I miss the times when hard work
was more fun than entertainment

By David McElroy · January 27, 2019

I’ve realized this week how much I miss work.

If you’re around me in life these days, that might sound like a surprise. Each week, I’m counting down the days until I’m “on parole” from the office for a couple of days. All weekend, I dread Monday arriving again.

If you didn’t know any better, you would assume I hate work. You would assume I’m just lazy and want to play all the time. But you’d be wrong.

I miss loving my work so much that it was a bigger high than any drug I knew of. I miss the days when working long hours was more fun than any entertainment I might be missing. I miss the times when I was learning so much that I believed I was laying a foundation for building something bigger.

I miss working for something that was my own. Something with my name on it. Something nobody else could control. Something that was mine.

I felt this way when I worked on certain projects as a teen-ager. I felt that way about my high school newspaper. I felt that way about projects I did to build my church youth group. I didn’t feel it for my first high school job — as an office janitor — so I can’t say that I felt it about every form of work.

It really kicked into high gear when I started my first newspaper job as a freshman in college. I was supposed to work 20 hours a week for the Daily Mountain Eagle in Jasper, Ala., but I was there more like 40 to 60 hours each week. I knew when to clock out — because I wasn’t going to be paid for more than my normal schedule — but nobody made me leave.

I was having fun. I was learning how to do almost every job in the building. I was only supposed to be working in the newsroom and the darkroom, but I learned everything.

I learned our archaic computer equipment inside and out. When technicians would come to do repairs or upgrades, I was their constant shadow, learning all they would tell me. I learned everything about the composing department and became just as expert as those who had worked there for years.

I learned the jobs of those in the camera and stripping department — where the pages were turned into big negatives and then metal plates. Late at night when nobody was around, I experimented with things nobody had told me how to do. I invented my own ways of doing things and later used many of those techniques. (The only thing I never learned was how to run the press.)

My father used to complain that I was allowing the newspaper to abuse me since I spent so many hours there without being paid. I thought he was crazy. I thought I was just getting a fantastic education at their expense.

I continued to love work as I moved through several newspapers, but it showed up its strongest when I owned my own small newspaper company.

I’ve told you before about starting this company and about why it had to shut down. But for that last year, my ex-wife and I were working between 80 and 100 hours each week. I’m not going to say that’s good for the human body or for a person’s mental state, but the work itself was euphoric for me.

It was mine — and I was willing to put everything into it. I’ve never had that much fun again.

When I worked for another newspaper company in the next couple of years, much of the thrill was gone. I still did work that I thought was good. I still put in long hours. But I had lost much of the control — because it was a bureaucratic chain of papers — and I’d lost the promise of feeling I had a big payoff from owning my own company.

In the years I worked in politics, there were emotional highs — times when I made a quick financial killing or election nights when a client won against all odds. But there wasn’t the same feeling of excitement all the time. There wasn’t the same sense that I was building something lasting and important.

I’ve realized this week how much I miss that.

I lost something during those years of working on other people’s projects and companies. I grew accustomed to simply doing what someone wanted to pay me to do. It seemed like a reasonable compromise when I was working as a publisher for a newspaper chain. At least I was still in the field where I had been so happy.

Then it seemed like a reasonable compromise when I started making good money as a political consultant. The money was so good that it would have seemed crazy to turn it down — but I had little passion for it to start with and then I lost all interest. It was destroying me ethically and it was making me cynical.

I completely lost touch with the part of me that had been so excited about work in the past.

These days, there’s nothing wrong with the real estate company I work for. I’m doing good work. I’m helping to grow a young company into something more mature. I’m working hard to build and improve internal control systems. I’m serving clients and I’m making a living.

But I’m still eager for Friday at 5 p.m. to get here. And I dread Monday morning. I don’t love what I do. I’m not building something for myself. I’m simply doing what I’m being paid to do. I don’t love what I do so much that I’m constantly dreaming about ways to make it better.

I’ve been figuring some things out lately and I’ve rediscovered an older part of myself that was passionate about success and changing the world. I had forgotten how much I’ve missed this. Now I have to find the right project — one I can reasonably jump to from where I am — that will make me so excited that I’ll be eager to get started each day.

I miss having that passion and excitement and drive for my work. Newspapers are dead, so I don’t expect to go back in that direction. But there will be directions that will make sense. Real estate is a good potential platform for doing something big and profitable at the right time, preferably with the right partner.

I don’t ever again want to kill myself with working 80 to 100 hours a week. But I do want to love what I’m doing so much that I’ll wish there were more hours in each day.

I’m excited to reconnect with that part of myself — and I can’t wait to feel that passion for work once again.

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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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