The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

Our society has become a conspiracy against joy.

If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second mountain is about shedding the ego and losing the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution. If the first mountain is elitist—moving up—the second mountain is egalitarian—planting yourself amid those who need, and w

At this point, people realize, Oh, that first mountain wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain. The second mountain is not the opposite of the first mountain. To climb it doesn’t mean rejecting the first mountain. It’s the journey after it. It’s the more generous and satisfying phase of

“There is joy in self-forgetfulness,” Helen Keller observed. “So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.”

Connection happens at the nexus of truth and love, the founders say. Truth without love is harshness. Love without truth is sentimentality. But if you can be completely honest with somebody in the context of loving support, then you have a trusting relationship. Norms are enforced as people hold one another accountable for violating them. Community

You know that at some point you should sit down and find some overall direction for your life. But the mind wants to wander from the meaty big questions, which are completely daunting and unanswerable, to the diverting candy right on your phone—the tiny dopamine lift.

As students, they were good at winning gold stars, and so they follow a gold-star-winning kind of life when they enter the workforce, and their parents get to brag that they work at Google or Williams & Connolly, or that they go to Harvard Business School.

Synchronous time is moment after moment, but kairos time is qualitative, opportune or not yet ripe, rich or spare, inspired or flat—the crowded hour or the empty moment. When you have been away in the wilderness for weeks, you begin to move at kairos time. The soul communing with itself in the wilderness is at kairos time, too—slow and serene, but

“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about—quite apart from what I would like it to be about.”

Iris Murdoch’s words: “Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.”