When you make your life choices, you also pick the consequences

By David McElroy · April 9, 2022

If you’re miserably unhappy and you hate where you are in life, I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is that you can’t blame somebody else for your problems. Not forever, anyway. The good news is that nobody else can stop you from fixing your life by changing your future. Starting today.

The choices you made a year ago — or five years ago or even longer ago — have given you the consequences you face today. Even if someone abused you in the past or messed you up through dysfunctional childhood programming, there comes a time when you can take control.

If you haven’t realized this until now, today can be the most important day of your life — because today can be the day when you take responsibility for changing the things which make you unhappy.

It took me decades to learn this lesson. I was so damaged by a dysfunctional childhood that I was in complete denial. Even though I often felt that something was wrong, I didn’t understand what had gone wrong. My confusion and the accumulated emotional damage caused me to drift in life. I allowed my life to fall apart. And it was only through serious self-reflection — and good therapy — that I learned what had happened.

From that point forward, the mess was mine. I could explain the past through the lens of what happened in my childhood, but I know that what I have today is because of my own choices. I’ve made some good choices and some bad choices, but I freely accept that my choices are creating my consequences. For both good and bad.

It’s easy to find ways to avoid responsibility for where you are in life.

Your parents abused you. You had bad luck in business. Your husband (or wife) turned out to be a narcissistic loser. Your health hasn’t been good. A friend betrayed you. Or you were disabled in an accident.

Every one of these problems could be heartbreaking. Any one of them might happen to you through no fault of your own. But no matter what has happened to you, these tragedies can simply be the beginning of your story. How you react to these setbacks will determine whether you are defined by your tragedy or by how you reacted to tragedy.

This won’t fix what’s wrong with every life. Some people die from their tragedies. But if you are still alive — and still have the power to make your own choices — you have the power to write the next chapter of your story. You have the power to make different choices — which can have different consequences.

When terrible things happen in the broader world around us, it’s easy to say, “But nobody could have known that was going to happen.” Sometimes, that’s true. Other times, it’s a convenient excuse we give ourselves for following blindly after what the culture around us is doing.

It’s obvious to me that our own culture is becoming more dangerous every year. It seems to me that anyone who’s paying attention can see the dangers of blindly following the comfortable patterns that our society has taught us.

It’s obvious to me that our monetary system has to collapse at some point. It’s clear that the social order has become dysfunctional and chaotic, leading to increasing physical danger and eventual collapse. It’s obvious that the political system is going to implode and collapse into warring camps.

If you say there’s nothing you can do — and you just wait for everything to collapse — few people will blame you when you say you can’t be blamed for what happened. But if you believe you see what’s coming and take actions to prepare yourself — maybe by moving to somewhere less likely to face the same collapse — your future can be different than if you do nothing.

If your relationships causes you misery, you might not be able to control what got you to this point — but you can change your future. You can cut ties with people who are dysfunctional or dangerous. Even if you made bad choices that brought you bad consequences now, nobody says this is where you have to end up.

If you think about it, you can easily come up with circumstances under which bad things can happen to good people. And your life could be ruined — or even ended — by one of those circumstances.

But even if that’s true, it’s still useful to believe you can change things. As long as you’re alive and still have power to start over, it should be liberating to know you can make new choices. It should be exhilarating to know that your new choices can bring you new consequences.

You might have to start over several times. You might have a lot of lessons to learn. You might have to reject many of your previous choices as you learn and grow. But if you keep making better choices — and hold yourself to ever-higher standards — the time will quite likely come when you have consequences that you like.

If you hate where you are in life right now, nobody can stop you from starting over. Nobody can stop you from making new choices that will give you different consequences — that will give you the kind of life you’ve only dreamed about.

From this day forward, take full responsibility for your choices. It can change everything.

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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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