The Opinions - David Brooks on Ending America's 'Social and Emotional Breakdown'

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

When David Brooks was growing up, he was emotionally detached, he says. Over the past several years, he’s worked to change that. In this audio essay, Brooks shares what he learned opening up with others on his journey to become a fuller human being: that better conversation could help save America from its “social and emotional breakdown.”Thoughts? Questions? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is David Brooks, and I am a New York Times columnist. I tend to write about politics, sociology, culture, morality, all the soft and squishy stuff. If you ever saw that movie, Fiddler on the Roof, You have a pleasant daughter? I have five pleasant daughters. You know how huggy and warm and emotion.

Jewish families can be. And this is mine. And this is mine. And this is mine. And so I grew up in the other kind of Jewish family. The culture around my household was think Yiddish, act British. And so we were stiff upper lip types. And I don't know if it was nature or nurture,

but I grew up somewhat aloof. I was not a guy who was necessarily intimately involved with others. My nursery school teacher told my parents apparently, David doesn't always play with the other kids. he just observes them, which was great for my life as a journalist, but maybe not great for having strong bonds and intimate connections. And there's one thing that happened to me about 10 years ago that to me symbolizes a whole way of life.

I'm a big baseball fan. And so I'm in Baltimore with my youngest son, and the batter loses control the bat that slips out of his hands, and it lands in my lap in the stands. And getting a foul ball is not nearly a thousand times as good, as getting a bat. And so any normal human being would have stood up, jumped up and down, high-fived everybody, hugged everybody, bit on the Jumbotron. I just put the bat on the ground and I stared stoically straight ahead. And I look back on that guy and I think, show a little joy.

I wasn't an emotionally open person. When anything really good or really bad would happen to me, I would just go numb to zero. So I wasn't really great at expressing emotions. And so, you know, it became a cause for me to try to become a more fuller human being. And so I went off on something of a four-year personal mission. I started work on a book, which is out now, called How to Know a Person, The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. The paradox was as I was hopefully on a journey to becoming more emotionally open and hopefully kinder and more considerate,

American society was on a journey to become less human, more cruel, more angry, more bitter. So there's all these terrible social statistics of rising depression rates, rising suicide rates. The number of people who say they have no close personal friends is quadrupled, declines in happiness. So we're in the middle of some social and emotional breakdown. And it's because we're not good at the act of being a considerate person in the daily circumstances of life to each other. And so I found this as a journalist, I just see this epidemic of invisibility of rural people who have, feel that coastal people don't see them, of Republicans and Democrats looking at each other in blind incomprehension. And so I've concluded that in these bitter and hard and sometimes cruel times,

the right thing to do is to double down on being a defiant humanist. It's to double down and say, I will not be calloused over. I'm going to double down on spending as much time as I can as effectively I can, in seeing another person, in trying to understand their point of view, in trying to make them feel seen, heard, and understood. I've learned that's a moral posture. You've got to be able to say, I'm going to pay more attention to you than I am to myself. But it also requires skills. And one of them is treat attention as an on-off switch, not a dimmer. If you're in conversation, you should be paying 100% attention or 0% but not 60%. Another is be a loud listener.

You should be listening so actively to people. You're burning calories. Like I have a buddy named Andy, and when I talk to him, he's like one of those congregations of a Pentecostal church. He's like, uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh, preach, preach. Just love talking that guy. He's a loud listener. Another is keep the gem statement in the center. If my brother and I are fighting over our dad's health care, we may be disagreeing about that.

but we both want what's best for our dad, and that's the gem statement. If you're in the middle of a disagreement and you can return to the gem statement, then you preserve the relationship amid your argument. Those are just very practical skills to make you and me better conversationalists. The fact that these skills don't come naturally to me as a person was actually useful in me writing the book. In sports, the people who are often the superstar athletes aren't the best coaches, aren't the best teachers, because it all comes naturally to them. For people like me who have some degree of social ineptitude, I have to think about it.

And so for me, even doing this book, it's become a way of life and shaped the way I am normally. Like normally, I was the guy who, if I'm on a bus or a subway or a plane, I've got my headphones in whether there's music in it or not. Because I'm like, don't approach me. And now I'm the guy who doesn't have headphones in. and if somebody seems to want to have a conversation, I'll do what I never used to do. I'll have a conversation with a stranger. On the other hand, I'm still, I walk into a conversation,

and I think I'm going to ask questions. I'm going to be the curious one. I'm going to make them the center of attention. Then I have a couple glasses of wine, and I start telling funny stories about myself, and then I leave very disappointed that Mr. Ego took control. On the journey to being a full human being, maybe I'll give myself a bead,

minus. So I know what to do. Like, I know how humans operate a lot better than I used to. And I'm proof that no matter how old you are, you can change.