【橘猫推书】

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

TWO: The Instagram Life

Every society has a way of transmitting its values to the young. Some societies do it through religious festivals or military parades. One of the ways we do it is through a secular sermon called the commencement address.

Colleges generally ask a person distinguished by fantastic career success to give a speech in which they claim that career success is not that important. Then these phenomenally accomplished individuals often go on to tell their audiences that you shouldn't be afraid to fail. From this young people learn that failure can be wonderful—if you happen to be J. K. Rowling, Denzel Washington, or Steve Jobs.

But this lesson is not the only advice we in the middle-aged commencement-giving world offer young adults. We use these speeches to pass along the dominant values of our age. We hand them over like some great, awesome presents. And it turns out these presents are great big boxes of nothing.

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. So they put down that empty box. They are looking for a source of wisdom. Where can I find the answers to my big questions?

So we hand them the empty box of authenticity: Look inside yourself! Find your true inner passion. You are amazing! Awaken the giant within! Live according to your own true way! You do you!

This is useless, too. The “you” we tell them to consult for life's answers is the very thing that hasn't yet formed. So they put down that empty box and ask, What can I devote myself to? What cause will inspire me and give meaning and direction to my life?

At this point we hand them the emptiest box of all—the box of autonomy. You are on your own, we tell them. It's up to you to define your own values. No one else can tell you what's right or wrong for you. Your truth is to be found in your own way through your own story that you tell about yourself. Do what you love!

You will notice that our answers take all the difficulties of living in your twenties and make them worse. The graduates are in limbo, and we give them uncertainty. They want to know why they should do this as opposed to that. And we have nothing to say except, Figure it out yourself based on no criteria outside yourself. They are floundering in a formless desert. Not only do we not give them a compass, we take a bucket of sand and throw it all over their heads!

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?

THE BIG SWIM TO NOWHERE

When you're a student, life is station to station. There's always the next assignment, the next test, the next admissions application to structure a student's schedule and energies. Social life has its dramas, but at least it's laid out right there in front of you in the dining hall and the dorm.

Then, from the most structured and supervised childhood in human history, you get spit out after graduation into the least structured young adulthood in human history. Yesterday parents, teachers, coaches, and counselors were all marking your progress and cheering your precious self. Today the approval bath stops. The world doesn't know your name or care who you are. The person on the other side of the desk at every job interview has that distant Kanye attitude—there's a million of you; there's only one of me.

In centuries past, emerging adults took their parents' jobs, faiths, towns, and identities. But in the age of “I'm Free to Be Myself,” you are expected to find your own career path, your own social tribe, your own beliefs, values, life partners, gender roles, political viewpoints, and social identities. As a student, your focus was primarily on the short term, but now you need a different set of navigational skills, to the far-horizon goals you will begin to orient your life toward.

The average American has seven jobs over the course of their twenties. A third of recent college graduates are unemployed, underemployed, or making less than $30,000 a year at any given moment. Half feel they have no plan for their life, and nearly half of people in their twenties have had no sexual partner in the last year. These are peak years for alcoholism and drug addiction. People in this life stage move every three years. Forty percent move back in with their parents at least once. They are much less likely to attend religious services or join a political party.

People in their odyssey years tend to be dementedly optimistic about the long-term future. Ninety-six percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds agree with the statement “I am very sure that someday I will get to where I want to be in life.” But the present is marked by wandering, loneliness, detachment, doubt, underemployment, heartbreaks, and bad bosses, while their parents go slowly insane.

THE AESTHETIC LIFE

Some people graduate from college with the mindset of daring adventurers. This is the time for fun before real life settles in. Marriage and a real job will just arrive in the mail one day when they are thirty-five. In the meantime, they're going to have experiences.

These are the people who at age twenty-three go teach English in Mongolia or lead white-water rafting trips in Colorado. This daring course has real advantages. Your first job out of college is probably going to suck anyway, so, as the impact investor Blair Miller advises, you might as well use this period to widen your horizon of risk. If you do something completely crazy you will know forever after that you can handle a certain amount of craziness, and your approach to life for all the decades hence will be more courageous. Furthermore, you will build what the clinical psychologist Meg Jay calls “identity capital.” At every job interview and dinner party for the next three decades, somebody will want to ask you what it was like teaching English in Mongolia, and that will distinguish you from everybody else.

This is an excellent way to begin your twenties. The problem with this kind of life only becomes evident a few years down the road if you haven't settled down into one thing. If you say yes to everything year after year, you end up leading what Kierkegaard lamented as an aesthetic style of life. The person leading the aesthetic life is leading his life as if it were a piece of art, judging it by aesthetic criteria—is it interesting or dull, pretty or ugly, pleasurable or painful?

Such a person schedules a meditation retreat here, a Burning Man visit there, one fellowship one year and another one the next. There's swing dancing one day, SoulCycle twice a week, Krav Maga for a few months, Bikram Yoga for a few months more, and occasionally a cool art gallery on a Sunday afternoon. Your Instagram feed will be amazing, and everybody will think you're the coolest person ever. You tell yourself that relationships really matter to you—scheduling drinks, having lunch—but after you've had twenty social encounters in a week you forget what all those encounters are supposed to build to. You have thousands of conversations and remember none.

The problem is that the person in the aesthetic phase sees life as possibilities to be experienced and not projects to be fulfilled or ideals to be lived out. He will hover above everything but never land. In the aesthetic way of life, each individual day is fun, but it doesn't seem to add up to anything.

The theory behind this life is that you should rack up experiences. But if you live life as a series of serial adventures, you will wander about in the indeterminacy of your own passing feelings and your own changeable heart. Life will be a series of temporary moments, not an accumulating flow of accomplishment. You will lay waste to your powers, scattering them in all directions. You will be plagued by a fear of missing out. Your possibilities are endless, but your decision-making landscape is hopelessly flat.

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.

When enough people are going through this phase at once, you end up with a society in which everything is in flux. You end up with what the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman calls “liquid modernity.” In the age of the smartphone, the friction costs involved in making or breaking any transaction or relationship approach zero. The Internet is commanding you to click on and sample one thing after another. Living online often means living in a state of diversion. When you're living in diversion you're not actually deeply interested in things; you're just bored at a more frenetic pace. Online life is saturated with decommitment devices. If you can't focus your attention for thirty seconds, how on earth are you going to commit for life?

Such is life in the dizziness of freedom. Nobody quite knows where they stand with one another. Everybody is pretty sure that other people are doing life better. Comparison is the robber of joy.

After several years of pursuing open options, it's not so much that you lose the thread of the meaning of your life; you have trouble even staying focused on the question. David Foster Wallace's epic novel Infinite Jest is a description of this distracted frame of mind. It's about a movie so “fatally entertaining” that everybody becomes a drooling zombie in its trance. The big questions of life have been replaced by entertainment. The novel itself embodies the mind of the terminally distracted, with sentences stringing along and doubling back on one another, thoughts just popping up here and there. In such a world, everybody is buzzingly entertained but not necessarily progressing.

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.”

But Wallace's remedy is unrealistic. When you are in your distraction, untethered to actual commitments, focusing your attention is precisely what you cannot do. 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.

All of this points in one direction: into the ditch. The person who graduates from school and pursues an aesthetic pattern of life often ends up in the ditch. It's only then that they realize the truth that somehow nobody told them: Freedom sucks.

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.

THREE: The Insecure Overachiever

If one group of young people approach adulthood as an aesthetic experience, another group tries to treat adulthood as much as possible like a continuation of school. These students usually went to competitive colleges and tend to come from the upper strata of society. They were good at getting admitted into places, so they apply to companies that have competitive hiring procedures. As students, they enjoyed the borrowed prestige of high-status colleges, so as adults they enjoy the borrowed prestige of high-status companies and service organizations. 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.

This group of emerging adults are pragmatists. They are good at solving problems. The problem for a college junior and senior is anticipated ambiguity. Graduation is approaching, and you don't know what comes next. The pragmatists solve this problem by flocking to companies and such that can tell them, even as juniors in college, what they will be doing for at least a few years hence. The uncertainty is over. Plus, now they will have a good answer when adults ask them, as they are prone to do, what they are going to do after graduation. In order to keep the existential anxiety about what to do with their life carefully suppressed underneath the waterline of consciousness, they grab the first job that comes along.

Unfortunately, this pragmatic route doesn't spare you from the ditch, either. Never underestimate the power of the environment you work in to gradually transform who you are. When you choose to work at a certain company, you are turning yourself into the sort of person who works in that company. That's great if the culture of McKinsey or General Mills satisfies your very soul. But if it doesn't, there will be some little piece of yourself that will go unfed and get hungrier and hungrier.

Moreover, living life in a pragmatic, utilitarian manner turns you into a utilitarian pragmatist. The “How do I succeed?” questions quickly eclipse the “Why am I doing this?” questions.

Suddenly your conversation consists mostly of descriptions of how busy you are. Suddenly you're a chilly mortal, going into hyper-people-pleasing mode anytime you're around your boss. You spend much of your time mentor shopping, trying to find some successful older person who will answer all your questions and solve all your problems. It turns out that the people in your workplace don't want you to have a deep, fulfilling life. They give you gold stars of affirmation every time you mold yourself into the shrewd animal the workplace wants you to be. You've read those Marxist analyses of the bosses exploiting the workers. Suddenly it occurs to you that you have become your own boss and your own exploiter. You begin to view yourself not as a soul to be uplifted but as a set of skills to be maximized.

It's fascinating how easy it is to simply let drop those spiritual questions that used to plague you, to let slide those deep books that used to define you, to streamline yourself into a professional person.

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

The meritocracy is the most self-confident moral system in the world today. It's so engrossing and seems so natural that we're not even aware of how it encourages a certain economic vocabulary about noneconomic things. Words change their meaning. “Character” is no longer a moral quality oriented around love, service, and care, but a set of workplace traits organized around grit, productivity, and self-discipline. The meritocracy defines “community” as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another. It organizes society into an endless set of outer and inner rings, with high achievers at the Davos center and everybody else arrayed across the wider rings toward the edge. While it pretends not to, it subliminally sends the message that those who are smarter and more accomplished are actually worth more than those who are not.

The meritocracy's soul-flattening influence is survivable if you have your own competing moral system that exists in you alongside it, but if you have no competing value system, the meritocracy swallows you whole. You lose your sense of agency, because the rungs of the professional ladder determine your schedule and life course. The meritocracy gives you brands to attach to—your prestigious school, your nice job title—which work well as status markers and seem to replace the urgent need to find out who you are. Work, the poet David Whyte writes, “is a place you can lose yourself more easily perhaps than finding yourself.”

Journalist Lisa Miller describes an “ambition collision” she saw in her peers, mostly young women of the professional set. These are the opportunity seizers, she writes, the list makers, the ascendant females weaned on Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In, who delayed marriage and children because they were driven to do big things and run big things.

But at a certain age, Miller writes, they've “lost it, like a child losing grasp of a helium balloon. Grief-stricken, they are baffled too.” As one woman told Miller, “There's no vision.” Or, as another put it, there's “nothing solid.” They fantasize about quitting their jobs and moving home to Michigan, or having kids merely as an excuse to drop out of the rat race. “They murmur about purpose, about the concrete satisfactions of baking a loaf of bread or watching a garden grow.” They stay put, diligently working, “waiting for something—anything—to reignite them, to convince them that their wanting hasn't abandoned them for good.”

Miller portrays this as a female problem, arising from society's screwed-up attitudes about women and work. But I notice many men also have a sensation that they are under-living their lives. Centuries ago there was a common word for what these people are going through: acedia.

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.

Desire makes you adhesive. Desire pushes you to get close—to the person, job, or town you love. But lack of desire makes you detached, and instills in you over time an attitude of emotional avoidance, a phony nonchalance. In short, the meritocracy encourages you to drift into a life that society loves but which you don't. It's impossible to feel wholehearted.

A person who tries to treat life as if it were an extension of school often becomes what the Danish novelist Matias Dalsgaard calls an “insecure overachiever”: “Such a person must have no stable or solid foundation to build upon, and yet nonetheless tries to build his way out of his problem. It's an impossible situation. You can't compensate for having a foundation made of quicksand by building a new story on top. But this person takes no notice and hopes that the problem down in the foundation won't be found out if only the construction work on the top keeps going.”

The problem with pragmatism, as they say, is that it doesn't work. The insecure overachiever never fully wills anything and thus is never fully satisfied. His brain is moving and his status is rising, but his heart and soul are never fully engaged.

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