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 Those “childish things” have been replaced by more mature desires.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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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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