The Moral Bucket List

Written as an extended personal reflection and in an informal tone, Brooks’s “The Moral Bucket List” meditates on a topic that people have been writing about since ancient Greece: Living a Meaningful Life. Brooks is a well-known American journalist, author, and cultural commentator whose professional success is evident in the fact that “The Moral Bucket List” appeared in his regular New York Times column and reached a wide audience.

Despite his prominence, Brooks raises questions about the conventional meanings of success based on career achievement, money, and status. His answer to the millennia-old question of how to live a meaningful life is that those who live the best lives are those who cultivate their moral selves. These individuals have undergone a Journey of Moral Education, where education refers not to a formal curriculum of study but to a process of continual maturation and growth. Consequently, these people, who “radiate an inner light” (Paragraph 1), know how to conquer their intrinsic human self-centeredness, form intimate relationships of deep love, and commit themselves to causes larger than themselves, all of which allows them to touch the “deepest meaning of life and the highest moral joys” (Paragraph 6). The image of the inner light becomes a symbol of goodness and purpose rooted in moral development.

In the essay’s opening paragraphs, as he introduces the image of this “inner light,” Brooks establishes a Tension Between External Achievement and Internal Character that he explores throughout the essay. He first constructs this opposition when he admits that he has achieved professional success, but he lacks true generosity. His equation of career success with the external and depth of character with the internal culminates in his distinction between the resume and eulogy virtues. The resume virtues are those “skills you bring to the marketplace,” that is, the personal traits valued by capitalism and consumerism, while the eulogy virtues are “ones that are talked about at your funeral,” characteristics like kindness and bravery that indicate a depth of character (Paragraph 4).

This juxtaposition between internal and external is the basis of Brooks’s mild critique of modern American society. He writes that although “we all know that the eulogy virtues are more important than the resume ones,” “our culture and our educational systems spend more time teaching the skills and strategies you need for career success than the ones you need to radiate that sort of inner light” (Paragraph 5). American society focuses on marketplace success, but people who live exclusively for career achievement end up hollow, complacent, and mediocre. He argues that moral development and internal achievement are the keys to living the most meaningful life. When Brooks subsequently concedes that he, like so many others, needs to work on balancing his ambition for external success with attention to internal growth, he introduces the idea that the best life is one that balances these two pursuits.

In the essay’s next section, Brooks offers his “moral bucket list” as a corrective to the misplaced priorities he sees in modern culture and education. Having set out to study how people become deeply good, Brooks discovers that “wonderful people are made not born” (Paragraph 8). Goodness results from a set of experiences and lessons that, taken together, constitute an informal moral education. He argues that people build their character through “specific moral and spiritual accomplishments” (Paragraph 9), or personal challenges through which they learn essential lessons. Brooks’s “moral bucket list” is a truncated list of some of these challenges, which he elaborates upon in his book Road to Moral Character.

There are six items on Brooks’s list. These challenges map a trajectory outward from the self to The Self in the World. The first two entries in his list concern people’s relationships just with themselves. In the “humility shift,” an individual comes to understand their weaknesses, their “core sins” and the shameful behavior that they generate. Although modern American culture fixates on praising the self, people with an inner light come to understand the limitations of the self. In the next item in his list, “self-defeat,” Brooks builds upon this idea by outlining how people conquer the weaknesses they recognize in the “humility shift.” People with an inner light overcome their weaknesses through a lifetime of habit-building, effort, and trial and error. Dwight Eisenhower exemplifies the combination of the “humility shift” and “self-defeat.” Eisenhower identified temper as his primary weakness, and he self-consciously developed habits to overcome it, like writing down the names of people he was angry with and then tearing the pieces of paper. The key for Brooks is that Eisenhower knew himself and purposely formed habits to counterbalance his “core sin.” Together, the “humility shift” and “self-defeat” lay the groundwork for people to understand and then look beyond themselves.

The next four items in Brooks’s list relate to how a person builds upon their self-knowledge to engage in the world. The “dependency leap” involves a commitment to other people. Whereas modern American culture imagines life as an individualistic enterprise, people with an inner light know that fulfillment and meaning are created through attachments to other people. They see life as a process of “commitment making.” In the subsequent item on Brooks’s list, “energizing love,” Brooks explains how deep love for another becomes the driving force for doing good in the world. He writes that “this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love” (Paragraph 16). Dorothy Day is Brooks’s example here. Once Day gave birth to her daughter, she reformed her life. Day exemplifies how “energizing love” enables people to “overcome […] the natural self-centeredness all of us feel” (Paragraph 17).

Whereas the “dependency leap” and “energizing love” are experiences that focus on personal relationships, the final two items in Brooks’s list, the “call within the call” and the “conscience leap,” concern a wider circle of people. Returning to the topic of career in the “call within the call,” Brooks contrasts external reasons that many people choose professions, like money or status, with the internal call that some feel for a career serving ideals bigger than themselves. Focusing again on the idea of moving beyond the self, he cites Frances Perkins, the first US woman cabinet member, as his example. Once Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, the cause of workers’ rights became her call within the call. She so dedicated herself to reform that she broke gender barriers.

The next and final item in Brooks’s list, the “conscience leap,” requires that individuals eschew social and cultural values like prestige and reputation to live in the world in ways that they know are right. Brooks’s example is Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name of George Eliot, who entered a relationship with George Lewes even though Lewes was technically still married to someone else. In Eliot’s day, having a relationship with a married man meant being marked as an adulterer and shunned by society. Despite the consequences, Eliot chose Lewes because she knew that it was an enduring, enriching relationship based on commitment. Eliot chose to engage in society on terms that suited her character rather than terms dictated by external success.

In the essay’s final paragraphs, Brooks emphasizes the ongoing, aspirational nature of building a moral self as well as the pain and joy inherent in the process. Pursuing the path of moral development often means failing in a conventional sense, but people with an inner light conceptualize this apparent failure within a broader narrative of their commitment to an ideal. The lives of these “stumblers” are marked by aspirations not to achieve external success but to better themselves. On the way, these stumblers have moments of real joy, which is the reward for pursuing a life of rich meaning.