Letting go of dead dreams can lead to path you need to follow

By David McElroy · November 27, 2020

The dreams of my youth are all dead. One by one, they slipped away until I’d lost everything I once thought was important.

I wanted power and glory. I was completely certain that I would become president of the United States. There was surely some ego involved. And a desire to prove my self-worth. But I wanted to do great things. I really wanted to lead the people. I wanted to show the way to our Promised Land.

I wanted success and wealth. I had a passionate desire to build a newspaper empire. In the days of my youth, newspapers were still the most serious of the news media. The most respected. They were also wildly profitable. I wanted to build the biggest newspaper company in the country.

There were others, but those were my two dominating dreams. They meant everything to me. And yet they slowly died. I’ve talked with you before about some of the reasons why. I held onto them for as long as I could. Longer than I should have, really.

But I understand now. No matter how much we want something — or even someone — the time comes when holding on to a dead dream stops us from accepting something better.

I wasn’t left without dreams after that. Those “childish things” have been replaced by more mature desires. And now that they’re gone, I finally understand that there was no room in my life for something new until I learned to release the dead dreams that I was dragging around.

When I was young, I thought I had to have those dreams or else my life would be a failure. I see it differently now. I don’t have to achieve any particular dream. I can be happy and successful and fulfilled if I decide I need to go in different directions. And that’s been liberating to understand.

But every time I have wanted to achieve a particular dream — or when I have wanted the love and companionship of a particular woman — I felt as though my entire life depended on achieving that desire. It was true for dreams and for love, which makes sense because those two things are remarkably similar for me.

The things I want today seem far more important to me than those old dreams of power and wealth ever did. It’s not that I’d mind power and wealth and success if they happened to show up. It’s simply that I don’t need them.

I want to create things that matter to me. I want to make some tangible things such as art, but I want to create in the service of larger ideas. Things which are going to take me a long time to make clear to the world.

In a very real way, I am preaching Good News that will not be understood by most for a long time. I’m preaching of the Enlightenment. I’m preaching a rejection of nihilism and Postmodernism and materialism and greed. I’m preaching a gospel of love and community and meaning.

I’m preaching about finding life amidst a world ruled by death.

I once wanted to save the world through political action. Today, my dreams are about saving families and communities and individuals — for the purpose of living a human life that’s worth living.

I don’t even have to have a particular woman, even though I believed my life was over with that one. I have felt hurt and anguish and sorrow because I needed the love of someone in particular. But I wasn’t what she wanted, so I had to realize that my dream shouldn’t be for that one particular woman. No matter how much value I once believed she had for me, what I really need is someone who’s willing to fill a certain role in my life.

That’s the dream. To have love and family and community with someone. It doesn’t have to be her.

There are a lot of things in this life that hold us captive. One of the hardest things to understand is that we are often held captive by the things we believe we need the most. There are many times in our lives when we remain caught in misery because we don’t have the courage to break the chains binding us while we still can.

Earlier today, I read a quote — from an unknown source — that a friend posted online. It said, “I hope that one day you find the courage to break free before the chains start to feel comfortable and the cage becomes home.”

Almost anything can become a cage for us. It can be a relationship. It can be a dream. It can be a job. It can be the pangs of lost love.

We won’t achieve everything we believe we want in this life, but that often works out for the best. We often realize we would have been miserable if we had gotten what we wanted so badly. That’s been true for me more than once.

I love seeing the new outlines start to form around the dreams I’m pursuing now. I don’t see all the details, but things are slowly making more sense. I need a partner who wants to go down that path with me. And there are very few who have the desire or ability to share that dream.

Dreams are exciting and all-consuming while they’re alive. They can make live seem worth living. But when a dream dies — as so many of mine have — the worst thing in the world is to drag it forward out of a sense of obligation or a desire to show consistency.

Until we dump our dead dreams — the ones which have failed us — we can’t make room for the better ones that can help us get started down the paths we need to be following.

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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.

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