David Brooks – The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

Middle age often brings a particular kind of restlessness – not depression, not failure, but a quiet, creeping suspicion that the goals we have spent decades pursuing were, somehow, the wrong goals. David Brooks explores this feeling in The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (2019), an ambitious attempt to name it, explain it, and offer a way forward. Part memoir, part moral philosophy, and part sociological manifesto, the book is expansive, thought-provoking, and often deeply moving (some chapters genuinely brought me to tears), even if Brooks occasionally struggles under the weight of the very large questions he sets out to answer.

Brooks – New York Times columnist, commentator for PBS NewsHour, and author of The Road to Character (a book I loved, which is exactly why I picked up this one) – builds his argument around a simple geographical metaphor.

The first mountain is the one our culture encourages us to climb: education, career, status, achievement. It is the mountain of résumé virtues – the skills, accomplishments, and qualifications we bring to the marketplace. Many of us spend the first half of adulthood climbing this mountain, only to reach the summit and discover that the view feels unexpectedly empty.

“It wasn’t my mountain,” Brooks writes. “There is another mountain.”

The second mountain is where life shifts from being self-centered to other-centered. It is the mountain of eulogy virtues – the qualities people talk about at your funeral: whether you were kind, whether you showed up when it mattered, whether you loved well.

Between these two mountains lies a valley.

And the valley is perhaps the book’s most important insight – the element that much of popular self-help literature conveniently skips. Brooks argues that no one reaches the second mountain without first descending into this valley: a period of loss, failure, crisis, heartbreak, or confusion. Suffering, in his framework, is not an obstacle to a meaningful life; it is often the path into one. Hardship cracks open the shell of self-sufficiency, exposes the limits of hyper-individualism, and compels us to reach toward others. The valley strips away the illusions of the first mountain. Only then can we orient ourselves toward something larger than ourselves.

The Four Commitments

The structure of the book revolves around what Brooks calls the four commitments – four pathways up the second mountain:

• Vocation
• Marriage
• Philosophy or faith
• Community

Each receives its own substantial section.

Vocation

Brooks makes an important distinction between a career and a vocation.

A career is transactional: you exchange skills for money, status, and advancement.

A vocation is different. It is a response to a calling – a sense that a particular kind of work is what you are meant to do, not because it makes you successful, but because it is needed and because you are uniquely suited to it.

He argues that most people discover their vocation not through endless self-analysis, but by paying attention to where their deepest joy meets the world’s deepest need – a formulation borrowed from theologian Frederick Buechner.

Marriage

Brooks writes about marriage with particular eloquence and vulnerability. Given his own personal history, this section feels especially honest.

Reading it, I cried more than once.

He describes marriage not as a contract between two independent individuals seeking to maximize happiness, but as a mutual promise to remain steadfast – to transform together through changing circumstances and become something greater as a pair than either person could be alone.

He critiques what he calls the modern “companionate marriage”: two autonomous individuals sharing space and coordinating goals while maintaining complete personal sovereignty. In his view, this creates connection without true interdependence.

Instead, he advocates for covenant – a willingness to surrender part of one’s independent identity in service of another person and a shared future.

Philosophy and Faith

Brooks, who often describes himself as living somewhere between Judaism and Christianity (having been born into a Jewish family and later building a life within a Christian context), approaches faith with caution rather than certainty.

His central argument is that people need some framework that transcends purely personal preferences – a larger narrative capable of placing individual lives within a broader structure of meaning.

This is probably the section where his arguments become the most expansive and inevitably the most debatable. Secular readers may find his turn toward spirituality intellectually unsatisfying. Yet his underlying claim – that the second mountain requires a degree of self-transcendence, and that purely individualistic meaning systems eventually collapse inward – is worth taking seriously.

Community

When Brooks writes about community, he becomes both his most political and, arguably, his most prophetic.

He argues that decades of culturally celebrated individualism have weakened the social fabric. Loneliness, mental health struggles, political polarization, and family fragmentation continue to rise.

His proposed solution is not a political platform but a cultural reorientation toward what he calls relationalism—a vision of public life that values solidarity more than autonomy and understands human beings as fundamentally shaped by their relationships.

Why the Book Matters

The book’s greatest strength is that Brooks is willing to write openly about moral questions at a time when popular culture is largely preoccupied with optimization, productivity, and self-improvement.

He is willing to say – without embarrassment – that some ways of living are better than others.

He uses words like virtue, commitment, surrender, and joy without irony.

In an era where public language is often wrapped in disclaimers and cautious qualifications, there is something almost radical about that directness.

Brooks is also a gifted storyteller. The book is filled with vivid portraits of what he calls “second mountain people” – individuals he encountered through the Aspen Institute’s Weave project. Volunteers, community organizers, social workers, teachers who spent decades in difficult schools, parents of children with disabilities who describe their challenges as unexpected gifts.

These stories form the emotional heart of the book.

What makes them powerful is that many of these people are not obviously happy in the conventional sense. Yet they radiate what Brooks calls moral joy – a deep alignment between who they are and how they live.

One of Brooks’s most enduring contributions remains his distinction between résumé virtues and eulogy virtues, first introduced in a 2015 TED Talk and expanded here. It captures something many people feel but rarely articulate: the qualities that earn professional success are often completely different from the qualities that define a life well lived.

The Book’s Tensions and Limitations

No honest review can ignore the central tension hanging over The Second Mountain.

Brooks writes extensively and beautifully about marriage as a covenant requiring faithfulness through hardship. Yet his own journey to the second mountain included divorcing his first wife after nearly three decades of marriage and later marrying a former research assistant twenty-three years younger than him.

Critics quickly pointed out the apparent contradiction.

I noticed it too.

The fairest response is probably this: the tension is real, but it does not necessarily invalidate the argument. Moral insights can be sincere and valuable even when the person articulating them has not fully lived up to them. Augustine was not a saint before becoming Saint Augustine.

Brooks himself acknowledges the personal cost of his midlife transformation.

It is also worth remembering that he writes from a position of considerable privilege. Readers whose valleys involve economic hardship, illness, or structural inequality may find some of his assumptions less convincing.

There is also the recurring issue of breadth versus depth.

The book attempts to tackle vocation, marriage, faith, community, memoir, and sociology all at once. As I mentioned earlier, it tries to hold a great deal in a single volume.

The chapters on marriage and community are, in my view, the strongest. The sections on vocation and faith sometimes read more like elegant essays than fully developed arguments.

Readers seeking rigorous philosophical treatment may wish to complement Brooks with works such as Habits of the Heart or After Virtue, both of which influenced his thinking.

Why It Is Still Worth Reading

What The Second Mountain ultimately does – and what books like this most need to do – is force us to stop and examine the direction of our lives.

Brooks is writing against a culture that has pushed individualism to its logical extreme and, paradoxically, left many people feeling more isolated and less fulfilled than ever.

His argument is that genuine fulfillment comes not through freedom alone, but through commitment; not through autonomy alone, but through belonging; not through achievement alone, but through service.

None of this is entirely new.

Versions of the same idea can be found in Aristotle, Augustine, and nearly every wisdom tradition that has seriously wrestled with the question of what makes a good life.

For those working in education, community-building, or any field concerned with human flourishing, the book resonates especially strongly. Brooks articulates at the level of personal biography what many practitioners already understand institutionally: that outcomes without relationships are hollow, and systems without commitment are merely processes.

The second mountain is not a metaphor for retirement or a second career.

It is a metaphor for the moment when a person – or an institution – discovers that the purpose it claims to serve has always been larger than its own ambitions.

The Second Mountain is an imperfect book written by an imperfect man about the possibility of a more committed, more generous, and ultimately more joyful life. It is worth reading precisely because it asks uncomfortable questions at a time when discomfort is unfashionable.

Not every answer will resonate with every reader.

But the questions themselves are the right ones:

What am I really living for?

What would it mean to give myself fully to something larger than myself?

How do I walk through the valley and begin climbing again?

When I think about it, few things a book can do are more important than helping us ask the right questions at the right time.