. Some people really serve their communities. You know, they
00:45:07.800
work at the Y or do something later in life. And sometimes, especially if you have small kids,
00:45:13.440
that swallows up your life. So that's a commitment that swallows up a lot of time. But I do think
00:45:18.740
being committed to something all the way through. And a commitment is to me, the best definition of a
00:45:24.060
commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for
00:45:28.440
those moments when love falters. Because we all, you know, we all have moments where we're feeling
00:45:32.640
dry. We don't want to go to church or we don't really care about the, the mentoring program we're
00:45:38.260
in. But if you build habits around that thing and you just go by the habits, it'll carry you through
00:45:43.540
those moments. So I always say Jews love their God, but they keep kosher just in case, just because
00:45:49.360
the structure of kosher sort of pulls them through the moments when, you know, they don't feel the
00:45:54.860
presence of God and they're just going about their way. It's about instilling habits.
00:45:59.540
And you also talk about this in the book, create an environment where it makes those habits are
00:46:02.880
easier to follow through on. So have a community where you can, where you have that social pressure,
00:46:08.980
where it's just the normal thing to do. And you're going to do it because you're with those group of
00:46:14.500
Yeah. I mean, this is sort of the model of Al-Anon or anything else. Probably even your book club,
00:46:19.900
like, would you really read the book? But if you got to go talk about it with your friends,
00:46:23.560
well, I'll show up and read the book. And so with, and that's, I think people who are dealing
00:46:30.060
with addiction find the same thing, that they're really doing it because they, they care about
00:46:34.920
those people. They don't want to let them down and they want to set a good model for the people
00:46:38.800
they're in group with. And we're just such contagious creatures that if six people around
00:46:44.700
you gain weight, the odds that you're going to gain weight are extremely high. If they start
00:46:48.860
smoking, you'll probably start smoking. If they stop drinking, you'll probably stop drinking.
00:46:52.460
We're very, we think we're not connected creatures, but we're extremely connected to each
00:46:57.280
Right. Plato says we're mimetic animals, mimesis. We copy others. Right. Well, David, where can
00:47:02.580
people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:47:04.820
Well, they can go to the Amazon webpage to get the book. And then the community stuff, I've
00:47:09.480
got an organization at the Aspen Project called Weave, the social fabric project, and they can
00:47:14.060
go to weareweavers.org. And that's there they can learn about some of the most amazing
00:47:18.860
people I've met over the last few years who really are building community on the ground
00:47:23.700
level and leading really lives that I would love to copy.
00:47:27.460
Well, David Brooks, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:47:30.660
My guest name is David Brooks. He's the author of the book, The Second Mountain, The Quest for
00:47:34.460
Immoral Life. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show
00:47:38.460
notes at aom.is slash second mountain, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper
00:47:42.720
into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our
00:47:53.660
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00:47:57.800
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