see them when we went out to dinner and such, but I missed those fifteen-second encounters in the hallway or kitchen at home. I had spent my adult life in the conservative movement, but my conservatism was no longer the prevailing conservatism, so I found myself intellectually and politically unattached, too. Much of my social life had been spent in conservative circles, and those connections drifted away. I realized I had a lot of friendships that didn’t run deep. Few people confided in me, because I did not give off a vibe that encouraged vulnerability. I was too busy, on the move.
I was unplanted, lonely, humiliated, scattered. I remember walking through that period in a state that resembled permanent drunkenness—my emotions were all on the surface, my playlists were all Irish heartbreak songs by Sinéad O’Connor and Snow Patrol. I was throwing myself needily upon my friends in ways that are embarrassing now if I stop to remember them, which I try not to. I was unattached, wondering what the rest of my life should be, confronting the problems of a twenty-two-year-old with the mind of a fifty-two-year-old.
Having failed at a commitment, I’ve spent the ensuing five years thinking and reading about how to do commitments well, how to give your life meaning after worldly success has failed to fulfill. This book is a product of that search. Writing it was my attempt to kick myself in my own rear, part of my continual effort to write my way to a better life. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,” Kafka wrote. It should wake us up and hammer at our skull. Writing this book has served that purpose for me.
I’ve also written it, I hope, for you. When it comes to what we writers do, I like to apply an observation by D. T. Niles: We are like beggars who try to show other beggars where we found bread. You have to get only a few pages into this book to realize that I quote a lot of people wiser than myself. I mean a lot of people. I’m unapologetic about this. It’s occurred to me many times over the course of writing this book that maybe I’m not really a writer. I’m a teacher or middleman. I take the curriculum of other people’s knowledge and I pass it along.
Finally, I write it as a response to the current historical moment. For six decades the worship of the self has been the central preoccupation of our culture—molding the self, investing in the self, expressing the self. Capitalism, the meritocracy, and modern social science have normalized selfishness; they have made it seem that the only human motives that are real are the self-interested ones—the desire for money, status, and power. They silently spread the message that giving, care, and love are just icing on the cake of society.
When a whole society is built around self-preoccupation, its members become separated from one another, divided and alienated. And that is what has happened to us. We are down in the valley. The rot we see in our politics is caused by a rot in our moral and cultural foundations—in the way we relate to one another, in the way we see ourselves as separable from one another, in the individualistic values that have become the water in which we swim. The first-mountain culture has proven insufficient, as it always does.
Our society has become a conspiracy against joy. It has put too much emphasis on the individuating part of our consciousness—individual reason—and too little emphasis on the bonding parts of our consciousness, the heart and soul. We’ve seen a shocking rise of mental illness, suicide, and distrust. We have become too cognitive when we should be more emotional; too utilitarian when we should be using a moral lens; too individualistic when we should be more communal.
So we as people and as a society have to find our second mountain. This doesn’t mean rejecting the things we achieved on the first mountain—the nice job, the nice home, the pleasures of a comfortable life. We all need daily ego boosts throughout our lives. But it does require a shift in culture—a shift in values and philosophy, a renegotiation of the structure of power in our society. It’s about shifting from one mode of thinking toward another. It’s about finding an ethos that puts commitment making at the center of things.