A Recommended Reading List for Young People

A Guide For the Perplexed prompted by recent conversations

In contrast with most of human history, modern liberal societies take a laissez-faire approach to the grand philosophical questions about life. Instead of seeking to inculcate one vision or another through religion or state ideology, people are generally left on their own to answer big questions about the meaning of their existence, their identity, and how they should view the world into which they are born. While no clear answers to these existential questions are provided, people are strongly encouraged instead to see themselves primarily as economic actors.

Postponing, or even ignoring, the profound questions of life in favor of a strict focus on production and consumption arguably has the positive byproduct of reducing ideological conflict, including the wars of religion and ideology by which humanity is still haunted. But while helping preserve a level of order, this minimalist anthropology has also generated a tremendous amount of confusion, ennui, and depression –particularly among more intelligent people who really want to understand the world on a more profound level, and are unsatisfied with the shallow nature of contemporary mass culture.

I tend not to write about personal affairs on my Substack, with the exception of my reported observations and analysis. But lately, I’ve been noticing that, particularly in my conversations with young people, there is a profound rootlessness and searching that is not being addressed by any of our major social, religious, or political institutions. Lacking answers to the major questions of existence, people are succumbing to quiet nihilism, desperation, or embracing many of the obvious ideological fads of the present era. I feel I’d be remiss to not try and respond to this in some small fashion.

I’m now almost 40 years old, and am happy to say that I feel very spiritually and intellectually established. But I can relate to the sentiment of feeling existentially unmoored, having confronted that sentiment many years ago in my youth. There are two things that I did to overcome that sentiment: Read a lot of books, and search for people smarter and more spiritually-connected than me who were willing to act as guides in some specific sense.

Finding a guide is something people have to figure out on your own, though, in general, I recommend keeping an open mind and not expecting perfection of any individual person. One thing that I did want to provide however is my list of essential books. I’m not an academic, or even shaped by academic institutions in any real sense. This probably makes me a dilettante, but it may also have the positive byproduct of making my recommended readings list relatively accessible to an ordinary person.

The bias of these books is inevitably colored somewhat by my own personal background, but they are the ones that I recommend as having helped me form a clear picture of the world that I’m comfortable with. This is not a list of my favorite books, nor even books that I entirely agree with. I read some of them many years ago and also may feel differently abotu them today. As you’ll notice, the list is also heavily weighted towards non-fiction, and excludes most of my favorite novelists.

But these are the books that I can say helped wake me up. In the absence of a society that provided answers to the big questions, or provided unsatisfactory ones on important subjects like religion, psychology, politics, race, and identity, these books were the ones that helped fill in the blanks. If any of them prove helpful to a young person starting their intellectual journey then I will feel very happy to have helped another person along the way.