David Brooks, “We’re Living Through the Great Detachment,” The New York Times Opinion, January 3, 2026
“I’ve come to appreciate people who are ardent about life. To paraphrase that great philosopher of love, St. Augustine: Give me a man or woman in love. Give me one who may be far away in the desert but who yearns and thirsts for the springs of passion. Give me that sort of person. She knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold person, a suspicious person, a mistrusting person or a calculating person, he just doesn’t know what I’m talking about.”
What Brooks is saying here is that you need things in your garden if you are to live a life worth living.
It does not matter much to me what it is that you love. Brooks is probably more restrictive than I am on that front. But, for me, you need to love something.
Who am I to say what you must love? Still, you must love something.
Brooks thinks we have too many cold people and not enough people in love. I think he is right. But again, he probably thinks there are not enough people in love with the right kinds of things and too many people in love with the wrong kinds of things.
I am less worried about that. I just do not think there are enough people with passion.
If you are passionate about something, you live within that world and do something with it. You do not merely consume it.
Too many people consume a thing superficially and move on.
That is not cultivation.
That is sowing seeds merely to watch them scatter in the wind.