Trivial distractions keep us from focusing on love and connection

By David McElroy · August 14, 2020

It was dark outside as I rode toward home on the YMCA bus that night, so it must have been fall or winter. I was about 11 years old when I rode that bus twice a week from Golden Springs Elementary School to the YMCA in downtown Anniston, Ala., where I took swimming lessons and played on a basketball team, among other activities, depending on the time of year.

I was sitting at the very back of the darkened, noisy bus looking forward at all the other kids. The song on the speakers at that moment — from the radio, I presume — was the Partridge Family’s “I Think I Love You.” I don’t know why the scene is so strongly imprinted on me.

“I’m not like y’all and I don’t really like you very much,” I thought. “I’m all by myself.”

I felt a little bit afraid — not for my physical safety, of course — but I mostly felt completely alone. It’s the first time I can recall ever feeling so disconnected and alone and alienated. And in a very simple and childlike way, it was the first time I felt a yearning to be connected to someone.

It’s the first time I remember feeling so alone that I had a powerful need for love and understanding to fill a part of me that I couldn’t yet understand.

As I grew up, I tried to bridge the gap between others and myself with achievements. In immature ways, I tried to be successful and impressive. I didn’t think anybody would like me or love me unless I was the best at everything I did.

I learned what I was good at and I focused on those things. I had achievements. I got accolades. And I pushed for more, thinking that more achievements would finally get what I was looking for.

I dreamed of achievement and riches and glory. I’ve talked about this before. I understand now that I was hoping to finally be acceptable to others — that they would finally accept me and love me. I thought if I did enough, they would follow me and I would feel as though I had what I needed.

In the early years of my adult life, if you had asked me the purpose of life, I would have said it was to achieve and build and do big things. I did some things that were big deals to me at the time. But I never found any of it to mean what I had hoped it would mean.

It was a painful process to throw off all of that thinking. I’ve talked about much of it before. I’m in an entirely different place — so much so that my 30-year-old self wouldn’t recognize me today.

This Thursday evening, I had just gotten home when I realized that it was almost sunset and that the clouds were moving into favorable positions for a sunset photo. So I backed the car out of the driveway and headed to my favorite spot. As I drove, I could see the golden and magenta rays of light starting to shoot out from around the clouds.

For reasons that I can’t explain, it felt like an epiphany.

As I drove toward the spot where I got the sunset photo, I talked to God about it. In a way far more clear than usual, I found myself seeing and feeling really clearly that the purpose of this life is love and connection. The absence of love and connection is a spiritual condition that I would call hell on this Earth.

What I felt on the bus in Anniston that night so long ago was just a tiny foretaste of what we humans feel when we don’t feel connected to anybody or anything.

When we experience that emotional hell, we do terrible things to ourselves to try to fill the empty space. We pursue all sorts of addictions. We pursue whatever we hope might make us feel better, even if it’s only for a minute. We’re not conscious of what we’re doing. We just instinctively reach out for something that we can’t even understand or define.

Everything else in this world is some form of a distraction from the love and connection we need.

Our culture is nothing but one non-stop distraction after another. You don’t ever have to allow yourself to feel what’s missing. You don’t have to experience your emptiness. You can watch a million movies, stream a thousand shows, browse social media, pursue ego fulfillment and do an endless array of things to avoid facing what we need.

As I was in the grocery store thinking about all this, I looked at all the things that the store was trying to sell me — and I realized that they were all distractions designed to fill something inside.

If we read about that rich woman’s divorce, we don’t have to think about our feelings. If we read this article about how to lose weight, it can help us figure out how to be better looking and maybe feel better about ourselves again. If we read about that woman’s personal life and happiness, we can avoid thinking about the mess into which we’ve gotten our own lives.

You can put almost everything in your life into one of two piles. Call one of them love and connection. Call the other one distractions. There are some gray areas, of course. There are some things that don’t really fall into either category. But for the most part, most of our time is divided between those two opposites.

We need love and connection. We yearn for it. Something inside of us isn’t right without it. Even when we hide it from ourselves, something in us knows. Even when we pretend it doesn’t matter and that we can ignore the doubts and fears and loneliness, part of us knows.

If you make your life a full-time distraction machine, you can avoid your emotional needs for a long time. I did that. You’ve probably done it, too. But at some point, it catches up with you. You either deal with it — or you let your distractions destroy you.

I don’t have the love and connection that I need today. I don’t know why. I honestly don’t. I’ve never felt as alone as I feel today. I don’t know why I’ve allowed myself to get into this position. But I’ve come too far — and I’ve learned too much — to let myself pursue empty distractions.

You can choose to prioritize love or you can choose to prioritize substitutes. One of them will bring you spiritual joy. It will bring you contentment. It will bring you all that you need. The substitutes will leave you just as empty and bewildered as I used to be.

I wish I could sit down with that little boy on the bus all those years ago. I wish I could have explained to him what he felt and why he felt it. I wish I could have explained what he needed and what he should pursue. Since no one taught me that, I wasted a lot of years.

At least I finally know what I need. I need love and connection. I need God.

And I need somebody who wants to be connected to me just as much as I want to be connected to her. Anything less than that is an ugly distraction with no value, something that isn’t worth my time or my effort or my love. Worthless.

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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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

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