David McElroy

This society is rapidly becoming a place where I no longer want to live — and it’s happening far more quickly than I expected.

It’s hard for me to be certain whether the world is the problem or if it’s really just me. Maybe what we’re going through is normal and I simply hate “the new normal.” (I detest that phrase.) Maybe I would deal with it better if it weren’t for my childhood programming.

I’m sure it’s some of both. But wherever the specifics lie, I’m feeling overwhelmed and so are lots of others. Maybe you’re feeling a bit of the same. Or maybe there’s some feeling in your gut that you’re trying to ignore.

In 1970, the futurist Alvin Toffler published a book called “Future Shock,” which he described as a psychological state of individuals and entire societies — who are experiencing “too much change in too short a period of time.”

The world was already changing quickly, but it’s accelerated. What‘s worse, it feels as though we’re passengers in a car being driven by a madman — and the madman is gunning the engine as he steers us all off the edge of a cliff.

If you’re not terrified, you’re not paying attention.

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Whatever perceived consensus might have once existed in this country about the sort of place “we” wanted it to be is now gone.

There was a broad mythical narrative that a large majority basically bought into — and most of those people were white. Because black and brown people didn’t have political power and were vastly underrepresented in media, the perception existed that the mainstream white culture was “the American culture.”

This broad white culture was seen by most as what the country “ought to be.”

Although there was vigorous competition within that white culture for power and control, the cultural consensus was fairly well accepted. Other groups were considered tiny players in the political and social sense.

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You are deceiving the world around you. And I am, too.

We mostly do it by what we don’t show to other people. We deceive by the things we hide. It’s not a conscious decision. We learned in our formative years what people didn’t like about us. We learned the parts of us that would cause us trouble when others saw them.

And so we learned to hide who we are.

We built masks for ourselves. We learned what would make people approve of us — and we wore those masks with pride. We craved approval. We craved love. We didn’t understand what we were doing, but we learned that acting in certain ways got us more of what we needed.

We learned to think of those artificial behaviors as our personalities. We learned to believe that these masks we showed the world were who we really are. But we were fooling ourselves.

Personality is a mask. That’s not who you are. Your personality is the defense you learned to use — to hide the real you from the world. And most of us hid so well that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.

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