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

By David McElroy · July 4, 2016

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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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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