Home > Author > Ben Sasse
41 " This is reality TV provocation, pure and simple. He loves it when the chyrons scream, Surely, surely, this is the thing that will take Trump down! He’s finally gone too far! He wants the twenty-four-hour coverage obsessing over him and his double-downs, partial pivots, and salacious provocations. "
― Ben Sasse , Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal
42 " Reverend King knew that the path to success could not be zero-sum—our side wins and your side loses. "
43 " This day’s failure wasn’t at all about lacking brains; it was about will. It was about ownership. It was about not having much experience or interest in seeing tasks through to completion. "
― Ben Sasse , The Vanishing American Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis—and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance
44 " We are necessarily within arm’s length of large questions about whether your kids on their deathbeds will be able to look back on lives oriented toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. This book is not outlining any answers to the grand questions of meaning, but we should acknowledge that adolescents and their parent-guides are inevitably wrestling with the fundamental: What makes a life worth living? From the moment human beings were able "
45 " Wealthy societies, for reasons largely well-intentioned but now producing unintended consequences, are making it easier for their teens to avoid the rigors and responsibilities of becoming a grown-up. Arnett calls those years the “self-focused age,” when there are few real responsibilities, few “daily obligations,” limited “commitments to others.” In a stage when young people were once supposed to learn to “stand alone as a self-sufficient person,” they find themselves increasingly paralyzed by over-choice. There are nearly unlimited personal-social options yet too few concrete work-related accomplishments. A "
46 " and beyond. Some of this evolution toward more secular, bureaucratic schooling followed necessarily from the Supreme Court decisions prohibiting school prayer and religious instruction in the 1960s. Regardless of whether you believe children should have prayer or study religion in school, the removal of those activities had the unintended consequence of removing existential questions about how the individual fits into the bigger, cosmic picture; about our life’s purpose. The moral hollowing of schooling is also attributable to the erosion of secondary education’s previously secure place and purpose in preparing kids for steady jobs right after graduation. Education historian Paula Fass traces the drift toward the “warehousing” of our young to schools’ loss of their tangible, culminating purpose—to prepare the emerging generation for conclusive entry into adult productivity. Instead, “going to high school became a stop-over during the teen years, with very little to offer beyond academic selection for those who would go on to college . . .” When a diploma was no longer a predictable ticket to a full-time, middle-class job and a set of expectations about adulthood, high schools began to fray. Peer culture metastasized to fill the vacuum of purpose. Instead of learning how to behave from their teachers, who no longer really saw their jobs as moral instruction and instilling wisdom acquired through age and experience, kids were learning how to behave from other kids, with predictable results. Fifth, the protest era of the 1960s saw an atypical amount of conflict about what America means, about whether our experiment in self-governance was really all that special. Some of the struggles—chiefly civil rights—were essential to America’s finally living up to the Declaration of Independence’s vision of universal, "
47 " Learning can't be force fed. It needs to come in response to genuinely asked questions by genuinely curious people. Experts can't educate your kids until your kids have the desire to be educated. "
48 " At one level, happiness is an equation that has "needs met" as the numerator and "presumed total needs" as the denominator. One way to achieve temporary happiness is to invest more energy seeking to fill up the numerator. But another way, a more stable way, is to reflectively guard against the growth of one's denominator of needs, and to cultivate the habit of gratitude at the satisfaction of real and basic needs. "
