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At Shopify dot com slash tech 23. My privilege to bring on to the show David Brooks. He's got a great op-ed. You see him all the time in the New York Times.
And I've had a very lengthy one that matters a lot that has just came out. And basically talks about how America got so mean and the culture devoid of moral education. Generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. David, welcome back.
Oh, good to be back with you. So David, what brought you to this point? To write something so extensive and do the research dating all the way back to the end of World War II? Yeah, just over the last eight years I've been obsessed with two questions. First is why we've become so sad. There's rising depression, rising mental health, a third rise in suicide. The number of people who say they have no close personal friends has quadrupled. So like what's going on with our society? And then the second question is why have we become so mean? And so I have a friend who owns a restaurant.
He says he's kicked somebody out of his restaurant every week for entitled behavior. I ran into a lady who's a nurse, head nurse at a hospital. And she said her main challenge is to keep her staff because the patients have become so abusive that they want to leave the profession. And so this just sadness and meanness are like pervading our society.
And I just wanted to get the roots of it. Some of it is social media and some of it, you know, maybe some inequality. But to me, you know, for generations we grew up in a society that taught sort of moral skills like how to be kind to people, how to be considerate, how to disagree well. And no one's teaching the skills anymore.
So does that go on parents? And my original concept when I started reading the story was this is going to go back to social media, especially when you talk about eight years. That's really the advent of the phone and the way we communicate, the way we're in our phones when we're around our friends and family.
We don't even talk to the people next to us. And I thought that was the foundation of it. But do you think it's deeper?
Yeah, I think that's a big factor. You know, on social media there's like judgment everywhere and understanding nowhere. So everybody feels sort of alienated. But if, you know, the phones are everywhere around the world and the social and moral crisis are mostly America.
We have it worse than anybody else. So it's the interaction of phones with a deeper problem with the culture. And my basic story there is that, you know, our founders looked around and they said human beings are beautifully and wonderfully made, but we're also deeply broken and sinful. And if we're going to make a decent society out of people who have sin, then we've got to do moral formation.
And moral formation sounds, you know, pretentious and pompous, but it's really just three things. It's giving you a purpose in life. What are you directed toward? Maybe toward God or family or country? Second, it's restraining your selfishness so you can be a little self-disciplined in front of temptation.
And finally, it's just teaching like basic moral skills. Like, how do I develop a friendship with you? How do I, if I'm going to break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, how do I do it without crushing their heart? How do I have a good conversationalist?
How do I be a good listener? These are skills, like any set of skills that need to be taught, and we sort of dropped the ball. So you say Cub Scouts, Girl Scouts used to be a way of doing that and used to talk about some outside organizations. But fundamentally, if parents aren't doing it, you've got to get it elsewhere. If it's a broken home, divorced home, single-parent family where they're working 50 hours a week, it's got to go somewhere else. So you think we've got to set up some moral structures in our society? Do you think is that somewhat of a plan?
Yeah, I think that's somewhat of a plan. I mean, I think our schools, I mean, first of all, you're right, our families should be doing it. But, you know, families need to be embedded in communities where everybody's sending the same message.
And with fewer people going to the church or synagogue or mosque, they're not getting the message there. And then we've developed a culture, especially after World War II, where we tell people, you're wonderful, you're good. And so you don't need moral formation.
You're good just the way you are. All you got to do is look within and find the angel within. And that was sort of the self-esteem movement in the 1970s and 1980s. And so a lot of the institutions that used to really do moral formation, like teaching you how to be a decent person, how to show up well, they just got out of the more formation business and they got into the you-do-you business, self-affirmation. Just we became a much more narcissistic and egotistical society. So we need a moral shift. And then we need then we need actual skills.
And I've actually spent the last four years working on a book, which is coming out in the fall. And all I do is I collect skills. How do you become a good conversationalist? How do I listen to you with attention when I meet you? What kind of gaze do I cast upon you? Like I have a buddy who's a pastor in Waco, Texas. And when he meets somebody, anybody, he knows he's looking at someone made in the image of God.
And he knows he's meeting someone who was so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person. And I don't care if you're a Christian, Jewish, atheist, whatever. But looking at every person you meet with that level of respect and reverence is a precondition for seeing people well. I mean, in other words, find the good in everybody. I'd rather see more of the good than the bad.
You could find either one, but you start with let's find the good. There's got to be something good about that person. Yeah, everybody you meet is more interesting than you on some subject. Everybody you meet is better than you at something. So if you ask them the questions like what they really care about, you're going to have a great conversation. And when you have a great conversation, people feel respected.
And, you know, somebody said in any conversation, respect is like air. When it's there, nobody notices. But when it's absent, it's all anybody can think about. Do you think we've hit different crises like this in our past? I mean, I know that there is always a sense of loss of patriotism in our past. If you read back, you know, even leading up to the war of 1812, they write, you know, where's that spirit of 76? You know, this generation is as tough as we were. I mean, it just amazed the same thing leading up to World War One right after the Civil War of the 1880s.
They talked about how soft their kids were. Do you think that we go through cycles like this, depending on the challenges our nation has? I think we do. You know, at the end of the 1880s, what you mentioned, it was like us when we were fearing we were losing the greatest generation. They were fearing they were losing the Civil War generation. And they did things to take care of it. They, you know, they established the Pledge of Allegiance. They established a lot of civic practices to try to give people sort of moral sturdiness.
Basically, college football got started, so young men could learn to be a little tougher. And so every generation is called upon, I think, to address the moral challenges of their day. And our particular day, it's this rise in depression, rise of distrust, rise in the ability to really be good friends to one another.
How much of this, like when people look at depression and they look at some of the medications out there and everyone wants to see a therapist and psychologist, for example, if you're in a situation in your life, you get hit by Sandy or if you're in Maui and you've got your whole life destroyed, you don't have time to be depressed. You've got to worry about the X's and O's of eating, surviving, finding out where we're going to live, where your family is. There was a time in which we were scrambling to make a living.
And the fact is, as a country, despite our debt and challenges that we have, we have a lot of luxuries that we never had, past generations didn't have. And when you don't have the things that are necessary for survival and success and you look around and go, OK, what makes me happy? I don't know, because I know I can survive. I know I have a place to live. I know I have a job.
So what satisfies me when you realize you don't know what that is? In comes the depression without that sense of urgency and survival. For example, in Ukraine, they're fighting so hard to survive, wondering about their loved ones. I don't know how much Prozac they need.
Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, there are some cultures where they don't really acknowledge depression. I look at parenting and the way we do schools, and a lot of the parenting in a lot of schools is based on a false idea. And that false idea is if I keep you, my child, safe, then you'll grow strong.
But if I keep you too safe, you never learn to deal with setbacks, you never develop resilience. And a friend of mine points to the fact that a lot of kids have peanut allergies now in schools and they can't serve peanut butter in schools. And why are there so many more peanut allergies in schools? It's because we're protecting kids from encounters with peanuts. And so they become more vulnerable to the allergies. And so that's sort of a metaphor for a better form of parenting.
And I think that's part of what's happened. Part of that cultural shift is we go, I just need to keep you safe and then you'll be better. That's not the way you make people strong and resilient. And is your goal to make people aware of what's going on? And unless you take a step back and analyze society, you're not going to pick up?
You can't change it unless you recognize it? Are you chronicling this or are you looking to make this an action plan? I'm looking to make this an action plan. So, you know, the book that's coming out, it's called How to Know a Person. And I really walk people through. I didn't know the skills myself. Like, if I want to make you feel respected, seen, heard and understood. What you do every day on your job, you talk to people. But I've got to become a really good conversationalist. I've got to become a really good listener. I've got to know how to ask questions. I've got to know when to wait when I sense that you're being a little scared because I'm being too probing.
So I've got to be patient. There are just all these social skills and we don't teach them. And so in the book especially, I just walk people through the skills and it's like, here's how you do carpentry. Here's how you play baseball. Well, here's how you relate to other people.
It's a skill set. You know, I do do. I remember my kids. I go, the first thing you got to do is find out, listen to people and let them know you care. If they tell you that they have a big game over the weekend, the first thing when you see them on Monday is, how'd you do?
You have a big test coming up. Show them that you listen, you care, you do follow up. And on some level they're going to say, I like that guy. I like that woman. You know, they care. I don't know why I like them. I just get along with them. It's because they're asking questions to show that you're listening and that what they said mattered.
Yeah, absolutely. In my book I say there are two kinds of people, illuminators and diminishers. Diminishers stereotype and ignore you. They make you feel invisible.
But illuminators make you feel lit up and they know what matters to you, like you said. And they say, well, how'd the game go? Or, you know, they'll say, how's your mom doing? You know, or, you know, if you've got a friend who's suffering, sometimes you don't have to say anything. There's nothing you can say because they're really going through something hard.
So you just show up and it's just the art of presence. I had a friend whose daughter got banged up in a bike accident. She said, you know what the best thing that happened during the many months where she was recuperating? Somebody came to our house, noticed we didn't have a shower mat in the shower. So they went out to Target, they got a shower mat and they just put it in and they didn't even say anything. They just did the practical thing. And they said, she said that was so honoring. It was like they knew what I needed.
They did what was practical and they didn't turn into a big drama. Yeah. Take action. I think a lot of it to the pandemic. I'm interested to see what you thought the pandemic did for your concern about our nastiness as a culture and maybe our self-absorption, because we were told as a country, stay home, stay away, don't go out to eat. And in many cases, your job doesn't matter.
Right. So people got introspective for a while and they go, you know what? I think it I think it brought everything to the surface, almost like putting peroxide on a cut. It went right to the infection in many ways. It made me more less social.
It took me months to get back into social life. So it did not have a good effect on my social skills. It had the pandemic had a couple some good effects and some bad. Like I thought there would be a lot more rise in suicide during the pandemic, but it didn't happen because people were staying home with their families and they were getting enough sleep.
And so that was a good effect. But there was a bad effect, especially on young people's mental health. If you ask people in twenty nineteen, do you feel persistently despondent and hopeless? It was like 21 percent said yes. After the pandemic, it was like 40 percent. So just a sharp rise, especially for young people because of that isolation. And David, what's the response been to you to the column you put out?
It's been overwhelmingly positive. People think people sense that, you know, there's just something weird going on in our culture. And they're looking for explanations.
And I don't know if my explanation is the whole one. Social media certainly plays a role. And but I think I was pointing to a piece that hasn't been played up as much, which is, you know, you get our our parents, our grandparents, our schools, our churches. They don't just channel us through. They form us. They turn us into different kinds of people.
And we need institutions that will do that for each successive generation. I hear you. David, great talking to you. I look forward to your book. Hope you'll come back on. We'd love to. We'd love to. You got it. David Brooks, New York Times opinion columnist, op-ed columnist, I should say. David, thank you.
