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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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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