Blog #9

Barbara Graham and David Brooks are two great writers. Yet they are also different in very many ways. Brooks is very abstract in his writing while, Graham on the other hand is very concrete. Graham likes to give examples and tells details so that we can better understand what she is talking about, although Brooks he is very vague and doesn’t give example nor details he just kind of leaves you hanging having to read deeper into what he is talking about.

            In their writings “It’s Not About You” (Brooks) and “Confessions of a Quit Addict.” (Graham), They connect in so many ways. They talk about how life is just beyond just yourself. Life is bigger than you. Brooks stated “The purpose of life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.” Barbara supports that very well because, she moves and moves and moves, throughout the entire article. Anything that didn’t make her happy or excite her she didn’t care for it. She states “I had never been much good at doing things that didn’t arouse my passion.” In other words, anything that didn’t make her happy she was not going even give energy towards it. She later discovers after having her son, Clay, that is not the life she wants to live anymore. She had a huge eye opener. She even says herself “It had taken thousands of miles and one child for me to understand that quitting I took for freedom was as much of a trap as the social conventions we were trying to escape.”  She admits that she was searching for happiness in all the wrong ways. She later says “Over the years, I’ve also come to understand that even if I don’t go chasing after change, it will do a perfectly good job of finding me.” Right there Graham has given so much support to what Brooks meant by “The purpose of life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself.” 

Like I’ve stated before Graham and Brooks are great writers. They just have extremely different styles of writing. Brooks is very abstract and that’s ok he still gets what he wants to say out there. While Graham is very concrete. Which is great because then we get examples of what she means by what she is saying rather than having to make inferences out of what she is saying like we must do for Brooks. 

Stress and anxiety are a huge problem right now in the United States. For the election is stressing everyone out, because who knows what’s going to happen. Like David Brooks states “That’s what’s happening this year. Anxiety is coursing through American society. It has become its own destructive character on the national stage.” We are destroying ourselves with the bad form of anxiety. And he states that the bad form is “the kind that spirals into dark and self-destructive thoughts.” -David Brooks. It seems as if we worry and stress out more than the poorer countries. The article talks about the darker side of anxiety rather than the good. David Brooks tells us that the richer buys off their privacy rather than getting the help we need, which I do agree with. It’s as if we’d rather have privacy and stress in peace, rather than leaning onto people that are getting paid to help us with the problems we are facing. David Brooks states that America isn’t the country we thought it was. “Among the less educated, anxiety flows from and inflames a growing sense that the structures of society are built for the exploitation of people like themselves. Everything is rigged; the rulers are malevolent and corrupt.” The Trump supporters keep saying that entire election is rigged, when that’s not the case. The less educated citizens are more as monkey see monkey do mindset. They don’t think for themselves, as if they don’t know how. David Brooks even states himself that “People who feel exploited by, and invisible to, those at the commanding heights of society are not going to worry if their candidate can’t pass a fact-check test. They just want someone who can share their exclusion and give them a better story.” Therefore, people are stressing out so much they don’t necessarily know what the future may hold, especially after this election is over. This election is causing so much damage “America’s culture may be permanently changed for the worse.” I agree with everything David Brooks is stating. This article has some concrete points and showing us different types of stress without even trying. The election is just making the entire country stressed no one knows what’s going to happen from here we just all must sit back and pray and hope it gets better. I have faith in humanity that it may change for better. This election just opened our eyes a bit wider.