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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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As I grow and learn, I have to leave more of my ideas behind

By David McElroy · July 4, 2016

Transformation

Almost every day, I find myself disappointed about things I wrote four or five years ago — but I think that’s a good thing.

Even though I don’t publish many new articles anymore, my old ones are read hundreds and hundreds of times each day. The software I use tells me which articles are most popular each day and how many times each was read. The idea is that writers can see which things are attracting an audience and write more things like that.

In my case, though, I feel as though the numbers — and the old headlines — mostly serve to mock me. I certainly don’t shape my writing by what people want to read. Instead, the old titles serve as a roadmap showing how my ideas and my priorities have shifted radically since I started writing here.

The old things I wrote remind me how shallow my priorities once were.

Old articles frequently become popular again for reasons I’ll never know. Someone presumably finds something through an online search and then shares it on social media, where it will sometimes be shared enough to attracts tens of thousands of readers in a brief period.

There are times when it’s not so bad. Other times, the title jumps out at me and makes something inside me ask in an accusing voice, “Why did you ever bother to write that?”

Five years ago, I was more concerned with politics, so I wrote mostly about current affairs and political ideas. That’s what my (mostly libertarian) readers wanted, so I gave them exactly what kept them coming back. I was publishing an article every single day for the first couple of years, so it was a struggle to come up with enough to say. As a result, a lot of what I published back then was very thin — reblogged news stories saying, “See what happened? Isn’t this outrageous?”

For the most part, I don’t necessarily disagree with things I wrote in the past. It’s just that my priorities have changed so much that it seems as though it was a waste of time and effort.

Politics seems like such a waste of time now. I can’t change people’s minds. Even if I could change the minds of a few, I believe the future collapse of this society is already set, so it makes little difference what’s done now. But the real issue for me is much bigger than political ideas, even if I could change people’s minds.

I have to change myself.

I’m desperately seeking to become a better person, not in the traditional moral sense as much as something deeper. I need love and connection with human beings — and I keep getting glimpses of what might be possible through such connection. I don’t even know exactly what I’m seeking, but I know it’s found by starting inside and then making connections — spiritually, creatively, romantically and fraternally.

More and more, I understand that meaning in life comes from finding ways to transform ourselves through various kinds of love, understanding and connection. I’m understanding that love isn’t real — it doesn’t exist in a human life at all — without the inner transformation that somehow produces it. (I’ve been trying for the last couple of weeks to write something about love and whether we’ve all missed the point of loving others, but it’s a struggle to understand things I see only dimly.)

I’m growing and changing. I’m not the person I was five years ago. Sure, my personality, skills, intelligence and so forth are all the same, but my heart has grown and my ideas have changed in ways I could barely even see then.

At this point, I wouldn’t write most of what I wrote back then. I’m not going to delete those articles, because I don’t like to feel as though I’m editing the past. But when I notice people getting excited about something I wrote years ago — such as a story that’s been popular this week about why non-taxpayers have as much say in government as taxpayers — I find myself thinking, “Did I ever think that was important enough to talk about? Life is too short to waste it on that.”

(It’s even worse when angry people want to argue about things in old articles. I simply don’t have any interest in doing that, because my priorities have changed so much. Did I make mistakes in things I wrote years ago? Probably, but I don’t have any interest in rewriting the past or in arguing those points today.)

I’m a more mature and loving person than I was then, but I’m not finished changing. I don’t know exactly where that metamorphosis will lead. I just know that I’m better off now than I was then — and I still have a long way to go.

I can live with people thinking that certain of my old political articles are important. I don’t mind if they want to make points with their friends with my old articles. But I feel like disavowing those articles anyway, not because I necessarily disagree with them, but because I feel like saying, “Don’t you see that there are things much more important than these?”

I’ve lost most of my hardcore political readers from four or five years ago. That’s fine. There are plenty of places for them to get what they crave. I’m doing something right now — very gradually — that I have to do, even though it’s not nearly as popular as what I once wrote.

Here’s what is ironic and frustrating to me. The old political articles can frequently get 15,000 to 20,000 hits in a few days when they start being randomly linked. I wince at that, because they’re not really what I think is important or what should be read. But the things I write now that I believe do matter deeply — such as this recent piece about why I choose to love instead of hate — are read by a hundred or fewer people for the most part.

There’s a much bigger market for anger and hate than for love and understanding.

I appreciate those who are interested in following this long struggle to understand love, connection, understanding and belonging. I don’t know where this process leads, but I know it’s much more important than politics.

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Briefly

It was five years ago tonight when Lucy first rode in the car with me. She was on her way to her “forever home” with me that night, but she didn’t know it, so she was terrified. It was a much happier and braver girl who took a ride in the car tonight so we could go through a drive-through window and order a hamburger for her — to celebrate five years with me. She had a great time. If she could remember five years ago tonight, she would be proud of how far she’s come, too. If you’d like to know more about Lucy’s journey from scared dog to brave queen of the household, here’s something I wrote after her first year with me. I’m hoping this girl will have many more happy years with me.

I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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