David McElroy

I’m launching a second podcast. It’s called the Alien Observer.

I still hope to bring Love & Hope back for a second season, but the things I have to talk about right now are very different from the concept I started for that show in January. This show might be more eclectic, because it’s more broadly about my observations of the world.

The Alien Observer is intended to give me a place to share audio about whatever’s on my mind at a given moment. A couple of times recently — here and here — I’ve recorded audio and just stuck it on here, so launching this will give me a place to share those sorts of things more broadly.

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I’ve become increasingly frustrated lately that there’s no easy way to explain what I need to talk about these days.

There is something badly wrong with our dysfunctional modern culture. We have become like blind men following other blind men — and that path leads to us all ending up in a ditch and wondering what happened.

I’ve realized that I can’t keep “dumbing down” some things. There are some ideas that you simply have to learn if you want to have this conversation and if you want to help correct what’s wrong with the culture. And that means we have to confront the fact that our education and our cultural experience has dumbed down much of what we need to learn.

I’m not going to try to explain history or philosophy or anything else complex in this presentation, but I’d like to start making the case for why most of our culture — probably including you — have to give up the shallowness we’ve been taught. And if this isn’t what you want, it’s probably also true that nothing else I’ve said for many months will make a bit of sense to you, either.

The audio embedded below is about 21 minutes long.

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I will always feel like an alien trying to fit among humans, because I don’t know how to blend in. Not really.

I can move among groups. I can talk as though I belong. I can say the right things. I can even lead them to believe I’m one of them.

Inside, though, I will always feel like an alien among others. I will always feel as though I don’t quite fit. And I’ll always hate it that I care what they might think of me.

Earlier this week, I found a group of my school photos from my younger years. It turns out that I have almost every year’s photo from first through sixth grade. In the younger photos, I looked like a happy little boy. By the time I got to the sixth grade — the one you see here — I look older than my years and I look unhappy.

Maybe I simply know too much about what was really behind those young eyes, but I see unhappiness and alienation. I see someone who felt alone in the world.

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