David Brooks

The world tells them to be a good consumer, but they want to be the one consumed—by a moral cause. The world tells them to want independence, but they want interdependence—to be enmeshed in a web of warm relationships. The world tells them to want individual freedom, but they want intimacy, responsibility, and commitment. The world wants them to climb the ladder and pursue success, but they want to be a person for others.

People on the first mountain have lives that are mobile and lightly attached. People on the second mountain are deeply rooted and deeply committed.

When we experience joy we often feel we have glimpsed into a deeper and truer layer of reality.

If you can create a social movement that people want to join, they will bend their energies and ideas to you.

In the age of the smartphone, the friction costs involved in making or breaking any transaction or relationship approach zero.

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.

In The Age of Anxiety, W. H. Auden wrote,
We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

Finally, suffering shatters the illusion of self-sufficiency, which is an illusion that has to be shattered if any interdependent life is going to begin. Seasons of pain expose the falseness and vanity of most of our ambitions and illuminate the larger reality of living and dying, caring and being cared for. Pain helps us see the true size of our egotistical desires. Before they seemed gigantic and dominated the whole screen. After seasons of suffering, we see that the desires of the ego are very small desires, and certainly not the ones we should organize our lives around. Climbing out of the valley is not like recovering from a disease.

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.