Why do humans keep running from the things we really need the most?

By David McElroy · February 16, 2019

My life isn’t what I want it to be. If I’m honest with myself, it never has been.

I have a narrative that I like to sell myself. It’s based on truth, but I can’t tell whether it’s the complete truth. I doubt any of our personal narratives are the complete truth. But here’s my persistent narrative.

I can see a time in my past when I was on the right track. It was a time when I was doing things I was proud of and I thought I had a great future. Then I got off track. I rebelled against something. Maybe it was against The Man. Maybe it was against my father. Maybe it was against culture telling me what I had to be.

I jumped off the treadmill leading to worldly success and I’ve been running away ever since. My narrative tells me that I’m just around the corner from finally succeeding — my own way — without doing what The Man said I had to do.

You have a narrative, too. It’s probably very different from mine. But we almost certainly share something important. We both know something which we desperately need — something we’ve always needed — and we keep finding all sorts of reasons not to reach out and accept whatever it is.

You can almost certainly have what you need. I can certainly have what I need, one way or another. But we continue sleepwalking through life, acting as though our time is unlimited, acting as though we will always have another day to deal with what we need.

Our narratives are the stories we invent to explain the past and explain our present. My narratives try to explain the present by promising that everything is about to be better. By telling myself tomorrow is about to be great, it gives me an excuse not to do anything about today.

I’m the most afraid of love, because that’s what I need the most. I fantasize about having the love and understanding and acceptance that I need from a woman. I dream of having my phone ring one day and having someone say, “I love you enough that I’m willing to find a way to be with you, no matter what.”

But if that were to happen, I would feel panicked. I would feel like running or distrusting what I heard. I would be afraid of being betrayed. You see, it’s not that I’m afraid to love. I’m just so afraid of not being loved that my mind has trouble accepting that as really possible.

There are other things I want which also scare me. There are business opportunities which I’d rather fantasize about than accept. If I’m honest with myself, I’ve always done that. With so many things, I’ve been so afraid of any kind of failure that I simply didn’t try at all. I just told myself how great it would be — one day.

One of the saddest words in human experience is “almost.” The things I regret the most are the things that almost happened — times when I almost took a chance or someone else almost took a chance on me. It’s sad if I love a woman and she doesn’t love me back. But it’s heartbreaking to love a woman and she loves me, too, but she decides not to take a chance on me.

I don’t know who wrote these words, but they express the idea quite well:

“The saddest word in the whole wide world is the word almost. He was almost in love. She was almost good for him. He almost stopped her. She almost waited. He almost lived. They almost made it.”

If you’re happy with your life — if you’re where you had hoped to be and you’re loved as you want to be loved — this might not apply to you. But for the vast majority of us, there’s a gnawing feeling of regret inside us when we allow ourselves to feel it. We know we haven’t accepted the things we need. We know we’ve been afraid to take more emotional risks. We know we’ve wasted our time — and deep down, we know we’re running out of time.

I suppose there can be a million reasons why we do these things, but they mostly boil down to some form of a fear that we don’t deserve to have our true needs met. Someone wouldn’t think we’re good enough. Someone else wouldn’t understand what we did. Someone else would criticize us. We can find a million reasons to keep running — to continue finding “logical reasons” to reject what we need.

I had a dream a couple of months ago and I didn’t remember all of it when I woke up. But I remembered one line strongly enough that I wrote it down as soon as I woke up. I don’t remember exactly the circumstances in the dream or what I was telling someone not to run away from, but I can remember reaching out for a woman’s hand in a fog. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew who she was. It doesn’t entirely make sense to me, but it felt emotionally true.

“You can trust me and let me help you,” I said, “or you can run away, just as you always have before. But you can’t do both.”

I think I can say that to myself and I can probably say it to you, too. We both need things which require the help of someone else to pursue — and to accept — but we can’t have what we need as long as we run away.

I don’t like thinking seriously about making the changes that I need to keep making in my life. I don’t like the thought of going out and finding someone new to love me. I don’t like the thought of taking some business chances that I need to take.

It’s easier for me to stick with my old narrative — to say that it will all magically change tomorrow or the week after or maybe next year. But sticking with that is a great way to end up alone and unhappy at the end of life — thinking about the love and life that I almost had.

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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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