I’m slowly learning how to be contented as an ordinary man

By David McElroy · October 23, 2025

When I was young, I wanted to be great. I wanted to be important, successful and powerful. I wanted to be put onto a pedestal, where I could get the adulation and approval I craved.

I wouldn’t have put it that way then, of course. I just thought I wanted the things my culture presented as normal goals for someone like me. (I understand now the degree to which being raised by a narcissistic father left me craving approval and attention.)

As I’ve gotten more emotionally healthy and psychologically mature, I’ve been surprised to find out that my desires in life have changed. It’s not that I’ve “given up.” It’s not that I’m settling for something easy after failing to achieve things I wanted.

My desires today are healthier and far more likely to make me happy. You see, I want to be ordinary. I want to be a good man. I want to be kind and loving and content with the joy of living an ordinary human life.

But I’ve recently discovered a fascinating paradox. As an ordinary man, I won’t have the things this world and our culture have always promised me. I won’t have wealth or power or adulation. But it turns out that the people who gain what the world and our culture promise won’t have what I have.

They won’t have the peace and contentment and joy of a man who’s living a simple and ordinary life.

This contradicts everything I grew up believing. It contradicts all that our culture teaches about success. But I believe it’s true.

I don’t believe that striving for more makes me content and I also don’t think that achieving more makes me content. This is true for everyone, even though it sounds crazy to someone brainwashed by our culture.

Contentment comes from being satisfied with what we have. Striving for more creates anxiety and discontentment.

But there’s more to the paradox. I benefit from the work of people who choose to chase the glittering gold of modern life. All progress in the world depends on people who are not satisfied with what they have. It depends on them working to develop new things and then striving to create more.

Improved lives for everyone ultimately comes because people who are unsatisfied with life strive and fight for success, even though they probably aren’t going to enjoy the fruits of what they create nearly as much as those of us who simply enjoy what they’ve created.

In this way, I’m far more content in a safe and modest house — with all the normal modern conveniences that other people’s striving has created — than are the people who get wealthy from those developments. The best of them and the luckiest of them will be wildly successful and wealthy, but they will almost never be satisfied with what they have.

It turns out that the people who give me the tools and modern progress that allow me to create my peaceful life can’t enjoy the peace they’ve made possible.

So I might urge you to discover the truth that I’ve found about how to be more content with life, even though I know human progress would stall if everyone made the same choice I’m making. But I don’t have to be concerned about that, because I know that very few will ever listen.

The vast majority will strive for money and power and all sorts of things that they believe they need to be happy. Some of them will become wildly rich. But if that’s where their hearts lie, they will never find the contentment that I’ve found by giving all of that up.

As long as my basic needs are met — through the service I need to perform for others — I’m going to be just fine with what little I have. I no longer want to be rich or successful or powerful. I’d like to find a way to be a good husband, a good father, a good writer — a good human being.

If the world must keep striving, let it. I’ll be here, living quietly, grateful for the peace their ambition will never buy.

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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?

For four years, Donald Trump’s supporters screamed that everything that went wrong was the fault of Joe Biden. They were sometimes right and they were sometimes delusional. (Anybody who knows me understands that I can’t stand Biden any more than I can stand Trump, just for different reasons.) But for two months, Trump has rampaged through U.S. political life — vandalizing pretty much everything in sight — and the vast majority of his supporters are silent at best. Many watch as he blows up the world economy and they make excuses for him. They’re in absolute denial, even about things that Trump is doing very intentionally. Anybody who understands economics and history knows that tariffs are a terrible idea from a pragmatic point of view. Anybody who values individual freedom knows that tariffs are massive taxes on individuals — and they’re a tool of political control over the ability of people to trade freely. Trump is the antithesis of everything which political conservatives stood for just a few years ago. It’s far past time for people who claim to be conservatives to reclaim the principles and values which they used to claim — and stop this mad man before he can accelerate the day when we experience economic and social collapse. Open your eyes to reality and reject this lying narcissist.

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