![]() ![]() How? By making and keeping what Brooks calls “the Four Commitments” - to a spouse/family to a faith/philosophy to a true calling/cause as the primary outlet for expending one’s heart, mind, and soul horsepower and to a community.įulfilling each commitment requires someone to rotate 180 degrees from the mirror and concentrate all his energy on serving others. All is vanity…There is nothing new under the sun.”Īn enlightened few among those living Plan A on the First Mountain at some point smell the coffee and move to Plan B on the Second Mountain, where long-term, authentic joy can actually be found. Pursuing Plan A on the First Mountain leaves two sets of victims: the “unsuccessful” inhabitants depressed over their inability to obtain mass quantities of money, power, success, etc., and the “successful” ones, who ultimately find themselves in sync with Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities. ![]() And even when a person thinks he’s achieved his goals, he can look in the mirror, see himself transform into bleached-blonde, smoky-voiced Peggy Lee, and start singing her classic song, “Is That All There Is?” Such secular aspirations are, of course, fueled by the selfish ego. ![]() Daily living on life’s First Mountain entails always keeping score (i.e., making comparisons to others) in the never-ending pursuit of money, power, success, and Instagram happiness. What’s the Second Mountain? That begins with knowing what the First Mountain is. With this theme, Brooks could well have titled his new book The Road to Joy, though that would lack the mysterious imagery of the chosen title. Making such a selfless community-enhancing decision, Brooks concludes, is the only means of creating a life spent in a stream of joy. Rather, it should be to look outside himself and commit to the ongoing responsibility of elevating the station of others. Whereas The Road to Character was paved by the premise that a person could morally elevate himself into exhibiting “eulogy virtues” (as opposed to “résumé virtues”) by steeling himself to live every day in a mode of high integrity, sometime after 2013, the downcast walking-in-the-wilderness author determined that a person’s ultimate life goal should not be merely to engage in consistent altruistic behavior. In Brooks’ case, after his bestselling book The Road to Character came out in 2013, he was traumatized first by his divorce (after a 28-year marriage) and then by seeing his moderate conservative editorial slant get skewered by the Tea Party and the Trump revolution.Īs is often the case when a person’s life jumps the tracks, Brooks’ nosedive into the depths of his emotional valley produced a life-changing epiphany. No major league thinker takes on the herculean task of addressing “the quest for a moral life” without being triggered by a major stimulus. In his new book, Brooks elevates this assemblage/distillation process to new heights as he gleans the most important thoughts from some of history’s leading philosophers and theologians, and combines them with lessons learned from his own life, resulting in 300+ pages that will likely cause legions of readers to reassess how they want to spend the rest of their days. He’s previously described his process for creating each op-ed as follows: Collect roughly 200 pages of potentially useful research, lay it all out on his floor, organize it into piles, turn his imagination loose, and meld the best parts into a tight essay. The esteemed author’s day job for the last 16 years has been writing 800-word columns twice a week for the New York Times on subjects ranging from politics to sociology to faith. In this chaotic state of affairs, a desperate voice cries out from the mountaintop, “Would some smart person please sift through this vast crop of data, separate the cream, and then blend it together in a way that enhances our understanding of the human condition?”ĭavid Brooks now answers that call with The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. We live in a world with too much information and too little synthesizing of it. ![]()
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