Tyler/David Brooks

  • People trade wealth for loneliness

  • 40% of people are lonely in the US

  • Pinker’s data is about individuals; stats on relationships are very bad

  • Edmund Burke says the country is built on epistemological modesty society is complicated and we should be cautious before changing it (constant but incremental change)

  • Hamilton = dynamism, def-transformational

  • Whigs were conservative but wanted to create dynamic economies

  • Secularization argument is always wrong

  • We’re seeing religious polarization now

  • Orthodox Jews are surging

  • Churches are growing in NY; surging with enthusiasm

  • Spiritual resurgence is occurring (?)

  • We were super secular in 1913

  • Drive for transcendent experience drives people back to religion

  • Central claim of religion = reality has iconoclasm

  • We’re all driven by complexes we don’t understand

  • Wounding, betrayal, distrust are major themes in the US

  • 20s have become a brutal time for many (!!!!!!!!!!!!) wowwwwwww

  • Society: being 25 is phenomenally difficult (!!!!)

  • Telos crisis: lack of sense of purpose

  • We’ve left people in a unstructured experience after age 21

  • People’s happiness bottoms out at 47 (teenage children)

  • Young people focus on threats; old people perceive reality as a friendlier thing

  • Quality of relationships correlates extremely well with happiness

  • Join club once/month —> same happiness gain as doubling your income

  • People get better at living as they get older (monster of self-regard diminishes)

  • Second mountain is less external, more internal (second half of life)

  • Second mountain is happier

  • Hasn’t seen a seriously negative impact from invasion of privacy

  • If you go to the power of your particular and build your landscape there, the audience will sense the authenticity of what you’re doing and they’ll come and live in your landscape with you (Faulkner, Springsteen)

  • Look at local successes and hopefully those will bubble up to the top

  • Know something about something. You’ve got to be able to bring something to the table

  • Find your deep gladness + the world’s deep need

  • Suffering creates a hole in the floor of your soul. You fill that whole with spiritual, not material, stuff

  • High low trust

  • Free will impossible vs inevitable

  • Britain 1830 to 1848 United States 1890 to 1910 massive periods of turnaround religious revival came firstLead to civic and political revival we’re not going in that order

  • 1950s culture in America was a guest house culture the protestants dominated culture in Everett else’s tree like a guest if you behave you could stay this like a tightknit community among Italians African-Americans and

  • Now we have a hotel culture everyone says in their private little location and no one knows the neighbors and everyone is more

  • Guest house culture fostered strong communities for lack of opportunity among many groups

  • I have tremendous faith in humans ability to solve theirMany social technologies are designed to make human relationships friction free and temporary such as Airbnb and tender

  • Obamas by us and foreign policy was never do too much as a result he did two little

  • Moral materialism drives the country — when settlers arrived, they saw absolute abundance they thought they would for fill God’s plan on earth