I don’t know how to be popular, and that hurts in a social world

By David McElroy · May 29, 2023

I was a terribly naive child. I was out of touch with social reality.

As my family moved from city to city, I was never among the popular kids at any school. I told myself it was because I was always the new kid everywhere, but some part of me knew better. Some of my peers always had something that made others like them. I seemed to rub people the wrong way — and I never knew why.

Despite this, I expected to be a leader. I knew I was smart and I was able to do things that few of my classmates could do. I thought that would take me far in this world. My childhood goal — a very serious one — was to be elected president of the United States.

As a teen, I had leadership roles at school and at church, but it wasn’t because my peers liked me. It was simply because I knew how to get things done. And when push came to shove, I was handed power and leadership when things needed to get done. But it didn’t make me popular. And I knew that.

I’m decades beyond those confused early expectations, but a part of me has never escaped them. I thought when I became an adult, competence would matter. Nothing else. Sometimes it did, but I often still can rub people the wrong way. Even when I knew how to be popular, I didn’t want to be.

And now I realize that I’m doomed to failure in the media world if I rely on popularity that comes from social media. Whatever it is that social media wants from a man, I don’t have it. And that means I have to make some changes.

I first joined Facebook years ago because a girlfriend asked me to. I didn’t see the point. But after I started publishing this website 12 years ago, I discovered that social media was the new way to become known. We were supposed to “connect” with our “followers” and “friends.”

So I played that game for a few years. I pandered to an audience. I wrote what they wanted to hear. I collected “friends” on Facebook the way sugar water catches flies. I soon had 5,000 “friends” — the limit for a personal account — and I promoted my links. Facebook’s algorithm at the time still made that easy — and I soon had thousands of readers every day. It wasn’t a huge audience, but I saw it as a platform on which I could build something bigger.

But I eventually rebelled against what I was doing. I couldn’t just keep pandering to readers by telling them what I knew they already agreed with. That seemed pointless. So I quit doing it.

I stopped writing about politics. I slowly deleted or blocked most of the fake friends I had collected. (I’m down to about 450 now and that still seems like too many.) And as I’ve started the new YouTube show, it’s suddenly dawned on me that I can no longer count on social media to build an audience for me.

Part of that is because I don’t want to play the role that social media wants us to play. I challenge people’s ideas instead of saying what I know they’ll agree with. When I do agree with most people, I rarely find it worth talking about, because what’s the point of saying what other people are already saying?

When I started the YouTube show, there was still a part of me which naively believed I could use social media to build some popularity, just as I did a decade ago. But I’ve realized that social media has changed — and I’ve changed, too.

Social media today is more about “social” and less about anything that I consider to be “media.”

It’s the online equivalent of middle school. The generic content which is posted is just filler to reflect the social status of the users. A socially popular person’s low-quality content is going to be more popular than thoughtful content from someone without social status. I’ve known this for a long time and it’s annoyed me, but I’m having to change my thinking.

For a long time, I thought this was just a flaw in the way social media worked. But I finally realize this isn’t a bug. It’s designed that way, because the platforms care only about engagement, not about good content finding an audience. As long as people are engaging — happily chatting or sharing recipes or arguing about idiotic beliefs — the social media platform makes money.

There is no social media platform which is in business to help me build my own business. I can either be popular by the shallow and idiotic standards of a dumbed-down system or else I’m going to be more and more marginalized on such a platform. And now that I understand this, I also understand that I have to find ways to build a media brand without the help of social media.

I don’t fit into what the social media algorithms want today, so I can’t help those companies become more profitable. Therefore, I’m useless to them, which means I would be an idiot to put my success at their mercy.

In some ways, I’m still a naive child. I still have the naive belief that competence and reason and decency matter. But if I want to play a game where those things are valued, I have to build an audience in a way that doesn’t require me to pander to a base-level popularity that I’ll never be capable of.

I’m never really going to be the popular kid. I’m always going to rub some people the wrong way. But there is an audience out there — somewhere — that would value what I know how to make. I need to find that audience.

That starts with admitting that social media is no longer the way for someone like me to build an audience. I’m not making a show to find shallow popularity. I’m making a show for you.

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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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