What kind of person are you if there’s not a word to define you?

By David McElroy · March 5, 2022

It’s always fascinating when people try to guess what I do for a living. It happened again Saturday afternoon when I was sitting with three young women. Two of them work at the restaurant where we were sitting and a third just happened to be there.

“I’m not sure what you do, but I’m certain you’re rich,” one of the women said. “You carry yourself like a rich person — like you’re totally confident and sure of yourself. My uncle is chief operating officer of a bank and you have that same sort of air about you that he does.”

I smiled to myself. Rich? Bank executive? How in the world had she come up with that? For me?

Another of the women had seen some of my photographs before, so she said she assumed I’m a professional photographer. The third one had never met me until today. She said I must be either a lawyer or a university professor.

After they had made their guesses, I first told them — as I often do — that I haven’t decided what I’m going to do when I grow up. They laughed. Then I was more serious.

I told them that I play with ideas. That’s what I do. Everything else I do with my life — even the parts I’m paid for now — are just trivia. The answer wasn’t what they expected, but it was the most accurate answer I could give.

I play with ideas. That’s what I do. That’s who I am. I just haven’t figured out how to get paid for it yet.

I’ve always hated bureaucratic forms that have a box on which I’m supposed to write what I do for a living. I’m confronted with that every time I fill out a tax return, for instance.

For most people, there’s some reasonable way to define who they are. Accountant. Firefighter. Grant writer. Salesperson. Clerk. Assistant manager. Nurse. Plumber. HR consultant.

Even for people who do a whole host of things, there are broad terms such as businessman or manager. But what about for me?

I was once a journalist. Then I started and owned publications. Was I a journalist or a businessman? I wasn’t sure. Then I was a newspaper publisher for a big company. Then a political consultant. For the last 10 years, I haven’t had a clue how to define who I really am.

If I absolutely must explain what I am today, I use this: “I’m a writer trying to make sense of a dysfunctional culture. I used to work in journalism and politics, but I now hate most journalism and all politics.”

“Writer” is such a broad term that it’s easy to use, but it says little. I’m not being paid to write anything these days, but it’s closer to my identity than anything for which I’m paid. Am I really a Realtor? Or the silly title I have with my company? It seems ridiculous. Of course not. I just go through the motions of those activities so I can eat and have a place to live.

(It’s also noteworthy that I’m not the sort of writer that the current advertising-driven media world really wants. If I write something which a certain group of people already believes, a lot of people will read it and recommend it to others. But when I write something which is far more important to me — such as the case in the last week or so when I wrote about escaping the inhumanity of a spiritually destructive culture — very few people will notice. My rule of thumb now is that the things which I believe are most important will be read by the fewest people.)

My ex-wife once sent me a book she found that she thought sounded like me. It was called “Thinking for a Living.” She told me that she didn’t know whether it was a good book, but that the concepts sounded just like me — because what I really did best, she said, was to synthesize ideas.

She explained this by saying that I was the best she had ever seen at taking unrelated ideas — maybe from entirely different fields, things nobody had put together — and synthesizing them in such a way as to develop an entirely new way of looking at things. She said I simply had a way of seeing things that nobody else saw — and I had a way of seeing answers nobody else come come up with.

So what does that make me? Even if you ignore the question of how I make money right now, what does this mean I am?

I tend to exasperate “normal” people.

“If I could do a fourth of what you can naturally do, I would be massively wealthy now,” one of my friends is fond of telling me.

Of course, this friend is motivated by making money, not by thinking or ideas or art or any of the impractical things that matter to me. He would be just as happy selling cars as he would be running a food distributorship or being a building contractor. The point to him is to make money. The specific activity is almost irrelevant to him.

My life would certainly be easier if I cared more about the pragmatic issues of making money. I do understand that I could do well at a thousand different things — if I could just care about them. Instead, I get lost in thoughts. I can’t help but ask, “What if…?”

I still need to find one effective channel for my thoughts and ideas. I need some way to sell the process that goes on inside my head. I’m not going to stop doing what I do — simply because I don’t know any other way to live — so I need to find some way to make it marketable.

I can call myself a writer. Maybe a filmmaker. If I’m really pretentious, I can even claim to be an artist. But whatever I claim to be, what I’m really doing is playing with ideas. There’s nothing in the world that’s as exciting or powerful as ideas, because ideas are what change the world.

And whether I like it or not, I’ll be playing with ideas — in one way or another — until the day I die. It’s just who I am.

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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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