Tag Archives: david brooks

The quality of your life is the quality of the people you get to know: Illuminating the David Brooks way

November 28, 2023 By in Books, Essays, Nonfiction Tags: , , 1 Comment

What’s the purpose of life? The question is annoying and contingent and probably unanswerable, but it’s also important and vital and guides our actions. I’ve been thinking about the purpose of life lately, for obvious reasons related to me prematurely dying, and my answer is congruent with the Brooks answer: life is about other people and our relationships—defined broadly—to them. Okay, if that’s the answer then can we be dismissed and go home to watch TV? Probably not, because the answer demands more elaboration, though most of us sweep it under the rug sometime in our late teens or early 20s and prefer not to revisit it, as if it’s an elderly relative who is no longer really here.

The “What’s the purpose of life?” question is not only annoying but also frequently uncomfortable, since it foregrounds the end, which is, at current technological levels, inevitable. We don’t like the question because we don’t want to ask: are we living up to our potential? Are we achieving our purpose(s)? If the answer is “no,” it’s comforting to ask other, less important questions, like who won the game last night. We can’t always be asking the big questions. Often, we have to be asking: “What’s for dinner tonight, and who’s going to make it?” But we should sometimes ask them, and try to answer.

If our everyday actions are incompatible with what the purpose of our lives ought to be, that argues for course correcting. Course correcting is hard, too, relative to continuing to do what we’re already doing. I’m guilty of coasting because it’s easy. I’m also guilty, though, of a certain fondness for both absurdity and excessively avoiding banalities, both of which lend themselves to not only thinking about hard, unanswerable things, but sorting people in those who are like me and those who are repelled by me. Lately I’ve been dying of squamous cell carcinoma, and when casual acquaintances or distant almost-friends have asked how I am, I’ve tended to answer: “I’m dying; how about you?” (Bess has an essay on this that she’s been noodling around on for a while). Maybe casually and sunnily saying that I’m dying makes me anti-social. Maybe it makes me pro-social. There’s a more serious point lurking beneath the dark humor, though: Let’s skip the small talk and get at something real, whatever “real” means. I don’t wholly know what it means but I often see what it doesn’t mean.

David Brooks’ book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen has an answer about the purpose of life that I more or less agree with, albeit with some caveats and some noticing-of-omissions: he writes that, for a lot of us, the purpose of life is to know other people (and to find the love of a good woman, or perhaps good women, depending). In saying that the purpose of life is other people, Brooks is pushing against the flow of American society, which is becoming lonelier and more disconnected from others than it was a few decades ago:

“The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020. In one survey, 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well. The number of American adults without a romantic partner increased by a third.”

Why are we lonely and prone to suicide? Lots of reasons, presumably, and Brooks says we need not just other people but the specific skills to connect with other people:

People need social skills. We talk about the importance of “relationships,” “community,” “friendship,” “social connection,” but these words are too abstract. The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

Brooks also says: “These are some of the most important skills a human being can possess, and yet we don’t teach them in school. Some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life.” I find myself agreeing, and yet it seems that most people don’t agree with Brooks or me, or we’d see more change and less loneliness.

Revealed preferences show most, or many, people prefer the problems of loneliness to the problems of connection and relationship. Given the data, maybe loneliness is a symptom of large-scale learned helplessness; unhappiness and isolation begets more unhappiness and isolation as the modern status-quo. Technology also makes being alone relatively more fun than it was, say, 30 years ago, which may push people towards not cultivating the weak social ties that eventually become close friends, lovers, and confidants. Facebook, however, is not going to help you when you need it most—but Facebook also isn’t going to demand help of you. Real connection means reciprocity, which is bidirectional, and it seems a lot of us can’t be bothered.

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Acceptable and unacceptable status in America

November 16, 2011 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

See this fascinating and largely accurate list of what kinds of inequality are acceptable and what kinds aren’t, by David Brooks; note especially:

Status inequality is acceptable for college teachers. Universities exist within a finely gradated status structure, with certain schools like Brown clearly more elite than other schools. University departments are carefully ranked and compete for superiority.

Status inequality is unacceptable for high school teachers. Teachers at this level strongly resist being ranked. It would be loathsome to have one’s department competing with other departments in nearby schools.

And people involved in each system probably believe in both without questioning why they do or how they came to believe what they believe.

Many English and humanities grad students and professors seem to find differences in income inequality abhorrent and believe they are probably the result of unequal access to resources or education but also believe differences in status and work quality in their own fields largely the result of merit, hard work, tenacity, and determination. When they get lousy papers from students, relatively few seem to attribute lousy papers to various kinds of inequality of opportunity and many attribute them to laziness, poor time management, and so forth.

In addition, academics, at least of the humanities varieties, don’t like flashy cards but do like flashy CVs. So the status of certain activities are different. Teachers appear to dislike both and seem to like markers of perceived equality, even though anyone who’s been through school is doubtlessly aware that not all teachers are equally skilled or passionate.

Also, on a personal note, I am a propagating this kind of inequality:

Cupcake inequality is on the way up. People will stand for hours outside of gourmet cupcake stores even though there are other adequate cupcakes on offer with no waiting at nearby Safeways.

The cupcakes at Magnolia Bakery in NYC and LA or Cupcake Royale in Seattle are so much better than most cupcakes that the difference astonishes. Yet part of my perception might be because they’re very hard for me, in Tucson, to find and acquire. (There is a place called Red Velvet that also sells expensive cupcakes, but they’re too dense and have the wrong mouthfeel.) PinkBerry used to be feel special, but now there’s going to be one a few miles from me, which means I’m much less likely to go out of my way to get one when I’m in LA. So maybe I’m actually consuming status as much as I’m consuming sugary confections. Now PinkBerry is opening at the University of Arizona, which means it won’t be a treat but something I walk past routinely.

I would be interested in seeing other lists of this kind and for other countries.

Brooks ends: “Dear visitor, we are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other. Have a nice stay.” We may also believe that equality of opportunity doesn’t imply equality of results, although that itself might be acceptable to believe while it might not be acceptable to believe in many circles that we have equality of opportunity.

It is acceptable to believe that many kinds of inequality affect women and few or none do men, which Roy Baumeister writes about extensively in Is There Anything Good About Men?: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men. For most people, it is also acceptable to have a very high number of sex partners as long as you don’t brag too publicly about it; rare, brash exceptions generate hilarity, as in Tucker Max or Chelsea Handler.