- 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.
I tried to start a #lolbrooks tag a while back, but it never caught on.
Political melodrama aside, this is one of most well-crafted roasts I have ever seen.
Seriously. I can't believe I missed this (a), and (b) how scathing and on-point and funny it is. I'm not as oberservational or astute as this guy is, but one of my favorite things is to read the comments section below each of Brooks' columns. NYTimes commenters have an abiding habit of calling him out.