I came across this article by David Brooks and had to share it with my readers.

Born in the 1920s and 1930s, most of them learned work habits in an age of scarcity and then got to explore opportunities in an age of growth. Unlike later generations, many of the men went through a phase in which they did physical labor in a factory, even if later they went on to become professionals.

Many of the women were born with limited aspirations and only saw their horizons expanded with feminism. By middle age, people of both sexes were moving freely, assuming there would be a decent job wherever they settled.

Some of my correspondents were influenced by the social revolution of the ’60s.

Hugh Nazor writes, “My wife, who had quit college when we married, was bored with life and the roles of suburban housewife and mother. Her affair with my best friend was easy for me to understand. Having grown up in the repressive, conformist ’50s, those of us who had recently lost the trust of the younger generation by being ‘over 30’ felt cheated. We were of another era, and wanted more. After some time acting out and playing ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,’ my divorce was a foregone conclusion.”

Resilience is a central theme in these essays. I don’t think we remind young people enough that life is hard. Bad things happen.

Gilda Zelin lost her husband. “The loneliness will never disappear. The intensity ebbs as the years go by. To take care of the cold, empty nights, I have substituted an electric mattress warmer and large pillow to hug and push into, to take the place of my beloved.”

Robert Roy writes, “I often revisit the birth of my firstborn, Greg, and thoughts of who he would become. I fast-forward to when he was 35 and the image of placing a mahogany box filled with his ashes in a grave along side my mother and father.”

“My faith survived a trial by fire,” Marguerite E. Moore writes. “My seven-year-old son was hit by a car. Will he live? (Please God!) Will he regain consciousness? (Please God!) … I know how it feels to be totally vulnerable and to know God is the only being that can save my son. (He had five doctors, none of whom would look me in the eye.) I stormed heaven, begged, pleaded, swore and promised. He survived, and so did I. My faith is like a steel rod that goes through my core and the glue that holds me together.”

Most people give themselves higher grades for their professional lives than for their private lives. Almost everybody is satisfied with the contributions they made at work. The people who started family businesses seem especially happy.

At home, many give themselves mediocre grades. One workaholic describes the time his 6-year-old son brought a family portrait home from school. He wasn’t in it, but the dog and cat were.

“During my drinking years, I was unfaithful to my wife,” writes a doctor from Pennsylvania. “This is my greatest regret and shame and will remain so until I die.”

The essays give a big warning about the perils of marrying young. Some people found their beloved at 19 and have spent a blissful half-century with them. But many people married before they knew themselves and endured a lonely decade before divorcing. A vast majority of those people made a wiser choice the second time around.

When the writer has a happy marriage, the essay glows with contentment. Others somehow made it work. “It wasn’t a love match for me, or for him for that matter,” a woman from New Jersey writes, “but we made a good family and did very well for the first decade or so and stayed together until he died at 81.”

I’ve probably overemphasized the pitfalls of their lives in this column — I’ll write more about the positive lessons in the next one. But many of the writers have integrated the ups and downs into an enveloping sense of gratitude.

Judy Eddy from Nevada writes, “My symptoms of Parkinson’s disease have now become a major part of my life. But, oh wow! I think that I am handling Parkinson’s well — no despondency at what I can no longer do, but I get encouragement from everyone to do what I can. My life is full: love shared with family, love shared with friends, love shared with another dog, various projects and even another career, that keep my time occupied. How fortunate I am that I can count both my ex-husbands as friends, as we share a different kind of love from and for me.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 25, 2011, on page A35 of the New York edition with the headline: The Life Reports.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/18/opinion/the-great-restoration.html?ref=davidbrooks

This article by David Brooks is quite interesting.
href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/opinion/brooks-in-defense-of-romney.html?_r=1&ref=davidbrooks”>

David Brooks recently wrote this article [which I edited] and I find that I must agree with him. Read for yourself and let me know what you think.

 

The Politics of Solipsism
By DAVID BROOKS

Over the years, the democratic values have swamped the republican ones. We’re now impatient with any institution that stands in the way of the popular will, regarding it as undemocratic and illegitimate. Politicians see it as their duty to serve voters in the way a business serves its customers. The customer is always right.

A few things have been lost in this transition. Because we take it as a matter of faith that the people are good, we are no longer alert to arrangements that may corrode the character of the nation. For example, many generations had a moral aversion to debt. They believed that to go into debt was to indulge your basest urges and to surrender your future independence. That aversion has clearly been overcome.

We no longer have a leadership class — of the sort that existed as late as the Truman and Eisenhower administrations — that believes that governing means finding an equilibrium between different economic interests and a balance between political factions. Instead, we have the politics of solipsism.[ extreme preoccupation with and indulgence of one's feelings, desires, etc.; egoistic self-absorption.] The political culture encourages politicians and activists to imagine that the country’s problems would be solved if other people’s interests and values magically disappeared.

The democratic triumph has created a nation that runs up huge debt and is increasingly incapable of finding a balance between competing interests. Today, the country faces three intertwined economic challenges. We have to make the welfare state fiscally sustainable. We have to do it in a way that preserves the economic dynamism in the country — that provides incentives for creative destruction. We also have to do it in a way that preserves social cohesion — that reduces the growing economic and lifestyle gaps between the educated and less educated.

These three goals are in tension with one another, but to prosper America has to address all three at the same time.

Voters will have to embrace institutional arrangements that restrain their desire to spend on themselves right now. Political leaders will have to find ways to moderate solipsistic tribalism and come up with tax and welfare state reforms that balance economic dynamism and social cohesion.

Over the past months, there has been some progress in getting Americans to accept the need for self-restraint. With their various budget approaches, the Simpson-Bowles commission, Paul Ryan and President Obama have sent the message that politics can no longer be about satisfying voters’ immediate needs. The public hasn’t bought it yet, but progress is being made.

There has been less progress in getting political leaders to come up with compromises that balance dynamism and cohesion. Republicans still mostly talk about incentives for growth, and Democrats still mostly talk about economic security. The breakthrough, if there is one, will come from the least directly democratic parts of the government, from the Senate or some commission of Establishment bigwigs. It will be enacted when voters realize we need to build arrangements to protect ourselves from our own weaknesses. It will all depend on reviving the republican virtues upon which the country was founded.