Brooks, David (b. 1961)

The Moral Bucket List [from The New York Times]

April 11, 2015

"Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet."

But if you live for external achievement, years pass and the deepest parts of you go unexplored and unstructured. You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity. You grade yourself on a forgiving curve. You figure as long as you are not obviously hurting anybody and people seem to like you, you must be O.K. But you live with an unconscious boredom, separated from the deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys. Gradually, a humiliating gap opens between your actual self and your desired self, between you and those incandescent souls you sometimes meet.

Light::Incandescent

Reading

David Brooks, "The Moral Bucket List," The New York Times (April 11, 2015). <Link to NYTimes.com>

04/15/2015