# The Instagram Life: A Selection From David Brooks’ the Second Mountain - Likeville Synced: [[2023_11_30]] 6:03 AM Last Highlighted: [[2023_08_20]] Tags: [[advice]] [[Advice]] [[Personal Growth]] [[philosophy]] [[Philosophy]] [[Psychology]]  [[The Second Mountain]] is an absolute masterful metaphor of what people need to get through life. We all crave purpose and if you choose to live only an aesthetic lifestyle, you will only be lost as you “follow your dreams”. Which is why you need to [[Find your strength, don't follow your passion]] ## Highlights [[2023_07_13]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h57srb0wzhnnnzgckzd9e57z) > Furthermore, you will build what the clinical psychologist Meg Jay calls ‘identity capital.’ At every job interview and dinner party for the next three decades, somebody will want to ask you what it was like teaching English in Mongolia, and that will distinguish you from everybody else [[2023_08_20]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h885rva386cn9d5a98hahjcv) > The problem with this kind of life only becomes evident a few years down the road if you haven’t settled down into one thing. If you say yes to everything year after year, you end up leading what Kierkegaard lamented as an aesthetic style of life. The person leading the aesthetic life is leading his life as if it were a piece of art, judging it by aesthetic criteria—is it interesting or dull, pretty or ugly, pleasurable or painful? [[2023_08_20]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h885vttanv4eka9881sef4sj) > As Annie Dillard put it, how you spend your days is how you spend your life. If you spend your days merely consuming random experiences, you will begin to feel like a scattered consumer. [[2023_08_20]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h885xj2atrp837m7ksx9tx2m) > Living online often means living in a state of diversion. When you’re living in diversion you’re not actually deeply interested in things; you’re just bored at a more frenetic pace. Online life is saturated with decommitment devices. If you can’t focus your attention for thirty seconds, how on earth are you going to commit for life? [[2023_08_20]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h885yabnfdq3e484z4b0vw3a) [[favorite]] > Everybody is pretty sure that other people are doing life better. Comparison is the robber of joy. [[2023_08_20]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h885z2b8wd1f7cdh2vz8ax0j) > The person who graduates from school and pursues an aesthetic pattern of life often ends up in the ditch. It’s only then that they realize the truth that somehow nobody told them: Freedom sucks [[2023_08_20]] [View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01h885zz02x4103c8mbydsp3cv) > Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom—when it becomes an ultimate end—absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and fully commit to something.