“He lived in a social landscape with astonishingly few guardrails. Some days he felt as though he was waiting for a set of opinions, habits, and goals to harden in his mind. The social critic Michael Barone argues that the United States produces moderately impressive twenty-year-olds but very impressive thirty-year-olds. He says that the hard pressures and choices that hit people during their wide-open, unsupervised twenties forge a new and much better kind of person. Harold wasn’t sure about that, since he seemed to spend a disturbing amount of time on a friend’s ragged couch playing Call of Duty: Black Ops. But at least he did have moments of intense pleasure and he did have a great group of friends.”
-David Brooks, The Social Animal
-Mallory
