The Second Mountain

Picture a successful professional in their forties, sitting in a corner office with all the trappings of achievement, yet feeling profoundly empty. Despite climbing every rung of the career ladder, accumulating wealth, and earning recognition, something fundamental is missing. This scenario plays out countless times across our culture, where individual success has become the ultimate goal, yet leaves so many feeling isolated and unfulfilled.

We live in an age of unprecedented individual freedom, where we're told to follow our dreams, express our authentic selves, and prioritize personal happiness above all else. Yet paradoxically, rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide continue to climb, particularly among young people who have been raised to believe that self-actualization is life's highest calling. The promise of radical individualism has delivered material prosperity but has left many souls malnourished, yearning for something deeper than personal achievement. This exploration reveals why the pursuit of individual success often leads to a valley of despair, and how the path to genuine fulfillment lies not in climbing higher on the mountain of self, but in descending into service of others and ascending a different peak altogether.

Leo Tolstoy had achieved everything a person could dream of by his middle years. He had written masterpieces like War and Peace and Anna Karenina, earning worldwide acclaim. He was wealthy, influential, and admired across the globe. Yet at the height of his success, Tolstoy found himself in a profound existential crisis. His brother's sudden death at thirty-seven shattered his faith in progress and reason. Then, witnessing a public execution in Paris, he was overwhelmed by a sickening realization that no theory of human advancement could justify such brutality.

Tolstoy described how his life came to a complete stop. He could eat, drink, and sleep, but there was no life in him because he had no desires whose satisfaction seemed reasonable. He removed ropes from his room to prevent himself from hanging himself, and kept away from his hunting rifles. The man who had everything found himself contemplating suicide, not because of external failure, but because of internal emptiness. His former pursuits writing, intellectual debates, social gatherings now seemed like madness to him.

This valley experience, though devastating, became the gateway to Tolstoy's spiritual transformation. The crisis forced him to confront the inadequacy of living solely for personal achievement and recognition. In the depths of despair, he discovered that the ego-driven life he had been living was fundamentally insufficient. The valley stripped away his illusions about what truly mattered, preparing him for a life oriented toward deeper meaning and service to others.

Sometimes we must lose our first mountain entirely before we can find our way to the second. The valley teaches us that no amount of individual success can fill the deeper longing for meaning and connection that defines our humanity.

George Orwell knew from an early age that he wanted to be a writer, but like many young people, he drifted away from his true calling. After school, he joined the British Empire as a policeman in India, then returned home and wandered aimlessly through various jobs. Yet throughout this period, he lived with the consciousness that he was "outraging his true nature" and that sooner or later he would have to settle down and write books. At twenty-five, he finally surrendered to his destiny, but not in the way most people pursue careers.

Instead of simply starting to write, Orwell made three crucial decisions that would define his vocation. First, he chose to live among the poor, tramping across England and working as a dishwasher in France, because he believed his fellow socialists didn't truly understand the people they claimed to represent. Second, he invented a new way of writing, turning nonfiction into a literary form that could convey political truths through vivid storytelling. Third, he committed to ruthless honesty, even about people on his own side.

The Spanish Civil War experience transformed Orwell completely. A friend remarked that it was "almost as if there'd been a kind of fire smoldering in him all his life which suddenly broke into flame." He had found his call within a call the specific mission that would consume the rest of his life: fighting totalitarianism and defending democratic socialism through his writing. This wasn't just a career choice; it was a moral imperative that organized all his appetites into "an army of purposes and principles."

True vocation emerges not from asking what we want from life, but from asking what life demands of us. It transforms work from mere career advancement into sacred service, where our deepest talents meet the world's greatest needs.

Jack Gilbert's poem "Married" captures something profound about the nature of deep commitment. After his wife Michiko died of cancer at thirty-six, he crawled around their apartment searching for her hair in drains, vacuum cleaners, and closets. Two months later, when other Japanese women visited, he could no longer distinguish which hairs were hers and stopped collecting them. But a year later, while repotting Michiko's avocado plant, he found one long black hair tangled in the dirt a final, precious remnant of their union.

This story illustrates how marriage transcends the romantic fantasies we see in movies. Real marriage is found in the small, constant gestures: knowing she likes to arrive at airports early, making the bed even when you know she would do it, offering endless acts of tact and consideration. It's the brutal grinding effort of surrendering ego to the altar of marriage, giving up parts of yourself for the larger union. Marriage becomes what Tim and Kathy Keller call a "gem tumbler," throwing two people together in daily "amicable collisions" until they are polished bright.

The deepest marriages require what seems like a paradox: total commitment despite incomplete knowledge. You're making a fifty-year promise to someone you're still getting to know, betting everything on a relationship that statistics suggest has a high chance of failure. Yet those who achieve maximum marriage discover that only by going all in, burning the boats behind them, can they create the fusion of souls that makes the risk worthwhile.

Maximum marriage demands everything and gives everything in return, creating a joy that can only be found on the far side of complete vulnerability. It teaches us that the most profound human experiences require not keeping our options open, but closing them in service of something sacred.

Kathy Fletcher and David Simpson started with a simple act of hospitality. Their son Santi had a friend named James who sometimes went to bed hungry, so they invited him for sleepovers. James had a friend, and that friend had a friend, and gradually their dinner table expanded. Now, on any given Thursday night, about twenty-six kids gather around their table. Four or five live with Kathy and David or nearby families. Every summer, they take forty kids from the city on vacation to Cape Cod. What began as one hungry child has become a sprawling extended family.

The Thursday dinners follow a sacred rhythm. Everyone eats the same meal spicy chicken and black rice. Cellphones are banned. A third of the way through dinner, each person shares something they're grateful for or something nobody knows about them. The conversations range from celebrations of small victories to discussions of serious challenges: pregnancies, kidney failure, coming out, depression. The adults from Washington's emotionally avoidant culture get to shed their armor. The kids from the streets call Kathy and David "Mom" and "Dad," their chosen parents.

This community didn't emerge from strategic planning or nonprofit methodology. It grew organically from Kathy and David's simple response to need. When asked how she manages to host so many young people, Kathy looks puzzled and responds, "How is it you don't?" Their exhaustion is real they're intertwined with forty lives, each with urgent needs and crises. But so is their joy. They know exactly why they were put on earth.

Their story represents what the second-mountain life looks like: not a career or even a calling, but a way of being that puts relationship and service at the center, creating webs of connection that heal both the servers and the served.

The people who radiate lasting joy share a common characteristic: they have made deep commitments that organize their entire lives around something larger than themselves. These commitments typically fall into four categories: a vocation, a spouse and family, a philosophy or faith, and a community. Unlike contracts, which are transactions based on mutual benefit, commitments are covenants that change who you are. When you marry, you're no longer just a man or woman you're a husband or wife. When you become a parent, teacher, or Marine, you take on an identity that shapes every aspect of your existence.

The process of commitment begins with love a falling in love with a person, cause, or ideal so deep that you feel compelled to make a promise. As Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand observed, true love always contains the impulse toward fidelity: "A man who would say: 'I love you now, but how long it will last I cannot tell,' does not truly love." The commitment becomes a structure of behavior built around that love, sustaining you through moments when feelings falter. Orthodox Jews love God, but they also keep kosher just in case.

These commitments create what Hannah Arendt called the foundation of personal identity: "Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to achieve the amount of identity and continuity which together produce a 'person' about whom a story can be told." More than that, commitments become schools for moral formation. When you promise to love a child, spouse, or cause, you're compelled to become the kind of person capable of keeping that promise.

Character emerges not from individual willpower but from the daily practice of serving something you've vowed to serve. The committed life transforms the question from "What do I want?" to "What does life ask of me?" and in that transformation, discovers the secret to lasting joy.

The journey from the first mountain of individual achievement to the second mountain of committed service reveals a fundamental truth about human flourishing: we cannot give ourselves what we most deeply need. The culture of hyper-individualism, despite its promises of freedom and self-actualization, has created an epidemic of loneliness, anxiety, and spiritual emptiness. Those who find lasting joy have discovered that fulfillment comes not from climbing higher on the mountain of self, but from descending into the valley of suffering and ascending a different peak altogether one devoted to love, service, and sacred commitments.

The path forward requires a quiet revolution against the prevailing culture. Instead of celebrating independence, we must embrace interdependence. Instead of keeping our options open, we must make binding promises. Instead of asking what we can get from life, we must ask what life demands of us. This transformation happens through the four great commitments: finding work that serves others, building marriages based on mutual surrender, adopting beliefs that connect us to transcendent purpose, and weaving communities that heal our fractured world. The second mountain is steeper and more demanding than the first, but it leads to the only summit worth reaching: a life of meaning, connection, and joy that radiates outward to bless others.