Bejinha

“familiar process before they can acknowledge how comprehensive their problem is. First, they deny that there’s something wrong with their life. Then they intensify their efforts to follow the old failing plan. Then they try to treat themselves with some new thrill: They have an affair, drink more, or start doing drugs. Only when all this fails do they admit that they need to change the way they think about life.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“your conversation consists mostly of descriptions of how busy you are. Suddenly you’re a chilly mortal, going into hyper-people-pleasing mode anytime you’re around your boss. You spend much of your time mentor shopping, trying to find some successful older person who will answer all your questions and solve all your problems.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“The meritocracy defines “community” as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“A person who tries to treat life as if it were an extension of school often becomes what the Danish novelist Matias Dalsgaard calls an “insecure overachiever”: “Such a person must have no stable or solid foundation to build upon, and yet nonetheless tries to build his way out of his problem. It’s an impossible situation. You can’t compensate for having a foundation made of quicksand by building a new story on top. But this person takes no notice and hopes that the problem down in the foundation won’t be found out if only the construction work on the top keeps going.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life