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I Don't Think David Brooks Is Okay, You Guys
by Meriadoc

    At some point around the new year, this powdered coffee creamer man abandoned his career-long mission of guessing at what the lives of common Americans are like, in favor of a new and more urgent mission, like an Antarctic explorer stalked by privation and death turning away from the far-off pole to race for the nearest hospitable bay, and with no less desperation. The bay is Us. We are It. He is trying to reach us before despair reaches him.

    David Brooks is telling us something dark and sad—about loneliness and the search for connection; about social desolation and sexual frustration and sadness. Something deeply personal, about discovering, too late in life, that accomplishment and position and thinkfluence are no ameliorative for the rejection of your gross old-man wiener by cute millennials. Something not about what priorities he guesses Whole Foods Uncles will take into the voting booth in 2016, but about himself.

    Oh God, I don’t think we have been listening.