Something in us usually wants to believe next year will be different

By David McElroy · December 31, 2017

The sun has set on another year — and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

It seems as though I feel this way every year. At least for the last decade or so. I start each year with unreasonable hope that this year will be different. I keep hoping this year will be the one when some of the things I need start to come true.

A few years ago, I heard an interview with Harvard University psychologist Dan Gilbert in which he explained that people are terrible at predicting their own futures. In the abstract, people will tell you they know bad things can happen just as easily as good things.

But Gilbert said a consistent pattern shows up when you ask people to predict things in their own futures. If you take all their predictions and group them into a positive pile and a negative pile, the positives they predict for themselves far outweigh the negatives. They simply can’t see that bad things are going to happen.

That seems to be a blind spot we all share. And maybe it’s another one of those things we need in order to allow us to face each new year with a desire to go on.

Do you ever predict the bad things in your life before they become obvious?

• Did you predict you’re going to have the medical issue you’ve been dealing with?

• Did you predict your marriage would disappoint you and leave you lonely?

• Did you predict you would lose your job and be facing an unplanned career change?

• Did you predict this was going to be the year an accident would kill your mother?

If we made such predictions, people would call us negative people. If I had predicted 10 years ago that I’d soon have to deal with breast cancer, most people would have said, “That’s silly; you’re a man.” If I had predicted earlier this year that I’d be in an emergency room this past week debating whether to have my gallbladder removed, people would have told me not to be negative. If I’d predicted 15 years ago that it was going to be so painfully difficult for me to financially recover from getting out of politics, others would have reassured me that I had nothing to worry about.

The things we predict for ourselves tend to be a wish list.

When I look at 2018, I see love and success and health. I see myself solving problems and moving forward to achieve the things that matter to me. I realize that what I see is fiction, but it’s the only way I know to face the future.

The truth is that good things and bad things are equally likely. I have control of some of those things and fate is in control of others. (And other people are in control of yet more things.)

It’s an illusion that we are in control of our lives. It’s an illusion that the plans we have are much more than hopeful wishes held up to fate.

But we like those illusions. I suspect we need the illusions in order to go on.

As an arbitrary calendar flips another day — and starts a new year which could be marked on any other date just as well — I wish good things for myself. And I wish good things for you.

There’s so much in this human life which is beautiful and amazing and delightful that I hope both of us can find some of that. I just hope that our frequent fixation on illusions doesn’t make us wait too long to accept the best of what’s offered to us.

Happy new year. Let’s do what we can to fill it with beauty and joy and creation — and with love for each other.

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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.

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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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