Hrm. I'm not sure what the intended takeaway from this column was. (to be clear: all writing has a purpose. If the purpose was for the author to vent, then my takeaway is that David Brooks is...
Hrm. I'm not sure what the intended takeaway from this column was.
(to be clear: all writing has a purpose. If the purpose was for the author to vent, then my takeaway is that David Brooks is gazing at his navel from the back nine)
A sequence of brief thoughts:
The author was touching on ambition as a means of accomplishing a reward, which speaks to the study of motivation in psychology. Those works do a great job of providing a framework for people to analyze their own motivations, if they so wish.
I expect this is because ~70% of the US population is Christian, but it's always terribly jarring to see someone reference the-capital-G, Abrahamic god in a serious and ostensibly secular text. Hopefully this person is aware that morals are relative and largely invented by popular consensus.
Same goes for casual worship of historic leaders of state.
Same goes for the term "meritocracy", in general, given how incredibly rigged the game is world over.
Viewing a competition as a zero sum game, with a winner or loser, is gross. Win or lose, you'll have hopefully learned something, and at a minimum you experienced life. We over-emphasize victory as a culture, instead of growth.
Overall: it feels like this person needs to get over themselves. This read like a self help column for Americans experiencing a low to moderate amount of ennui.
IMO, from the perspective of an amateur navel gazer: life is a long sequence of meaningless events, and then you die. At the end there await no pearly gates, no winged angels, nor scales of sins and virtues upon which your life's achievements will be weighed. So go nuts, don't hurt anyone, and try to leave the place cleaner than you found it.
Post-script
Holy crap I didn't wikipedia this guy until after I wrote my peace but damn this guy is certainly a piece of work. I'm going to go ahead and purge this article out of my brain now; I try to avoid anything political involving the USA (especially since the lake incident), and this man appears to be comprised of 30% conservative talking points, 10% nuclear hot bad takes, and 60% water. I spent a bit long on the above comment to just delete it, but I think I'm going to ignore this article to avoid getting sucked into unsavoury debates.
Brooks’ piece offers commentary on the experience and utility of reconciling internal ambition and aspiration, the inverse motivations that inform them, and how to evaluate the fullness (or lack...
Brooks’ piece offers commentary on the experience and utility of reconciling internal ambition and aspiration, the inverse motivations that inform them, and how to evaluate the fullness (or lack thereof) that emerges from their emotional preeminence.
Many of us habitually devise extraordinary dreams for the world: if only this or that, then things would be so much better. The source of those ideals is worth attention, and so too is the psychic “stew” in which we mediate their development—the daily society and directional life choices through which we apply our values with some fluctuating level of selectivity. The manners we employ to justify pursuit of our desires has interior consequences distinct from, and nominally irrelevant to, the end results. Yet neglecting self-reflection here might be a particularly fundamental error.
In my own spiritual discernment, I attempt to position my consciousness in a literally accepting way, listening rather than defining or explaining or justifying or dismissing. This is rarely successful in entirety simply because meditation is extremely difficult and one is easily distracted by the endless library of idle thought. But it is also difficult because one is often faced with worldly choices that conflict with one’s values, and more often because one remains enamored with one’s universal centrality. We know that we are not the Center, but nevertheless In American culture (and perhaps all cultures) we are subtly or unsubtly encouraged to forget that presumed objective Truth so that we may express absolute individuality and enforce radially outward hierarchy of deserts—at least a comfortable self-obsession very hard to abandon at the best of times, let alone under stressful conditions. So, in a spiritual sense, it is a constant and grueling challenge to earnestly pour cupfuls of love into everyone and everything, including ourselves and our own visions for change, when we are simultaneously dealing with a definitely self-dealing social, relational tendency of the mind.
I admit I live with some apprehension of being “hollowed out” by the drive to achieve. In practical matters, I tend to derive the most certainty in courses of action from utilitarian principles, through which it is easy to devise decision trees but also narrowly misjudge broad priorities; this is parallel to introspection, though, and like any wave function I think I go through more or less rigidity in my thinking at different points in the year and beyond. When I am fortunate, I experience the bliss of actual altruistic belief: true connection which exists for its own sake and persists because it is only natural to extend goodness infinitely. But that feeling is so unlike the mechanisms that society (of any number) uses to control general behavior. The world is full of evil and that evil is most often felt in the company of persons openly uninterested in grace, kindness, and healing. The disillusioning feeling we get after doing good and being insulted for it, or in seeing offensive personal qualities come to fore in our work’s beneficiaries, or after repeatedly failing despite all efforts while the less worthy succeed—that is a real and common affliction which burns our belief in human goodness and maybe our own faith. Some of my defense is simply to ignore the emotion and think of social work in only logical terms. Perhaps this is effective. But I think it leads me, personally, toward a condescending sort of detachment and an unpleasant personality which I would rather not inhabit.
I think we can learn to better live with this discomfort. It ought to be possible to strive for greatness and accomplishment and also maintain reasonable moral security in the knowledge that we actually have values and properly care to remind ourselves of them. I’m naturally tempted to search for shortcuts, ways of avoiding the effortful task of self-reflection, but there probably are none.
Curated desire, and continuous revelation, are perhaps the most trustworthy predictors of spiritual harmony for me.
Hrm. I'm not sure what the intended takeaway from this column was.
(to be clear: all writing has a purpose. If the purpose was for the author to vent, then my takeaway is that David Brooks is gazing at his navel from the back nine)
A sequence of brief thoughts:
Overall: it feels like this person needs to get over themselves. This read like a self help column for Americans experiencing a low to moderate amount of ennui.
IMO, from the perspective of an amateur navel gazer: life is a long sequence of meaningless events, and then you die. At the end there await no pearly gates, no winged angels, nor scales of sins and virtues upon which your life's achievements will be weighed. So go nuts, don't hurt anyone, and try to leave the place cleaner than you found it.
Post-script
Holy crap I didn't wikipedia this guy until after I wrote my peace but damn this guy is certainly a piece of work. I'm going to go ahead and purge this article out of my brain now; I try to avoid anything political involving the USA (especially since the lake incident), and this man appears to be comprised of 30% conservative talking points, 10% nuclear hot bad takes, and 60% water. I spent a bit long on the above comment to just delete it, but I think I'm going to ignore this article to avoid getting sucked into unsavoury debates.
Brooks’ piece offers commentary on the experience and utility of reconciling internal ambition and aspiration, the inverse motivations that inform them, and how to evaluate the fullness (or lack thereof) that emerges from their emotional preeminence.
Many of us habitually devise extraordinary dreams for the world: if only this or that, then things would be so much better. The source of those ideals is worth attention, and so too is the psychic “stew” in which we mediate their development—the daily society and directional life choices through which we apply our values with some fluctuating level of selectivity. The manners we employ to justify pursuit of our desires has interior consequences distinct from, and nominally irrelevant to, the end results. Yet neglecting self-reflection here might be a particularly fundamental error.
In my own spiritual discernment, I attempt to position my consciousness in a literally accepting way, listening rather than defining or explaining or justifying or dismissing. This is rarely successful in entirety simply because meditation is extremely difficult and one is easily distracted by the endless library of idle thought. But it is also difficult because one is often faced with worldly choices that conflict with one’s values, and more often because one remains enamored with one’s universal centrality. We know that we are not the Center, but nevertheless In American culture (and perhaps all cultures) we are subtly or unsubtly encouraged to forget that presumed objective Truth so that we may express absolute individuality and enforce radially outward hierarchy of deserts—at least a comfortable self-obsession very hard to abandon at the best of times, let alone under stressful conditions. So, in a spiritual sense, it is a constant and grueling challenge to earnestly pour cupfuls of love into everyone and everything, including ourselves and our own visions for change, when we are simultaneously dealing with a definitely self-dealing social, relational tendency of the mind.
I admit I live with some apprehension of being “hollowed out” by the drive to achieve. In practical matters, I tend to derive the most certainty in courses of action from utilitarian principles, through which it is easy to devise decision trees but also narrowly misjudge broad priorities; this is parallel to introspection, though, and like any wave function I think I go through more or less rigidity in my thinking at different points in the year and beyond. When I am fortunate, I experience the bliss of actual altruistic belief: true connection which exists for its own sake and persists because it is only natural to extend goodness infinitely. But that feeling is so unlike the mechanisms that society (of any number) uses to control general behavior. The world is full of evil and that evil is most often felt in the company of persons openly uninterested in grace, kindness, and healing. The disillusioning feeling we get after doing good and being insulted for it, or in seeing offensive personal qualities come to fore in our work’s beneficiaries, or after repeatedly failing despite all efforts while the less worthy succeed—that is a real and common affliction which burns our belief in human goodness and maybe our own faith. Some of my defense is simply to ignore the emotion and think of social work in only logical terms. Perhaps this is effective. But I think it leads me, personally, toward a condescending sort of detachment and an unpleasant personality which I would rather not inhabit.
I think we can learn to better live with this discomfort. It ought to be possible to strive for greatness and accomplishment and also maintain reasonable moral security in the knowledge that we actually have values and properly care to remind ourselves of them. I’m naturally tempted to search for shortcuts, ways of avoiding the effortful task of self-reflection, but there probably are none.
Curated desire, and continuous revelation, are perhaps the most trustworthy predictors of spiritual harmony for me.