David Brooks: evaluation

Transcript context

…No. Well, Jonathan Rauch, he’s absolutely right. There’s a U-shaped curve. People are happy in their 20s, and they sort of bottom out at 47, which to me is having teenage children. [laughter] He has more complex things, but then they rise up, and some of it is straight biological. If you give people experiments where you ask them to look at a crowd of faces, young people look at angry faces; they go toward threat. Old people, their eyes just fixate on the happy faces. They just perceive reality as a more friendly thing. So that’s one of the reasons. He’s even got data on . . . apparently, baboons also have a U-shaped curve, that they’re happy in young baboonhood. Then they get middle aged, baboonhood stinks. And then upper to old age baboonhood. I don’t know how they measure this. [laughter] But to me, I guess my answer would be, it’s again quality of relationships. Quality of relationships correlates extremely well with happiness levels. If you join a club that meets once a month, that produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income. So if relationships are the thing . . . And I would say that people get better at living, that in their 50s and 60s they get out of their own way. The sort of monster of self-regard diminishes. How am I doing? How am I doing? What do people think of me? After a certain age people stop caring, and that’s the recipe for happiness. [laughter] And then I notice — and I’m going to write about this, I hope — the people I talk to, especially over 70, their life has this shape, which I’ve come to think of as the two-mountain shape. They got out of their education, and they figured, “Oh, that’s the mountain I’m going to climb up.” And there’s a career they imagine. There’s a family they imagine. Then they achieve that success and find it unsatisfying. Or else something really bad happens, and they suffer. They’re at the valley, and they realize, “Oh, that actually wasn’t my mountain.” There’s a second mountain, and it happens often in their 50s and 60s. The second mountain tends to be more about community service. It’s more internal, less external. The first mountain is more building up the identity and the ego. The second mountain is sort of shedding it all, and it’s more about pouring back. You meet person after person who built a career, and then they went off and became a teacher. They went to Tibet and meditated, or they dedicated their life to some cause. And that second mountain is a more spiritual mountain, but it’s just a happier mountain. So I think people just learn lessons as they get older, and they get better at living. In an age of supposed revelations about Silicon Valley and so-called Facebook scandals, why don’t Americans seem to care more about their privacy? And in your view, is this actually a good thing that we’re not so worried about it? Not many people have quit Facebook, right? There can be a big ZIP file of information about you out there. There’s not actually any great protest in the parks of Arlington that I know about. Some media people, some intellectuals, but otherwise, no.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.