Search for ‘more’ can leave us craving what we haven’t found

By David McElroy · January 30, 2021

I knew Laura had a 6-year-old daughter, but I didn’t know the details. At dinner tonight, she told me her story.

“I never had any emotional connection with her father,” she said. “He’s a decent man and he tries to be in her life, but there was never any feeling between us. I was always just desperate for attention from a man — so I kept getting it however I could.”

Laura is 28 now. She’s a strikingly attractive blue-eyed blonde with a successful career in management. But she admitted to me tonight that she has always tried to find something that was missing from her life.

“When I was little, my daddy told me that I was a mistake,” she said. “I was an accident. They didn’t want me. My mom admitted it was true, but it mostly affected me with my dad, especially since he had another ‘accident’ a year after me with another woman. I craved his attention and couldn’t get enough to make me feel like I was loved. So when teen-age boys started wanting me, that was my way to feel loved. I kept looking for more and more — but I never found what I was looking for.”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my own pursuit of “more.” Laura’s ways of pursuing something more was different than my ways have been, but our motivations haven’t been so different — and this is more common in our society than any of us like to believe.

It’s a common dilemma in our culture. The pursuit of more — more of something we can’t quite identify — is killing us, yet we die when we finally stop pursuing more.

Just like Laura, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

The things I believe will satisfy me rarely do. I always find myself wanting more, but maybe I’m chasing more of the wrong things. It’s our cravings and longings that keep us moving forward in life, but craving the wrong things — or pursuing the wrong things because we’re confused about what we’re really craving — is self-destructive.

In his haunting song, “Traveling Alone,” singer/songwriter Jason Isbell refers to his past — when he was lost in addictions — as himself having been “strangled by my appetite.” Most of us are similarly hurting ourselves one way or another — as we desperately chase the next thing which we hope will make us happy.

But if we give up on trying to fill our needs, we stagnate and die. For most people in modern culture, it’s a mad race to find one thing or another — always something more — all of which fail to make us happy, followed by eventual lethargy and boredom and depression when we give up on life. That’s when nihilism sets in, even for people who don’t know what the word means.

The pursuit of more in our culture leads us to emptiness but the lack of such pursuit leads to death. That’s a paradox that leads a lot of people to believe life has no pursue and no meaning. But as Christian songwriter Terry Scott Taylor writes in a song he wrote for the band Daniel Amos (“Ribbons & Bows“), life is full of such mysteries:

Love is a question mark
Life’s in a shadow box
God hides himself sometimes
Inside a paradox

We are created to have basic needs which must be fulfilled. Just as we need food and water to survive, we also need love and connection to find peace. That’s a complex need and it’s further complicated by the traumatic experiences of the human life, even more for some than others.

I lived for many years without understanding what I was looking for. I pursued a number of different things — which I’ve outlined for you here before — for many years before I realized how damaged I had been by things which were missing from my life.

Some people are eager to explain it all as a need to find God. Ultimately, God is the source of the things which we need and crave — even though we rarely realize that — but it doesn’t mean that finding God or joining a church is going to fix everything.

In fact, for a lot of people, organized religion is a place to hide from the deeper and more powerful spiritual experiences they’re looking for.

I’ve chased “more” as a religious experience. I even served on a church staff when I was young and almost went into the ministry. I’ve chased more by trying to be successful. I’ve chased more by trying to be famous and loved and praised by people who don’t even know me. I’ve chased relationships which I hoped could finally make me feel loved and wanted and understood.

I can tell you a lot of things which haven’t worked for me. And more hauntingly, I can tell you things which I believe would have a chance of helping if I could find them. But it’s still a story of longing. A story of craving. Of appetite. It’s a story of craving something more — something which I can almost reach out and touch at times.

But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. And on some terrifying nights when I feel close to hopelessness — such as tonight — I fear that I never will.

Note: If you’ll look below, you’ll find two short videos which comment on this search for more in similar ways. “Happiness” is a very “in your face” presentation of modern culture as a dangerous rat race in which we’re chasing happiness that’s being sold to us in forms that never quite bring what we want. “More” is a more nuanced look at the same issue, depicting a man who’s full of fire to achieve something seeing his life devolve into something entirely different as he achieves success — only to discover that what he was looking for was in something simple that he gave up long ago. These are both excellent, but “More” is one of my favorite short films. Its haunting music makes it even more effective.

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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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