The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

"Brooks gets a lot of grief from the Twitterati for his politics; he seems to drive some people completely up the wall. But what I’ve always liked about his writing, especially in book form, is that he doesn’t pretend to have everything together in his life. I’m always drawn to writers where you get a sense that they’re putting their insides out there, regardless of their politics. He sometimes gets teased online because you can detect, from the subjects that seize his interest, what particular issues he’s grappling with in his own life at that moment – divorce, ageing, et cetera – and for some reason his critics see this as terribly embarrassing. But I’m always like: great, finally, a pundit who’s not just pretending to have everything solved! The basic idea of the ‘second mountain’ metaphor is that there are two phases in most people’s lives, or that ideally there ought to be. First, there’s a young adulthood phase that very properly is about making your place in the world and developing your talents, starting a family, buying a house, making a career and a name for yourself. It’s largely self-focused, but not in a bad way; that’s the appropriate focus of that phase. But there often does come a point when the strategy seems to stop working, seems to stop bringing the fulfilment it once did. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The so-called ‘second mountain’ is a shift toward asking what life is demanding of you, rather than what you can get out of it. Brooks thinks we’re in a culture that’s so hyper-individualistic that we often miss moving to this second mountain. But if you get to a point in your life or your career where everything seems a bit empty and meaningless, even though you might outwardly be very successful, it might be time to switch mountains. A lot of the book consists of the inspiring stories of people in history, and in the present day, who’ve found and enacted this second purpose of their lives in an astonishingly impressive way that most of us never will. But, as inspiration, they’re really powerful stories. At the same time, he’s writing about his own crises, which, as I say, I always find very disarming. Even when part of his crisis is that he left his wife who he’d been married to for more than two decades, and later married a woman 23 years younger than him, who’d previously worked as his researcher. It’s not a story that you’re likely to come out well from telling! Most of us, I think, would approach the basic facts of that story thinking judgmental thoughts about the person telling it, and not necessarily unwarrantedly. All I’m saying is that I think it is a very honest and authentic book. I don’t think he’d ask you to endorse his life choices, necessarily. I admire him being willing to go ahead and write the book the way he did, because he must know what people are going to say when you tell that particular story. That’s a really interesting point. The mountain metaphor too is probably a little macho to begin with. Ultimately I think this may be best thought of in Jungian terms, though Brooks doesn’t do it that way – and from this perspective, the second phase of life can absolutely be seen as a matter of coming home to yourself, claiming your own authority, even listening to your own soul, if you like that sort of language. So it’s not that the first mountain is selfish and the second mountain selfless, but that the first mountain is about following what modern society tells you you ought to do, to have a happy life, while the second mountain is about going beyond that to something that doesn’t see ‘a happy life’ as the priority anyway."