The Social Animal

by David Brooks

  Erica never got to the point in her life when she could really relax. She always had to be moving and doing and achieving. But this was a delicious sort of exertion. For someone who’d spent her life struggling and climbing, these trips were pure joy.

  CHAPTER 22

  MEANING

  IT’S HARD TO KNOW WHEN THE IMMORTALS STARTED APPEARING on the mountains. You’d be hiking or biking or cross-country skiing outside of Aspen, Colorado, and from behind you’d hear this whoosh that sounded like an incoming F-18. You’d turn around and see this little nugget of Spandex. It was one of those superfit old guys who’d decided to go on a fitness jihad in retirement. He’d shrunk as he crossed age seventy, so he’d be four ten and ninety-five pounds of hard gristle wrapped in Spandex action gear. He’d be coming at you at ferocious speed, wearing weights on his wrists and ankles and a look of fierce determination on his small wrinkled face. You’d be huffing and puffing on the mountainside, and this superbuff Spandex senior would whiz by like a little iron Raisinette.

  These old guys had succeeded at everything else they had ever tried, so they had simply decided to say a big Fuck You to death. Earlier in life, they had been the sort of ambitious young strivers who had started their first paper route at six, made their first million by twenty-two, and they’d married a string of beauties so that they had achieved this weird genetic phenomenon in which their grandmothers looked like Gertrude Stein but their granddaughters looked like Uma Thurman.

  In their postretirement quest for eternal youth, they’d hired personal trainers, graduated from fitness boot camps, and spent much of their time at their resort homes strategizing about energy shakes, veggie-centric cuisine, and bone-marrow preservation. They could be counted upon to take up windsurfing at seventy, and K2 expeditions at seventy-five, and by ninety they’d be popping Cialis like breath mints and working out so furiously their fitness trainers would be dropping with coronaries just trying to keep up.

  They had the time and means and focus to do all this because they’d entered their pluto-adolescence. When highly ambitious men make a lot of money and then retire to high-end vacation communities, they enter a phase of life in which they have the money, the time, and the mentality to make a profession out of all the puerile stuff they enjoyed at age eighteen. They don’t actually have the energy levels they used to, but for brief bursts they are raging libidos with platinum Amex cards. They hang out with resort-town celebrities—George Hamilton, Kevin Costner, and Jimmy Buffett. They unsuccessfully flirt with young waitresses, then go home to the event planners they married as trophy wives a few decades ago and who have now in their fifties turned into modern American centaurs. Because cosmetic surgeons are apparently more proficient the lower down the body you get, these women have legs like Serena Williams but overstretched g-force cheeks and the stuffed-pillow lips.

  It’s become fashionable to be interested in education, so many of these guys have three homes, six cars, four mistresses, and five charter schools. They also spend a lot of time bonding with one another. If you go to a resort community, from Bridgehampton to Aspen to Malibu, you can see packs of these overly fit oldsters meeting on the sidewalk in the early evening on their way to a tapas restaurant.

  None of them really wants to go to the tapas restaurant, which is filled with dishes they don’t understand. But they are in the grip of some primordial New Urbanist force, and as modern cosmopolitan sophisticates, they are sentenced to endless tapas ordeals. They and everybody in their party will be condemned to spend ninety minutes wrestling with traditional date fritters, squid with aioli, saffron rice with cuttlefish and grilled peppers straight from the Canary Islands, which they neither look forward to nor savor but which they must simply endure as one of the mysteries of their civilization.

  As they walk that long gray mile to the tapas of doom the group will radiate a certain sort of male giddiness, and a strange transformation will take place. For it is a law of human nature that the more men you concentrate in one happy pack, the more each of them will come to resemble Donald Trump. They possess a sort of masculine photosynthesis to start with—the ability to turn sunlight into self-admiration. By the law of compound egotism, they create this self-reinforcing vortex of smugness, which brings out the most pleased-with-themselves aspects of their own personalities.

  These men are, in other circumstances, loving grandfathers, eager to talk about their offspring at Stanford, who are in year-abroad programs in Cambodia. But when sucked into the psychodynamics of a haute-bourgeois boy gang, striding around sockless in their performance sandals, they become immature versions of themselves. Their decibels rise. Their chests puff. Their laughs explode. They become temporary geriatric gangstas, and brag and swagger in a spirit of rising male hysteria. They get a form of millionaire titan Alzheimer’s; they forget everything but their erections.

  The Contemplative Life

  After they retired, Erica and Harold bought a second home in Aspen, where they lived during the summer and for a few weeks around Christmas. They saw the Immortals swooshing by and carousing when they went downtown, but their own lives had taken a different path. They had also achieved what is called success, but theirs was a different kind of success. Without really thinking about it, they had created a counterculture. They didn’t consciously reject the lifestyle of the affluent mainstream; they just sort of ignored it. They lived and thought differently, and their lives had taken on a different and deeper shape. They had a greater awareness of the wellsprings of the human heart, and when you met them you were impressed by their substance and depth.

  On summer afternoons, they’d sit in Adirondack chairs on the front porch and look out over the Roaring Fork River and wave at the occasional raft trip going by. Harold would read his serious nonfiction books, and Erica would read novels and nap. Harold would look over at her as she slept. Her Chinese features had become more pronounced as she had gotten older, and she was thinner and smaller. Harold would remember a story he had once read, by Mark Saltzman. It was about a man in China who was learning English. One day, his teacher asked him what had been the happiest moment of his life. The Chinese man paused for a long time. And then he smiled with embarrassment and said that once his wife had gone to Beijing and eaten duck, and she often told him about the delicious duck. And so, the story concluded, “He would have to say the happiest moment in his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.”

  Harold would think back on his own life and then try to squeeze it into the shape of that story. And he would remember a blue shirt Erica had earned in high school for making the honor roll, which had made her so proud, and which she would talk about when she welcomed young interns to their firm, or when she was invited to speak at a company or college commencement. He had heard her tell the story of the shirt hundreds of times over the years, first when she was young and starting out in life, when she told it to him over dinner; then when she was confident and middle-aged and being interviewed and feted; and now when she was older and smaller and wrinkled. He reflected that it wouldn’t be totally inaccurate for him to say that the happiest moment of his life had been her making the honor roll before she knew him, and the earning of the shirt.

  On those afternoons, they would talk about things, sometimes over a glass of wine—or two or three for Harold. In the late afternoons, Erica would rise and get Harold a sweater, and then she’d go in to cook them an early dinner. Harold would sit there watching the shadows of the evening sun.

  They had run their tour company for about eight years, but eventually they had to give it up. Harold’s knees had begun to go, then his hips and his ankles, which had been prone to tendonitis all his life. He was largely immobile now, walking awkwardly and slowly with two canes. He would never play tennis again, never golf again, never carelessly get up and walk across the room again.

  His body was breaking down. He’d been in the hospital nearly once a year for the past few years, for one thing or another. Some men grow thin and frail as the
y age, but he, immobile, grew heavy and round. For the first few years of his old, old age, he found, he needed more and more help, for little chores he’d never given a second thought to all his life—sometimes to even get out of bed or a chair. Erica would grab his hands and then lean back, like a sailor leaning against the pull of the sail, and leverage him up.

  Then, as the decay worsened, he needed help all the time. Harold was imprisoned in his chair. He endured three bouts of depression as he realized he would no longer be a participant in the life of the planet, but just a decaying observer of it. For several months he lay awake at night in a sort of madness, imagining the horrors to come—surgeons opening his chest, his throat gorging with blood and choking off his air supply, losing speech and pieces of his mind, losing limbs, sight, and hearing.

  He could no longer participate in parties and social occasions. He just sat against the wall. On the other hand, his wife and his nurses served him with a care, patience, and devotion that surpassed all expectation. Their efforts were more dear to him because he knew that he could never repay them. He had to surrender his male pride, his egoism, his sense of self-mastery and depend utterly upon their service and affection. It was hard at first to simply fall backward into their love. At first their attention made him cranky and cross. But their patient love soothed him. Eventually his physical condition stabilized and his moods lifted.

  He’d sit on his porch and he could look out at the elementals of nature: sky, mountains, trees, water, and sun. Researchers have found, not surprisingly, that sunlight and natural scenes can have a profound effect on mind and mood. People in northern latitudes, where the sunlight is less bright, have higher rates of depression than people in lower latitudes. So do people on the western edges of time zones, where the sun rises later in the mornings. People who have spent much of their lives working the night shift have higher chances of suffering breast cancer than those who work in the day. Researchers have found that hospital patients in rooms with natural views seem to recover slightly faster than patients in rooms without them. In a study done in Milan, patients with bipolar depression who stayed in east-facing hospital rooms were discharged three and a half days sooner than patients housed in west-facing ones.

  Harold found he could play a little game with himself. He’d sit on the porch looking at a little flower in the grass down below. He’d concentrate on the petals and their fragile beauty. Then, by lifting his head, he’d gaze out at the icy mountain peaks miles and miles away. Suddenly, he was swept up in an entirely different set of sensations, feelings of awe, veneration, submission, and greatness. Just sitting there, he could move from the beautiful to the sublime and back again.

  He loved these grand views. They gave him a feeling of elevation, of being connected to a sacred and all-encompassing order, a part of some stupendous whole. People who are out in nature do better on tests of working memory and attention than people who are in urban settings. Their moods are better. As the philosopher Charles Taylor writes, “Nature draws us because it is in some way attuned to our feelings, so that it can reflect and intensify those we already feel or else awaken those which are dormant. Nature is like a great keyboard on which our highest sentiments are played out. We turn to it, as we might turn to music, to evoke and strengthen the best in us.”

  The views of the mountains and trees soothed him and enlivened him. But they didn’t really satisfy him. As others have noted, nature is a preparation for religion, but it is not religion.

  Harold was still in pain much of the time. During those horrendous hours, pain filled his mind the way a gas fills the available space in a container. He could barely remember what it was like to not be in pain. Yet when it was gone, he couldn’t remember the pain itself. He just had a cold intellectual concept of it.

  Most of the time, Harold thought about people. He’d remember quick visual images—a playmate and her toy car sitting in the snow; his parents taking him to look at a new house; an office mate on a terrible day, washing his red face over a sink in the restroom—but there were mysterious gaps in his memory too. He found he could not recall ever sitting around the dinner table with his parents, though it must have happened all the time.

  Harold found that his memories came in strings. He remembered a catch he made playing dodge ball in fourth grade. This set him thinking about his teacher that year, who he had a crush on. He felt her presence but couldn’t really make out her face. She had long dark hair. She was tall, or seemed so. Nothing else was distinct but the aura of her beauty and sweetness and his feelings for her at the time.

  Harold would ask Erica to bring him boxes of their old stuff—photographs, papers, and documents that they kept hodgepodge from decades past. Then he’d rummage around in the boxes. Even while younger he’d had the presence of mind to save only the happy reminders, and so the bad times faded away.

  He was slightly deranged while rummaging through these old things. Or drunk, for he was back to drinking during the day. Emotions and feelings streamed through him. He found he could remember old poems in their entirety. He had images of Olympics and elections and national events coursing through his head. He could relive the atmosphere of a decade—the way people wore their hair, the kinds of jokes they told.

  He would sit there, giddily playing with time. Psychologists have a term for seniors who have trouble inhibiting their thoughts, and whose conversations veer off in random directions. They call it “off-topic verbosity.” Harold suffered from that sort of malady, except it was going on inside. One second, he’d remember bodysurfing in the waves as a boy, and the next, a drive he took last week.

  There’s an old fable about a monk who went for a walk in the woods, and paused to listen to the lovely trilling of a small bird. When he returned to his monastery, he found nothing but strangers there. He had been gone fifty years. Some afternoons Harold felt that his personal time scale had slipped its gears.

  Harold felt rejuvenated by his memories. In 1979 the psychologist Ellen Langer conducted an experiment in which she equipped an old monastery in Peterborough, New Hampshire, with props from the 1950s. She invited men in their seventies and eighties to stay for a week. They watched old Ed Sullivan shows, listened to Nat King Cole on the radio, and talked about the 1959 championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants. At the end of the week, the men had gained an average of three pounds and looked younger. They tested better on hearing and memory. Their joints were more flexible and 63 percent did better on an intelligence test. Experiments like that are more suggestive than scientific, but Harold felt better when he was living back in the past. The pains diminished. The joys increased.

  Search for Meaning

  Harold spent a lot of time thinking about his teenage years, when he was about sixteen. This is the period researchers call the “reminiscence bump,” because memories from late adolescence to early adulthood tend to be more vivid than those from any other time of life. He wondered how accurate his memories could possibly be.

  When George Vaillant from the Grant Longitudinal Study sent an elderly subject reports on his early life for fact-checking purposes, he sent back the reports insisting, “You must have sent these to the wrong person.” He simply could not remember any of the events from his own life that had been recorded at the time. The subject of another longitudinal study had suffered a brutal childhood at the hands of abusive parents, well documented at the time. But at age seventy, he remembered his father as a “good family man” and his mother as “the kindest woman in the world.”

  Harold also experienced a sort of negative enjoyment. After a lifetime spent preparing for things and building for things, he was finally free from the burden of the future. “How pleasant is the day,” William James once observed, “when we give up striving to be young—or slender.”

  Even though old and dying, Harold was plagued by an intellectual discontent. Without even thinking about it, he, like most of us, regarded life not only as a set of events to be experienced,
but as a question to be answered. What is it all for? Sitting there on that porch with his canes propped against the chair, Harold set out, in the twilight of his life, to understand the meaning of his existence, to bring it all to a point.

  In his famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl writes, “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life.” He quotes Nietzsche’s words, “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” But then Frankl made a crucial, helpful point: It’s fruitless to try to think in the abstract about what life in general means. The meaning of one’s life is only discernible within the specific circumstances of one’s own specific life. In the concentration camp, he writes, “We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct.”

  Harold thought back on his life as a son, a husband, a business consultant, and a historian and wondered what question life had asked of him. He looked for something that could be defined as his life’s calling or mission. He thought the project would be easy, but the more he looked for a key to his life, the harder it was to find. When studied honestly and accurately, his life had been a series of fragmented events. Sometimes he had been very money oriented, but other times he was oblivious to money. Sometimes he had been ambitious, but in other phases he was not. During some years he wore the mask of a scholar, while at others he wore the mask of a businessman, and who was the true self beneath the masks? In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman argues that it’s masks all the way down.