Book Review: The Social Animal by David Brooks

I just finished The Social Animal by David Brooks. I was curious about it for a while, but never got around to reading it until now. I can see why it was a New York Times bestseller. It is nonfiction but the narrative he weaves into his discussions about the brain and the unconscious made it feel like I was reading this really intriguing novel.

The book starts with the meeting of a man and a woman who fall in love with each other. Brooks analyzes the different social cues that they follow when they first meet and how the different networks in their brains are working while they look at each other. As someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction, it was interesting to understand how attraction works or why people prefer certain bodily features such as eye color, hair color, body measurements.

Harold

The couple have a son named Harold, and Brooks explores how Harold’s brain operates as a baby then a child then a teenager. He explains how Harold’s affluent upbringing and access to good education and social activities impacts his career and his view on the world later on. He is a pretty popular kid in school, but one encounter that impacts Harold’s life is his encounter with his high school teacher. She is an avid reader and recommends books to all of her students, and she especially sees Harold’s potential to do better at school and gain the most from reading and her class. She assigns him books on ancient Rome and Greece, and at first he is reluctant but then he delves into the literature and watches movies like 300 to gain more knowledge of this time period. When he writes his paper on this time period and everything he learned from it, at first he experiences severe writer’s block and has a hard time synthesizing all the information he learned in a cohesive way, but as Brooks notes when Harold goes to bed early and gets sleep rather than trying to chug through the paper all night, the networks in his brain start making new connections and new ideas pop up, and in the end Harold is finally able to write a paper that speaks to him personally and shows that he studied the material and could apply his learning to his own life, making the paper his own.

I really loved the way Brooks describes this whole process with Harold writing the paper because I remember how hard it was for me to overcome my writer’s block when writing my thesis during my senior year of undergrad. Even though I read and read countless books and academic journals on environmental justice and visited The Jane Addams Hull House Museum in Chicago as part of my research, when I actually sat at the computer to type the draft, I couldn’t come up with anything, and thus my drafts were always late to my advisor. I think also my perfectionism played a role in my procrastination. I was so stuck on writing the perfect paper, when in reality for most, if not all, people, your first drafts are just not going to sound good, and that’s just part of the writing process. I was also afraid to receive feedback at the time because I was so adamant about writing the perfect paper, but I also learned, looking back, that receiving feedback on your drafts is the only way you can improve. It wasn’t always pleasant to my ego to receive feedback on what I could do better, but in retrospect, my advisor was encouraging me to dig deeper and to not just regurgitate the information I absorbed from reading, but how to formulate my own ideas about the material, whether they were right or wrong. I finally just decided to sit down and write, and while my ego kept screaming at me how bad my writing was and that I should just trash it, I had to finish because long story short, I had a deadline to submit the thesis and there was no shortcut around that. I just had to sit down and write. Not keep reading. Not surf YouTube and watch my favorite Key and Peele videos. I had to just write the thing even if it sounded bad and just submit it to my adviser.

When I finally finished the paper and received an award for it, I was both elated and exhausted because it felt like I had worked on the thesis for 1,000 years instead of just a year. But in all honesty, the thing I remember most about the thesis was how much I grew from taking on this project. I learned how to form my own opinions, I learned how to meet deadlines, I learned how to write and rewrite and edit, I learned how to take feedback from my adviser and run with it, and more importantly, I learned about a very crucial issue that I didn’t know much about before writing the thesis. Environmental injustice has been a huge issue for years, and as a longtime environmentalist, learning about how the environmentalism movement hasn’t always welcomed the narratives of BIPOC and low-income people made me more aware that I needed to challenge my own assumptions about what made someone an environmentalist. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder last year, I came across countless articles and social media posts about the disproportionate impact of environmental pollution and other injustices on Black communities, and it really gave me hope because it reminded me that I wasn’t the only one thinking about this issue, but that there were many other people who were writing about and organizing demonstrations calling for local, state and national governments to do something about the environmental problems that low-income and BIPOC communities have had to deal with. It also helped me appreciate the work that activists like Hazel Johnson had done for environmental justice years ago. Hazel Johnson was a Black woman who spearheaded the environmental justice movement in the South Side Chicago community of Altgeld Gardens in the 1970s. The mostly Black residents started dying of cancer because so many factories surrounding the community leached toxic chemicals that polluted the air and caused many health problems in the residents. After speaking with public health officials and learning more about the cancer rates in her community, Johnson found that the chemical companies didn’t actually care about the health of the residents in Altgeld Gardens, and that this neglect constituted environmental racism. She founded an organization called The People for Community Recovery and fought tirelessly for the community members against this injustice, and her legacy continues to this day.

Erica

The book then talks about Erica, a young Mexican-Chinese woman who grows up in poverty with her mother. She fights hard to get into a selective private school even when the social workers tell her no, and when she gets to the school she encounters a lot of challenges, particularly when it came to her love of tennis. She falls in love with the sport, but often get frustrated when she loses, and this causes her to want to give up. But Brooks talks about how important mental coaching is for athletes, so Erica trains herself to focus on what she can control rather than what she cannot control. She decides to focus on the task of hitting the throw rather than what other people will think of her or past mistakes, and she disassociates from her anger and realizes that it’s not part of who she is. I really loved this part and underlined it because in my cello lessons I often would get frustrated with myself and would take my anger out on my teacher, fuming and getting upset every time they corrected me on something while I was playing the music. I think reading how Erica learned to manage her frustration and focus on the game inspired me to focus on the task at hand and not get so caught up in ruminating over my past mistakes or worrying about what my teacher would say to me. I get it’s important to work on correcting mistakes, but the problem was that I often attributed my mistakes, even the smallest ones, to a flaw in my character, so I concluded that because my character didn’t want to change I couldn’t change my mistakes. My teacher and I had a long discussion about this, and I left feeling hopeless, like “Gosh, I’m so stubborn, I’m never going to get over this.” I hit a breaking point when I was tasked with memorizing the third movement of this really difficult piece of music, and I got so fed up with myself for forgetting a huge portion of the movement. I sat there and cried and chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo about it (it’s a Buddhist prayer I do everyday that helps me bring forth my inner potential). Then I read about Erica dealing with her frustration in tennis, and it inspired me to approach my music lessons and practice sessions with the same attitude. Even though it’s easier to get defensive than it is to take constructive criticism, I’m learning slowly how to take a deep breath and just focus on the task of just playing beautiful music. I learned I cannot control how people react to me or what audience members think, but I can control whether I fulfill the task to the best of my ability or not. Reading Erica’s example has helped me in that sense.

In the book Erica also gains a new perspective on how to do things in life, and starts creating different maps for new ideas that she comes up with and how different social interactions work. When she enters a mostly male workforce she is fed up with the men’s overconfident and dismissive attitudes and figures out a way to mobilize other fed up employees to speak out against this behavior because the male colleagues’ overconfidence is causing the company to go into debt and business to suffer. Erica later does her own freelance work, but she has a hard time finding clients because her work doesn’t speak to them, but then she meets Harold (who we meet earlier in the book) and he uses his writing and analysis skills that he learned in school to help Erica make connections between ideas and find ways to make that work useful to the daily lives of their clients. They develop an emotional connection, but like any committed relationship marriage takes a lot of work and communication, and Erica and Harold find themselves so caught up in their own busy work lives that they don’t find much time to relax in their personal lives. This burnout puts a huge strain on their marriage, and Erica has an affair with someone else and keeping moving up in the corporate world so that she is going to the most exclusive parties, which end up being boring. Later on, when their lives slow down, Harold and Erica spend more time together and reflect on their past failures, successes, their childhood, the people they’ve met, the things they have done, and how all of these moments shaped who they became later on in life.

My Overall Takeaway

The Social Animal gave me a lot of good insight into human behavior: why we do certain things, why we make assumptions, why we fall in love with certain people, why we interact with each other the way that we do. The full title is The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, so the main framework undergirding this entire story with Harold and Erica is psychology, the study of the mind, how the brain works, how our unconscious mind affects who we fall in love with, how we behave, and how we achieve success and bounce back from failure. I really loved this book for that reason because I took a class in college that integrated philosophy and psychology, so whenever we studied about the brain or the mind we always looked at it from a philosophical perspective, the why, the reason why particular neural networks in our brains operate the way they do and how and why they affect decision making. Brooks integrates economists, psychologists, philosophers, and so many other thinkers into his writing, and the ideas of these people gave me a more inclusive way of looking at how Harold and Erica developed over time and how the unconscious part of their brain played a fundamental role in their ability to come up with new ideas and new ways of examining their lives and their interactions with others. I had forgotten a lot of my learning from the course sadly, and there’s still a lot I don’t know about the brain or how my unconscious works, but this gave a lot of excellent insight into it. I also loved learning about the creativity part of the unconscious in this book because in my Buddhist practice (the particular school is called Nichiren Buddhism) we talk about different levels of consciousness. The first five levels of consciousness correlate to the five senses of hearing, taste, seeing, touch and smell, the six level makes up these five levels in a cohesive way (our conscious mind). The seventh is the ego, where we distinguish our self from others, the eighth is our karmic consciousness, which operates on the law of cause and effect and stores all of the causes and effects from our past thoughts, words and deeds. The ninth is called the amala consciousness, and this consciousness is the life potential, the life energy that we and all phenomena possess. Personally, when I chant nam-myoho-renge-kyo, I unconsciously tap into this potential without thinking too hard about it or having to make a million good causes over several lifetimes to tap into this. Tapping into this unconscious connects me to the universe and to other people and things in the universe, so that I naturally get over trying to protect my finite limited ego and awaken to a potential that I still cannot fathom through statistics or concrete measurements. Brooks talks about how the unconcious is responsible for creativity, the forming of new ideas and connections. I noticed when I chant and tap into this unconscious, I find new ways of seeing myself, ways to integrate new perspectives into my ways of thinking, and this has helped me whenever I find myself dealing with creative block. I have the unconscious to thank for my art, my writing, my new recipes, and the different ways I express myself while playing music. The article on the nine levels of consciousness can be found here.

Brooks’ The Social Animal gave me a deeper appreciation for the way the brain works. It also gave me a deeper appreciation for the interactions I have had with others over the course of my lifetime. I couldn’t become the person I was without the people in my life who helped me grow.

Overall, this was an excellent book.

The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement: David Brooks. 430 pp. 2011, 2012. Random House Publishing Group.