Brooks: It's Not About You

David Brooks had a column in the New York Times today, It’s Not About You, that got some attention around the web. It's mostly about all the stupid things that people say in commencement speeches. I found this article nicely refreshing for a number of reasons. While I’m not sure that I agree with Brooks’ assessment of the sad state of the world that we’ve bequeathed our children, the rest provides a lot of good stuff to chew on.

First off, I never liked the advice to follow your dreams. It always struck me as mostly banal, hopelessly individualistic and was about the same as saying do whatever you want to do. And it’s absolutely devoid of moral content. No doubt Timothy McVeigh was following a dream when he blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

I also agree that kids today mostly live in a way too structured environment. We now have play dates. The common phrases we hear today are life lived on a leash and helicopter parents. Parents, I think, need to be a bit more selfish, or have more interests than just their kids. As Brooks points out, this much control does not serve our children well. I always liked the phrase "benign indifference."

And then, as I will discuss at a much greater length in another blog entry – if I ever get it finished – the idea of “finding yourself” is not only another one of these empty expressions that doesn’t stand up to much thought, but it is blatantly anti-existentialist. It suggests that there is a pre-existent blueprint of yourself out there for you to find. Sartre rejects the idea of a pre-existent self: "Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself." I think that Brooks mostly has it right: we don’t discover ourselves; we form ourselves by what we do.

Finally, the last lines – “The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.” – deserve comment. It reminds me of the guy with the impossible name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He’s one of the happiness psychologists. He proposes that happiness is achieved paradoxically by forgetting about whether you’re happy or not. So following your dream of happiness will most likely just make you unhappy. He, instead, has proposed this concept of “flow,” in which you are so deeply engaged in what you are doing that you forget yourself. Let’s let Csikszentmihalyi explain it:

In the early seventies, I spoke with chess players, rock climbers, musicians, and inner-city basketball players, asking them to describe their experience when what they were doing was really going well. I really expected quite different stories to emerge. But the interviews seemed in many important ways to focus on the same quality of the experience. For instance, the fact that you were completely immersed in what you were doing, that the concentration was very high, that you knew what you had to do moment by moment, that you had very quick and precise feedback as to how well you were doing, and that you felt that your abilities were stretched but not overwhelmed by the opportunities for action. In other words, the challenges were in balance with the skills. And when those conditions were present, you began to forget all the things that bothered you in everyday life, forget the self as an entity separate from what was going on—you felt you were a part of something greater and you were just moving along with the logic of the activity.

This is happiness.