The Third Mountain

I’ve realized, in the first part of this year, that I’ve been running my life the wrong way, by which I don’t mean that that life was chockablock with heroin and hookers.

No, the problem was that I was treating my feelings like barbarian invaders, beating them back from the top of the castle while they launched all manner of fiery tar at me. As it turns out, it wasn’t tar and that they weren’t invaders. They were me and I hadn’t talked to them in a long time and they were angry.

I’m nowhere near “fixed,” but then again there is no “fixed,” there is only acceptance and, trained as I was in accomplishment and progress and all the rest, acceptance will probably feel like a razor’s edge for entirely too long. I have found some clarity, though—some clues about where I went wrong—and now I want to tell you about one of the ways I messed up, why that happened, and what messing up (again) has taught me about second mountains. And third ones.

I talk sometimes about the book The Second Mountain by David Brooks. The thrust of that there tome: we all have a first mountain whose summit is a shrine to our egos—money, power, that sort of thing. We ascend that mountain, realize we’re no happier, hit a bottom, a valley, and then figure out that our second mountain is, inevitably, a mountain that involves helping other people.

I did that journey—top of the mountain (the NBA!), down in the valley (I’m no happier, dang!), and then I caught sight of my second mountain and started climbing it and I was really proud of myself, thinking I was being such a good mountaineer, with all the right plans and all the right gear. But then I got really, really tired and that’s when realized: I was on the wrong mountain.

My second mountain was helping people work better. I liked that mountain. Until I didn’t. Except I did. But I didn’t. I was experiencing that most painful of human conditions: cognitive dissonance. So, what was the problem?

The problem was that a lot of the people I was trying to help were the wrong people.

I believe, more and more all the time, that here in America we’re suffering from a crisis of meaning. I talk to people constantly who say they should be happier, but they’re not. Part of the guilt they feel has to do with the simulacrum of life we’ve created around us—this Truman Show of performative and poisonous positivity that is injected almost directly into our synapses by all these infernal devices around us.

But perhaps a bigger part has to do with shortcuts, with comfort, with ease. We think that if we can just speed things up, we’ll find more time to sit on the couch, more money to buy shit on Amazon, more love by way of Tinder or Bumble or Hinge. A lot lot lot of people are trapped in this acquisitive race. And a lot lot of them won’t ever find their way out; they’ve internalized that bumper sticker from my childhood: “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

My second mountain taught me that I can’t help these people. I can only help the people who want to be helped—the people who understand that comfort and ease will let them down, who’re after meaning and purpose and who are willing to look for this in the work they do, who can see that that work doesn’t have to involve saving kids with cleft palates or building cathedrals in Siena; that there’s plenty of meaning and purpose to be found in doing things well, doing things right, and creating beauty when we can: all the pursuits we know, deep down, to be our mandate as human beings.

This is my third mountain: helping people, yes, but only those who want it.

We are told often that we live in the very best of times. I’m not so sure about that. Yes, we have plenty of potatoes and I can connect a device to my car and make it play damn near any song that’s ever existed. But when I look around—when I look inward—I don’t see a lot of connection, a lot of soulfulness, a lot of meaning.

I’ve been just as guilty of living too fast, of disconnecting from my body and how it felt, of valuing all the wrong things at all the wrong times. And in that speed and disconnect and in those misguided ambitions, I climbed my second mountain and that mountain taught me a lot. It got foggy up there. It made my heart hurt. I lost a couple of friends on the way.

It wasn’t the wrong mountain. It just wasn’t my final mountain.

Now, I’m sallying forth on a new mountain—my third mountain—alongside fellow travelers who feel like I do about work and purpose and the bullshit distracting us and deceiving us and seducing us.

And who’re ready to do something about it.