Just give us big, fake, happy smiles; nobody wants to hear your feelings

By David McElroy · February 20, 2019

When I saw Alissa two weeks ago, she told me she was dating a new guy and that everything was going well. Tonight, I saw her again and she gave me an update. He had ditched her.

I was frustrated to hear this. Alissa is bright, articulate and funny. She’s ambitious and interesting. She’s also an extremely attractive 20-year-old. But this guy had decided he wasn’t interested in her. Why?

“He said I talk about my feelings too much,” she said. “He didn’t want to hear about the problems with my family. He just wasn’t interested.”

Although I was outraged at my friend being treated this way, I can’t say I was really surprised. The culture is becoming more and more shallow, so why wouldn’t people immersed in that culture want to pretend that real people don’t have problems?

Most of the automatons who mindlessly absorb modern culture don’t want to know the real you. If you want those people to like you — the ones who surround you at work or at school or at play — hide your feelings and pretend to be happy.

It’s very rare when someone wants to know the real you. It’s shockingly rare when someone can see who you really are and then wants to know you as a real, flawed, normal human being. But those are the few people who you ought to seek out.

You’re taught to keep things light and superficial. Men complain about women who need to talk about their feelings, so many women learn to hide who they really are — eventually hiding even from themselves — and pretending to be what shallow culture tells them they ought to be.

And then when the bottled-up feelings inevitably come out at a time of crisis, you’re told to quit being dramatic. Condescending people give each other knowing glances and make jokes about hormones and menstrual cycles.

It’s even tougher to be open about who you are and what you feel if you’re a guy. The culture likes to teach young men not to feel — to treat women as objects and to pretend nothing hurts them.

This leads to all sorts of negative consequences for men who are unhappy and have absolutely no idea what’s wrong with their lives — so they increasingly turn to alcohol and drugs and porn as they run wild in packs who seem determined to demonstrate they’re still juveniles at heart.

But you have a choice.

You don’t have to live by the rules of the dominant culture. You’ll be healthier and happier, but it will also require that you limit your relationships with people whose values are different from what you want to be.

And that’s the thing. You have to accept that if you choose to spend time with these sorts of people, you are going to become more and more like them. You will become more shallow. Your values will become warped. And you will wake up one day and realize that you’re an empty human being who has little to show for his or her life.

You will suddenly realize you’ve wasted your life.

Life is a series of tradeoffs. The sooner you accept that — and decide which tradeoffs are truly worth making — the sooner you will experience a happier and healthier life.

You can choose to be like the shallow and empty people who reflect popular culture. Or you can choose to be one of the shrinking number of people who build emotionally healthy lives through vulnerability and loving connection.

Sadly, most people will never even think about this choice — and many of those who consider the choice will decide it’s more important to be popular than to be emotionally healthy.

It’s no wonder the children of every generation — including your own children — are learning worse and worse values. They’re learning them from us.

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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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