After long but necessary detours, the beginning finally nears for me

By David McElroy · January 12, 2020

By the standards I set when I was 25, I’m a failure today.

But if I had done all the grandiose things I planned back then — and gained immense wealth and power as a result — I would have been a complete failure by the more mature standards I set for myself today.

It’s a paradox. I had to lose everything I once valued — and I had to wander in the desert for a metaphorical 40 years — to finally arrive at a place where I feel qualified to even start living a life worth living.

I have struggled through years of what felt like defeat and exile. I felt as though I had blown my chance to do the things that matter to me. But something has changed.

I’ve realized that I am entering into my best period yet — intellectually, creatively and emotionally. I am finally where I wish I could have been at 25 or 30. I had to take a long but necessary detour — and I’ve finally arrived at the start of my life.

I am not the person I was when I was 30 — and I am deeply grateful for that. I have not done — or even attempted — the things I had intended when I was young, but I wouldn’t want those things now even if I could have them with no effort.

I was a product of the shallow culture in which I grew up. I was a product of my dysfunctional family of origin. I learned to want the things which other people believed were important. I learned to strive for things which could possibly win the shallow praise which my fragile and wounded ego needed.

After struggling through self-discovery and fragmented efforts to heal myself, I find that reality is nothing like what I once believed it was. I don’t want the things which once seemed so important. And I want things today which once would have seemed trivial or useless.

I had to lose in order to win — in order to understand that the culture and value system which created me as a young man were broken.

I haven’t yet figured out everything that I mean by this, but I am increasingly convinced that the culture of modern society is broken in ways that make it shallow and hollow. I have a feeling that the framework for finding a better culture lies in some portion of the traditional past which modern culture is so eager to bury.

This is leading me to a set of values and understandings which give life new meaning — and which make me realize that the life I once wanted to live was completely empty.

The ground of my life is littered with the rubble of battles I’ve fought, some of which I’ve won and some of which have left me wounded. I’ve been so consumed by those battles that I’ve had my eyes down for too long.

But now the battles have subsided. I’ve come to a wall which separates me from the culture I’ve been part of and something else which lies beyond it. And I’m scaling that wall, figuring out how to get over it and how to leave the empty hollowness of this culture behind.

As I scale that wall and look at what lies ahead, I’m starting to lose some of the fears which have held me back for so long.

I’ve put up with too many things out of fear — fear of what others might think, fear of being wrong, fear of looking foolish, fear of not being loved. It’s time for me to stop caring what people think. It’s time for me to confidently ask for the things I want — and be happy with hearing “no” some of the time.

Allison Schrager is an economist and journalist who wrote a book about risk management based on her investigation into how a Nevada brothel operates. She said that brothel owner Dennis Hof taught her one of the most powerful lessons of her life.

“If you’re not hearing ‘no’ regularly, you’re not asking for enough,” Hof told her.

I haven’t heard “no” that often in my life. I was trained as a child not to ask for much and to be happy with what I was offered. That’s not good enough anymore.

I now understand that I can have what I want. If one person won’t give me what I want, there’s someone else to ask. And another. And another. Someone will be willing to give me what I want. I just might have to hear “no” a few times before I find the person who’s willing to say “yes” to my offer.

That applies to everything I want, whether it’s money, creative pursuits or even love.

I’m entering my best and most productive period right now. I’m going to have the things I need. I’m going to have the things I want. They might be different things than they would have been when I was younger. They might be different things than would appeal to some of the partners I’ve wanted in the past.

But I’m going to have the things I want — and they are going to feed my soul and allow me to experience things that my 30-year-old self couldn’t have imagined being offered by this life.

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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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