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"description": "#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world. “Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”—The Washington Post Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment. In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose. In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.",
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there is also this other kind of permanent joy that animates people who are not obsessed with themselves but have given themselves away. I often find that their life has what I think of as a two-mountain shape. They got out of school, began their career or started a family, and identified the mountain they thought they were meant to climb:
The goals on that first mountain are the normal goals that our culture endorses—to
Whatever the cause, these people are no longer on the mountain. They are down in the valley of bewilderment or suffering.
Some shrivel in the face of this kind of suffering.
But for others, this valley is the making of them.
The people who are made larger by suffering go on to stage two small rebellions. First, they rebel against their ego ideal.
But, overall, they realize the desires of the ego are never going to satisfy the deep regions they have discovered in themselves.
Second, they rebel against the mainstream culture.
The people who have been made larger by suffering are brave enough to let parts of their old self die. Down in the valley, their motivations changed. They’ve gone from self-centered to other-centered. At this point, people realize, Oh, that first mountain wasn’t my mountain after all.
That’s the crucial way to tell whether you are on your first or second mountain. Where is your ultimate appeal? To self, or to something outside of self?
You don’t climb the second mountain the way you climb the first mountain. You conquer your first mountain. You identify the summit, and you claw your way toward it. You are conquered by your second mountain. You surrender to some summons, and you do everything necessary to answer the call and address the problem or injustice that is in front of you. On the first mountain you tend to be ambitious, strategic, and independent. On the second mountain you tend to be relational, intimate, and relentless.
People on the second mountain have made strong commitments to one or all of these four things: A vocation A spouse and family A philosophy or faith A community
I now think good character is a by-product of giving yourself away. You love things that are worthy of love. You surrender to a community or cause, make promises to other people, build a thick jungle of loving attachments, lose yourself in the daily act of serving others as they lose themselves in the daily acts of serving you.
But when I look back generally on the errors and failures and sins of my life, they tend to be failures of omission, failures to truly show up for the people I should have been close to. They tend to be the sins of withdrawal: evasion, workaholism, conflict avoidance, failure to empathize, and a failure to express myself openly.
It’s about finding an ethos that puts commitment making at the center of things.
Most of the time we aim too low. We walk in shoes too small for us. We spend our days shooting for a little burst of approval or some small career victory. But there’s a joyful way of being that’s not just a little bit better than the way we are currently living;
Joy tends to involve some transcendence of self. It’s when the skin barrier between you and some other person or entity fades away and you feel fused together.
A narcissist can be happy, but a narcissist can never be joyful, because the surrender of self is the precise thing a narcissist can’t do.
The people who radiate a permanent joy have given themselves over to lives of deep and loving commitment. Giving has become their nature, and little by little they have made their souls incandescent.
How do you build your personality to glow in this way? You might think a bright personality would come from an unburdened life—a life of pleasures and constant delights. But if you closely look at joyful people, you notice that very often the people who have the most incandescent souls have taken on the heaviest burdens.
On the contrary, a life of ease is how you get stuck and confused in life.”
I ask these people what brings joy to their daily lives. The answer is always a variation on the same theme—some moment when they brought delight to another.
Joy is not a self-standing emotion, he concludes. It is the crown of a well-lived life.
One of the greatest legacies a person can leave is a moral ecology—a system of belief and behavior that lives on after they die.
This was what happened when your life was lived in a drab manner serving some soulless organization. Not only were you unfulfilled, you lost the capacity to even feel anything.
It’s not politicians who lead this kind of change. Instead it’s moral activists and cultural pioneers.
“Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”
It’s not the job of schools or neighborhoods or even parents to create a shared moral order. It’s something you do on your own, and who are you to judge if another person’s moral order is better or worse than any others?
In a hyper-individualistic society, people are not measured by how they conform to a shared moral code. They are not measured by how fully they have submerged themselves in thick relationships.
There’s always a tension between self and society. If things are too tightly bound, then the urge to rebel is strong. But we’ve got the opposite problem. In a culture of “I’m Free to Be Myself,” individuals are lonely and loosely attached.
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.
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.
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.
A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.
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.
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.
When you choose to work at a certain company, you are turning yourself into the sort of person who works in that company.
Acedia is the quieting of passion. It is a lack of care. It is living a life that doesn’t arouse your strong passions and therefore instills a sluggishness of the soul, like an oven set on warm. The person living in acedia may have a job and a family, but he is not entirely grabbed by his own life. His heart is over there, but his life is over here.
When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others. You are haunted by your conception of yourself.
If you know what your purpose is, you can handle the setbacks. But when you don’t know what your purpose is, any setback can lead to total collapse.
Every age group in America is less trusting than the one before, and, as Robert Putnam of Harvard points out, that’s for a very good reason: People are less trustworthy.
They revert to tribe. Individualism, taken too far, leads to tribalism.
Community is connection based on mutual affection. Tribalism, in the sense I’m using it here, is connection based on mutual hatred. Community is based on common humanity; tribalism on common foe. Tribalism is always erecting boundaries and creating friend/enemy distinctions.
Seasons of suffering kick us in the ass. They are the foghorns that blast us out of our complacency and warn us we are heading for the wrong life.
The poet Ted Hughes observed that the things that are the worst to undergo are often the best to remember, because at those low moments the protective shells are taken off, humility is achieved, a problem is clearly presented, and a call to service is clearly received.
At the moment when you are most confused about what you should do with your life, the smartest bet is to do what millions of men and women have done through history. Pick yourself up and go out alone into the wilderness.
Solitude in the wilderness makes irrelevant all the people-pleasing habits that have become interwoven into your personality.
As the saying goes, suffering that is not transformed is transmitted.
“Trying to live someone else’s life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and even do great damage.” You don’t find your vocation through an act of taking charge. “Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.”
Listening to your life means having patience. Many of us confront most of life with a prematurely evaluating attitude. We have a natural tendency to make up our mind instantly, the moment we encounter something. The problem is that once we’ve filed something away with a judgment—even our very selves—we stop seeing it in all its complexity. The wilderness teaches negative capability, the ability to rest in uncertainty, to not jump to premature conclusions.
Two years later he noticed something: A little green bamboo shoot pushing up through the cement. That bamboo was unquenchable. It could not stop pushing upward. We have something like that inside ourselves. It is our desire.
We begin to realize that the reasoning brain is actually the third most important part of our consciousness. The first and most important part is the desiring heart.
Our emotions guide us. Our emotions assign value to things and tell us what is worth wanting. The passions are not the opposite of reason; they are the foundation of reason and often contain a wisdom the analytic brain can’t reach.
The ultimate desire is the desire for fusion with a beloved other, for an I–Thou bond, the wholehearted surrender of the whole being, the pure union, the intimacy beyond fear.
“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”
The heart and soul teach us that we cannot give ourselves what we desire most. Fulfillment and joy are on the far side of service. Only then are we really able to love. Only then are we able to begin the second journey.
The love will change everything in unexpected and inconvenient ways.
a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”
Thus, the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters.
Identity is not formed alone. Identity is always formed by joining a dyad with something else.
They assume responsibility. Somebody in their background planted an ideal of what a responsible life looks like, of what you are supposed to do. Some people walk down the street and see passing forms. But these community builders see persons and their needs.
But the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that giving is the primary relationship between one person and another, not the secondary one.
“Talk to any poor person or vulnerable person and they can give you a long list of the services they have received. They are well serviced, but you often have to ask what in their life has fundamentally changed.” Relationship is the driver of change.
The practical way we do that is through commitments—through making maximal commitments to things we really care about and then serving them in a wholehearted way. The core challenges of the second-mountain life are found in the questions, How do I choose my commitments? How do I decide what is the right commitment for me? How do I serve my commitments once they have been chosen? How do I blend my commitments so that together they merge into a coherent, focused, and joyful life?
He realized that the career questions—What do I want from life? What can I do to make myself happy?—are not the proper questions. The real question is, What is life asking of me?
“We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly.
Nietzsche wrote that the way to discover what you were put on earth for is to go back into your past, list the times you felt most fulfilled, and then see if you can draw a line through them. He writes, “Let the young soul survey its own life with a view to the following question: ‘What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?’
“The great thing in all education,” William James wrote, “is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”
n learning a skill but also working with your emotions
For many, the big choices in life often aren’t really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing.
For one thing, intuitions are unstable. Feelings are usually fleeting and sometimes inexplicable in the days or even minutes after you feel them.
Second, our intuitions frequently lead us astray. Kahneman and Tversky, along with many other behavioral economists, have filled books and books with all the ways our intuitions can betray us—loss aversion, priming effects, the halo effect, the optimism bias, and so forth.
Finally, intuition is reliable only in certain sorts of decisions. “Intuition” is a fancy word for pattern recognition. It can be trusted only in domains in which you have a lot of experience,
The crucial terrain to be explored in any vocation search is the terrain of your heart and soul, your long-term motivation. Knowledge is plentiful; motivation is scarce.
When a person or culture is outside its daemon, then everything becomes derivative and sentimental. A person or culture that has lost touch with its daemon has lost touch with life.
When you raise children, you notice that their daemons are wide-awake a lot of the time. They have direct access to these deep realms. Moral consciousness is our first consciousness. But as adults we have a tendency to cover over the substrate, to lose touch with the daemon and let it drift asleep.
If you really want to make a wise vocation decision, you have to lead the kind of life that keeps your heart and soul awake every day.
What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Fear is a pretty good GPS system; it tells you where you true desires are, even if they are on the far side of social disapproval.
Swaniker believes that we are defined by these moments of obligation, which are “usually caused by a sense of outrage about some injustice, wrong-doing or unfairness we see in society.” But he goes on to argue that “you should ignore 99% of these moments of obligation,” no matter how guilty it makes you feel. The world is full of problems, but very few are the problems you are meant to address.
First, it’s not about creating a career path. It’s asking, What will touch my deepest desire? What activity gives me my deepest satisfaction? Second, it’s about fit. A vocation decision is not about finding the biggest or most glamorous problem in the world. Instead, it’s about finding a match between a delicious activity and a social need.
That’s a useful distinction. A job is a way of making a living, but work is a particular way of being needed, of fulfilling the responsibility that life has placed before you.
this kind of structured discipline is necessary if you want to escape the tyranny of the scattered mind. “Self-discipline is a form of freedom,” he writes. “Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt.”
What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”
One of the best pieces of advice for young people is, Get to yourself quickly. If you know what you want to do, start doing it. Don’t delay because you think this job or that degree would be good preparation for doing what you eventually want to do. Just start doing
And yet there is a prize. People in long, happy marriages have won the lottery of life.
In an individualistic culture, marriage is not fusion; it is alliance.
It used to be that people got married and the marriage formed them into the sort of self-disciplined, ordered person who was capable of building a good career. Now more people seek to establish themselves first, then get married. The social script has flipped.
“Whether it turns out to be a healthy, challenging, and constructive crisis or a disastrous nightmare, depends largely upon how willing the partners are to be changed.”
“The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s. Why? Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it,” the Kellers write. “If two spouses each say, ‘I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,’ you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.”
For the marriage to work, you’ve got to know your spouse well enough to love her in the way that will bring out her loveliness.
Marriage is the sort of thing where it’s safer to go all in, and it’s dangerous to go in half-hearted.
Divorce does not always represent an erosion of love or high expectations; in many cases the expectations weren’t high enough. Idealization of the other is part of every happy marriage.”
The chief responsibility is to care for the other above yourself.
Kwakiutl Indian poem, transcribed from native tongue in 1896: “Fires run through my body—the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you. Sickness wanders my body with my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you. Consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain.”
Conversation is how marriage partners rub off on each other.
Divorce doesn’t generally happen when the number of conflicts increases; it happens when the number of positive things decreases.
This ideal held that a university’s purpose was teleological—to help answer the ultimate questions of life. To put it more bluntly, the purpose of a school was to shape the students’ souls. “Character is the main object of education,”
The idea that one could survey the main forms of living, or ask big, vague questions like “What makes life worth living?” began to seem not only unrealistic but irresponsible and pernicious. “For it made the question of the meaning of life appear unprofessional—a question that no responsible teacher of the humanities could henceforth take seriously,” Kronman writes. The research ideal offers little way for the university to engage the student as a whole person,
The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor.
The fourth thing our professors did was teach us intellectual courage. There is no such thing as thinking for yourself or thinking alone. All thinking is communication, and all the concepts in your head are inherited from a procession of thinkers stretching back thousands of years.
But if the college does its job, it reveals the inner self, or at least the possibility of the inner self.
The central message is to be watchful over what you love, because you become what you desire.
But ultimately joy is found not in satisfying your desires but in changing your desires so you have the best desires. The educated life is a journey toward higher and higher love.
I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
In the course of his imprisonment, Solzhenitsyn looked at the guard who treated him most cruelly. He realized that if fate had made him a prison guard instead of a prisoner, perhaps he would have been cruel, too. He came to realize that the line between good and evil passes not between tribes or nations but straight through every human heart.
began to use them as wisdom literature, as tools for understanding and solving the problems of life. The characters in the Bible are normal, mottled human beings who are confronted with moral challenges. The key question is whether they respond to the challenge with the right inner posture—whether
I suppose this happens to most of us as we age: We get smaller, and our dependencies get bigger.
Christian good has the power to shock. As Dorothy Day once said, Christians are commanded to live in a way that doesn’t make sense unless God exists.
ADULTHOOD I seem to live my life as what my friend Mako Fujimura calls a “border stalker,” perpetually on the line between different worlds. Politically, I am not quite left and not quite right. Professionally, I am not quite an academic and not quite a journalist. Temperamentally, I am not quite a rationalist but not quite a romantic.
They say that religion is the opiate of the masses, but I found the atheist life surprisingly untroubling.
Thomas Merton once wrote that “trying to solve the problem of God is like trying to see your own eyeballs.”
Do I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Do I believe his body was gone from the tomb three days after the crucifixion? The simple, brutally honest answer is, It comes and goes. The border stalker in me is still strong.
Frederick Buechner once observed that if he were asked what faith is, “it’s exactly the journey through space and time I’d talk about, the ups and downs over the years, the dreams, the odd moment, the intuitions….Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward, less a sure thing than a hunch. Faith is waiting.”
Faith is not so much living constantly in that extra dimension of depth as much as it is glimpsing it and then longing for it. People in this camp describe faith not as a steady understanding but as a kind of desire, or maybe as a kind of hunch. It is not so much knowing God in all his particulars but a constant motion toward something that half the time you don’t even feel.
you should wake up in your bed and ask, “Can I believe it all again today?” Or, better yet, ask yourself that question after you’ve scanned the morning news and seen all the atrocities that get committed. If your answer to that question of belief is “yes” every single day, then you probably don’t know what believing in God really means, Buechner writes. “At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you’re human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and…great laughter.”
But God doesn’t seem to want the elimination of the will; He seems to want the training and transformation of it. He doesn’t want a lack of will, but a merger between the will of the person and the will of God.
A believer approaches God with a humble reverence and comes, through study and prayer and the spiritual disciplines, to get a feel for the grain of God’s love. She gradually learns to live along the grain of God’s love and not against the grain. It is not a willful attempt to dominate life, nor is it complete surrender and self-annihilation. It is an enthusiastic response. It is participation, the complex participation of a person’s will into God’s larger will.
Over time prayer reorients the desires. The very act of talking to God inclines a person in a certain way; you want to have a conversation appropriate to Him; you want to bend your desires to please and glorify Him.
A commitment to community involves moving from “I” stories to “We” stories. The move, as always, is downward and then outward. Down into ourselves in vulnerability and then outward in solidarity with others.
How do we tackle homelessness? It starts with the personal question, What can we do to help Mary lead a life of stability, safety, and security in a home?
Collective impact requires systems thinking. Systems thinking is built around the idea that if you take the direct approach to any problem, you’re probably going to screw things up because you don’t see the complexity of the whole system.
On the first mountain, the emphasis is on the unencumbered self, individual accomplishment, creating a society in which everyone is free to be themselves. This is a fluid society, and over the short term a productive society, but it is a thin society. It is a society in which people are only lightly attached to each other and to their institutions. The second-mountain society is a thick society. The organizations and communities in that society leave a mark.
“The secret of life,” the sculptor Henry Moore once said, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of every day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”
The hyper-individualist finds himself enmeshed in a network of conditional love. I am worthy of being loved only when I have achieved the status or success the world expects of me. I am worthy of love only when I can offer the other person something in return. I am what the world says about me. In the end, hyper-individualism doesn’t make people self-sufficient and secure. It obliterates emotional and spiritual security by making everything conditional. It makes people extremely sensitive to the judgments of others and quick to take offense when they feel slighted.
The uncommitted person is the unremembered person. A person who does not commit to some loyalty outside the self leaves no deep mark on the world.
The best adult life is lived by making commitments and staying faithful to those commitments: commitments to a vocation, to a family, to a philosophy or faith, to a community. Adult life is about making promises to others, being faithful to those promises. The beautiful life is found in the mutual giving of unconditional gifts.
The core question for each of us is, Have we educated our emotions to love the right things in the right way?
The state has an important but incomplete role to play in this process. The state can provide services, but it cannot easily provide care. That is to say, the state can redistribute money to the poor, can build homeless shelters and day care centers. It can create the material platforms on which relationships can be built. But the state can’t create the intimate relationships that build a fully functioning person. That can only happen through habitual personal contact. It is only through relationships that we become neighbors, workers, citizens, and friends.
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```json { "title": "The Second Mountain", "authors": [ "David Brooks" ], "publisher": "Random House", "publishedDate": "2019-04-16", "description": "#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world. “Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”—The Washington Post Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment. In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose. In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.", "image": "http://books.google.com/books/content?id=gZNgDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api", "language": "en", "categories": [ "Social Science" ], "pageCount": 384, "isbn10": "0679645047", "isbn13": "9780679645047", "googleBooks": { "id": "gZNgDwAAQBAJ", "preview": "http://books.google.com/books?id=gZNgDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=intitle:The+Second+Mountain,+David+Brooks&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api", "info": "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=gZNgDwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_api", "canonical": "https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=gZNgDwAAQBAJ" } } ```