David McElroy

Would you apply for this job?

HELP WANTED: Profitable and successful tech company is looking for workers to create all content for its media platforms. Applicants can create as much as desired, but company will determine which content is used and which is ignored. Company has strict content rules and workers can be banned or punished with no warning or recourse. No compensation is offered except to the most popular creators, but think of the exposure. Join our company today.

Unless you’re an idiot or a masochist, you wouldn’t apply for that job. I wouldn’t, either. I would laugh at it and mock the intelligence of anybody who would fall for such a one-sided deal.

But when I’m honest with myself, I realize that’s what I’ve been doing for years on social media.

I started joining social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even Threads — starting in about 2007. The value proposition was simple: You connect with your friends and anybody else you want to connect with. Your friends will be shown everything you post. You’ll see everything they post. And there’s no charge for this. What a deal.

As the social media companies grew more popular, they changed the deal. They introduced algorithms which determined which tiny portion of your posts would be shown to your friends. Then the companies started randomly showing you posts you never asked for — from people you’ve never heard of, about things you don’t care about.

But we put up with it, because we had developed a weird addiction to social media. We created all of the editorial content for companies which have gotten fabulously wealthy. We’ve been bewildered sharecroppers on a digital plantation.

Today, I’m starting the process of walking away from all of that. This is not what I signed up for.

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The truths that matter most in life cannot be proven.

I know that love is real, but I can’t prove it. I am absolutely certain that some things in this world are indescribably beautiful. Painfully beautiful. I know those things matter in ways that I can’t explain or understand. I’m certain that there is a reality beyond the physical world I can see and touch. I know there’s a creator — who I experience as God — who is just as real as anything I can touch or see or hear.

I can’t prove any of these things, but I know they’re true.

For me, they’re not theories or hopes or abstract concepts. They’re facts about reality. All of these things are part of my knowledge — but it’s “irrational knowledge.”

Maybe “non-rational knowledge” would be more precise, but I adopted this phrase from a distinction that Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy made between rational and irrational knowledge. Rational knowledge is what we get from science and other sorts of experimentation with the physical world. Irrational knowledge is what we feel as though we just know — through intuition, gut feeling, faith, whatever you want to call it.

My version of irrational knowledge might be different from yours. And that’s OK. But when we look at human groups around the world and over long periods of time, we find that some shared intuitions about irrational knowledge are pretty widespread.

Rational knowledge helps us to survive and to live in prosperity. Irrational knowledge feeds our hearts and gives us purpose and meaning.

The longer I live, the more I value meaning and the less I value prosperity.

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I felt angry, but more than anything, I felt powerless.

All I was trying to do was set up an account with a new company that my suburb had contracted to pick up our trash. The service provider has changed several times in the 11 years I’ve lived in my house. I normally just start getting a bill from a different company, but it didn’t work that way this time.

The new provider was a large national company. I saw its new trash containers show up for all of my neighbors, but mine never came. When I called the company, I was told that my phone number matched a local address that I’d never heard of. The only choice I was offered was to pay the bill for that address.

When I called from my office phone, I was sent straight to voicemail and nobody ever called back. When I called the city to ask for help, I was told to call the company. There was nothing they could do.

There is no local office for the company — and nobody would return my calls.

I went for months without trash pickup. Nothing changed until a different company took over the contract. I now have trash pickup again. It feels like a huge win that they’ll at least take my money.

This entire mess is just one tiny incident in a growing collection of ways in which I feel I’ve lost control of my life — in big ways and tiny ways — to faceless companies, indifferent bureaucrats and bored gatekeepers.

These people have more and more power over my life. I’m feeling powerless.

And I’m angry about it.

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