David Brooks on Youth, Morality, and Loneliness
David Brooks — New York Times columnist and author of The Road to Character — joins Tyler Cowen for Ep. 42 to range across the loneliness epidemic, the two-mountain theory of life, suffering as a source of depth, how young people lose their sense of purpose, and what a Whig revival might look like in American politics.
Key ideas
- Individualism is the root cause of loneliness. The cultural revolution of the 1960s destroyed the conformist community of the 1950s — necessary, because that culture tolerated racism and sexism — but left people ‘naked and alone’, reverting to tribalism as a poor substitute for genuine belonging. Fifty years of autonomy-first culture has produced a loneliness epidemic, rising suicide rates, and an addiction crisis.
- The ‘telos crisis’ is hollowing out young adulthood. The most supervised generation in history is released into a complete void at 21 — no marriage, no settled career, no purpose — and lacks the Nietzschean ‘why’ needed to endure setbacks. Brooks calls this the telos crisis (telos is the Greek word for goal or purpose), visible in rising depression and mental-health problems among 20-somethings.
- Suffering is the deepest teacher, if converted into redemption. Drawing on Paul Tillich, Brooks argues that suffering ‘carves through the floor’ of who you thought you were, revealing hidden depth. People who convert suffering into a redemptive narrative — turning grief into service, as with the Hope for Henry charity — are deepened by it; those who cannot, shrivel.
- The two-mountain life. People climb a first mountain — career, family, conventional success — find it unsatisfying, or encounter catastrophe at the valley, then discover a second mountain in their 50s and 60s: more communal, more spiritual, less about building an identity and more about pouring back into the world. This shape, Brooks argues, is the recipe for genuine happiness.
- Commitment, not autonomy, is the source of a fulfilled life. Brooks’s working definition of commitment: ‘falling in love with something and then building a structure of behaviour around it for those moments when love falters.’ Four great commitments — to a spouse and family, a vocation, a community, and a philosophy or faith — are the scaffolding of a meaningful life.
Content
Loneliness and the cost of individualism
Brooks opens as a cultural determinist. The 1950s produced tight, conformist community — big unions, deferential neighbourhoods, group-oriented culture — that tolerated racism, sexism, and emotional coldness. The ratchet-hatchet-pivot sequence of cultural change (a phrase he borrows from a social theorist he cannot name) demanded that culture be chopped up in the 1960s, and chopping it up was justified: feminism, civil rights, and Silicon Valley’s rebel ethos all grew from that period of individualism.
But every truth becomes false at its extreme. Fifty years of autonomy — social individualism on the left, economic individualism on the right — has left people without the community their evolutionary roots expect. The data: self-reported loneliness doubled from 20 to 40 per cent; suicide rates at a 30-year high; 50,000 opiate deaths per year; a massive upswing in social distrust. Against Steven Pinker’s optimism about individuals, Brooks notes that almost every data series on relationship quality runs in the wrong direction.
Affluence accelerates the problem: Brooks’s own story of buying a house in Bethesda with a big yard — and the garage-door opener he attached to his car visor — illustrates how people translate money directly into loneliness.
Secularisation and spiritual hunger
On religion, Brooks rejects the standard secularisation thesis (the richer a society gets, the less religious it becomes), citing the late sociologist Peter Berger’s disproof in the 1970s. He observes Orthodox Judaism surging, and hip young professionals packing churches in New York — Redeemer, Trinity Grace, C3 — that feel ‘like the hippest nightclub on Earth.’ His claim: the human drive for transcendent experience never disappears; it goes underground when institutions fail to answer it, then resurfaces in new forms.
He describes himself as ‘religiously bisexual’ — shaped by both Judaism (childhood household, Passover Seder, the irrevocable pull of that story) and Christianity (an Episcopal school, a church choir, 15 years at an Episcopal camp, deep reading of Reinhold Niebuhr and Saint Augustine). The concept of the soul — a piece of each person with ‘no weight, no colour, no size or shape’ that confers infinite dignity — is not, for Brooks, an abstract theological commitment but a reporting tool: without it, he says, he cannot explain why atrocity is wrong or how to write about people in a way that captures what they actually are.
His model of non-extremist religion comes from the poet and theologian Christian Wiman: occasional moments of transcendence that feel like poetic inspiration, followed by long stretches of doubt, held together by fidelity to those moments. Pluralism and self-doubt, Brooks argues, are the only civilised way to be religious.
The telos crisis and young adulthood
Cowen asks why so many young men have stopped looking for work. Brooks connects it to trauma, attachment wounds, and a structural failure of culture. Six adverse childhood experiences make long-term thinking feel pointless. But the deeper problem is generational: the most closely supervised cohort in history is released into complete freedom at 21, with no clear vocation, no marriage in prospect for another decade, and no sense of purpose to anchor them when setbacks hit.
He names this the telos crisis — from the Greek for goal or end — and points to Nietzsche: ‘He who has a why to live for can endure any how.’ Rising depression, mental-health problems, and suicide rates among 20-somethings are, for Brooks, the statistical signature of a society that produces well-supervised children and then abandons them. He cites the Butler University commencement where he warned graduates that life would be hard in three years — arguably the wrong tone, but the right diagnosis.
The U-shaped happiness curve and the two-mountain life
Jonathan Rauch’s research shows that happiness bottoms out around 47 (Brooks: ‘having teenage children’) and rises sharply from the 50s onwards. Brooks explains part of it biologically — older people literally fixate on happy rather than threatening faces — but the deeper cause is relational. Quality of relationships correlates extremely well with happiness, more than income does: joining a club that meets once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your salary.
The broader pattern he calls the two-mountain life. A person climbs a first mountain — career, family, the conventional self they imagined — reaches the top and finds it unsatisfying, or falls into the valley through suffering. The second mountain, reached in the 50s and 60s, is more communal, more spiritual, less about ego-construction and more about ‘pouring back.’ The people he has spoken to who follow this shape — career, then teaching; success, then cause — describe it as a happier mountain. The monster of self-regard diminishes; ‘how am I doing?’ stops being the central question.
Suffering as depth-revelation
Asked by an audience member how to fail and suffer well, Brooks draws on Paul Tillich’s image: suffering ‘carves through the floor of what you thought was the basement of your soul and reveals a cavity, and then carves through that floor and reveals a cavity below.’ Moments of great suffering show the depth of a person the way nothing else does. Henri Nouwen’s counsel — stay in the suffering to see what it has to teach you — he finds intellectually serious even where he personally would exit.
The key distinction is between those who turn suffering into a redemptive narrative — a cause, a service, a charity in a dead child’s name — and those who cannot. The former are deepened, spiritualised, their ego broken open; the latter shrivel. The monster of self-regard, he says, is exactly what suffering crashes through.
Conservatism, Whiggery, and American politics
Brooks describes his political DNA as half Edmund Burke (epistemological modesty, constant but incremental change) and half Alexander Hamilton (dynamism, energy, transformational ambition). Neither European small-c conservatism nor libertarianism fits America’s self-recreating character; what he wants is a revival of the Whig Party — Hamilton, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster — which stood for ‘limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility’: national banks, infrastructure, credit markets, a ladder for poor boys and girls to rise.
On the anti-Trump movement’s failure, he is self-critical: it did not understand where Trump voters were coming from, did not offer a realistic account of why Trump had failed on those voters’ own terms rather than on cosmopolitan ones. Young Trump voters he has spoken to argue coherently that diversity and genuine community sit in deep tension — a view he disagrees with, but takes seriously.
His model for political recovery is local: the cities doing well — Greenville, Fresno, Eau Claire, Nashville, Detroit — are run by pragmatic managers who have set the culture-war agenda aside and focused on measurable results for working-class Americans. The historical template is the reform wave of 1890–1910, when a scatter of civic organisations (Boy Scouts, NAACP, settlement houses, unions) merged into the Progressive Movement and cleaned up government.
The production function of David Brooks
On how he works: he reads and writes every day, has done since age seven, and thinks geographically. Each column begins with 200 pages of notes, which he lays out in piles on his living-room floor — one pile per paragraph. ‘Writing for me is not typing into the keyboard. It’s crawling around on the floor, organising my piles.’ His lesson to students, which they ignore: a paper should be 80 per cent done before you sit down to type, because writing is structure and traffic management.
His career advice: say yes to everything at 24 — he was a movie critic, a foreign correspondent, wrote about El Salvador without visiting. And Richard Holbrooke’s counsel: ‘Know something about something.’ Viktor Frankl’s version, channelled through his friend Fred Swaniker: do not ask what you want from life; ask what life is expecting of you.
Related
- David Brooks — guest; columnist and author
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Meaning and Purpose — concept page; the telos crisis and the two-mountain life directly extend this
- Free Will — concept page; Brooks’s position on genes, culture, and agency
- Science and Religion — concept page; Brooks’s account of non-extremist religion and spiritual hunger