Wednesday, June 15, 2011
"It's not about you"
I'm not the bigggest David Brooks fan, but I thought his op-ed, "It's Not About You," from a few weeks ago, about the right message to send to new college grads, was very thoughtful, and very "Catholic" in theme. Especially this, from the end:
Today’s grads enter a cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But, of course, as they age, they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, and can’t be pursued directly. Most of us are egotistical and most are self-concerned most of the time, but it’s nonetheless true that life comes to a point only in those moments when the self dissolves into some task. The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2011/06/its-not-about-you.html
Comments
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the
comment feed
for this post.
a little oversimplified but good text
do you think that the message should be to pursue not 'happiness and joy', but freedom?
in its onthological (and Lutheran) meaning: being most enslaved makes you most free
no man can live fully autonomously, a puppet, probably, can, or a machine
every man belongs to something bigger - army, group of friends, family, God
no one is interesting per se, but is interesting - as a part of a bigger entity - tremendously
not because he carries an imprint of that bigger or higher thing or being, but because in them, through them, a person himself is revealed, 'finds himself'
in that sense, i think, it would have been logical if David Brooks finished the last sentence "Lose yourself.... in something bigger"