Would you have avoided mistakes if a psychic could’ve warned you?

By David McElroy · July 14, 2021

Think about the worst decision you’ve ever made — the one thing you know you should have done differently.

“If only someone could’ve warned me,” you might think. “If I had just known, everything would be different today.”

I’ve thought things similar to that. After things end in ways that make me unhappy, I tend to go back and find the one moment — and there usually is one moment — when I made a decision or took an action that caused what I’m unhappy about.

I’m prone to thinking how different things could be if I had a time machine to go back to that moment. But I wonder whether that’s true.

I found out this evening that a young woman who I casually know has gotten engaged. She hasn’t been dating the guy very long — and everyone who knows her seems to have very negative impressions of the way he treats her.

As she stood there this evening showing me her ring, I knew better than to express my misgivings. She wouldn’t listen — just as I suspect I wouldn’t have listened if someone had warned me before my own major mistakes.

I like to think I make good decisions. Maybe you do, too.

I have a rather arrogant narrative that I tell myself. You see, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past. I’m good at looking at those old mistakes and drawing lessons from them. But I like to think I’ve finally reached the point that I wouldn’t fall for the same sorts of errors that have plagued me in the past.

Of course, I had this same notion about myself when I was 25, then again at 30. And again at 40. At every step along the way, I had the impression that I’d finally reached the point that my decisions would bring me success and happiness thereafter.

That hasn’t always worked out so well.

My newly engaged friend from earlier this evening was just telling me recently about how she had made horrible decisions with her relationships in the past, both friendships and romances. She comes from a very dysfunctional family and knows that she’s desperately looking for approval and validation.

But knowing that hasn’t stopped her from quickly latching onto an abusive man — simply because he knows how to give her the approval and validation she needs. Her past has basically programmed her to make this bad decision.

I suspect she will eventually regret this engagement. Maybe they’ll never marry. Or maybe they’ll marry and then she will regret it. There are dozens of specific ways in which it could play out. But let’s assume for a moment that it blows up at some point and she eventually wishes she had made a different decision.

Would she be ready to make a better decision the next time? Or would she simply find a new way to let her old childhood programming lead her astray?

When I’ve made my major mistakes, it’s always been because I’ve doubted myself and not trusted my instincts. I internalized the voice of my father — telling me that I was going to make a mistake by trusting my instincts, that I should act as he would have acted instead.

And by listening to the fear and self-doubt that came with that voice, I’ve failed to do things which I now think would’ve made me happier and more successful.

In truth, I believe that I should get past self-doubt and trust my gut. If something tells me to ignore conventional wisdom and take a gamble on a particular woman or a new opportunity, I should listen instead of letting doubt stop me.

So my judgment says I should actually listen to what I want — to what my gut says — for the major decisions. I suspect this would lead to better outcomes. I really do.

And when I say that, I think I have it all figured out — until I remember that I’ve felt the same way before. And I wonder whether we ever really learn from our mistakes.

At this point, all I can say is that I’m going to listen to my gut. I’m going to choose the things I really want — and hope that I’m right.

I don’t know if my decisions will be better than those I’ve made in the past, but at least I’ll finally reach the point that I’m no longer lamenting, “If only I’d done what I really wanted to do.”

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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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