My life will matter only if I can show love and meaning to others

By David McElroy · January 6, 2026

When I die, nobody is going to care what I did with my life.

They’re not going to care about the achievements I was once so proud of. They’re not going to remember the talent that once impressed me so much about myself. Nobody is going to know or care what my IQ was.

The only thing people will remember about me — if they remember anything at all — is how I’ve made them feel. The only way I’m going to matter to others is if I’ve somehow shown genuine love to them or helped them find meaning in their own lives.

I’ve recently realized that I’ve had it all wrong for a long time. I’ve been letting my ego get in the way of being the person I need to be. I understand how that happened — and I’ll tell you about that in a minute — but the bottom line is that I’ve been chasing the wrong things.

I’ve wanted to be a star. I’ve wanted to be important. I craved the feeling of mattering to others, so I’ve unconsciously pursued a kind of success that would matter only to the wounded heart of my hidden inner child.

For a long time, I’ve struggled with understanding what I’m trying to do — with writing, film, video, art. Without realizing it, I was allowing myself to be held back by emotional baggage from childhood.

I wanted very visible success. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted you to admire me and love me and praise me. And I see now that this ego dysfunction was getting in the way of what I need to be doing.

I have some important things I need to say to this world — at least to the people who see the world as I do — and my need to be admired has gotten in the way of what I need to say. Right now, I’m trying to set aside my bruised ego so that I might be able to make a difference in the world around me. At least for some small number of you.

I’m having to learn some more humility. That seems like a lifelong pattern. Maybe I’m a slow learner.

When I was young, I was pretty impressed with myself. What were the words I expected to be applied to my life? Genius. Talent. Success. Fame. Glory.

I understand that this need for self-glorification came entirely from a wounded ego. I felt terrible about myself as a child, so this is the way I compensated. I lived with it for so long that it became invisible to me.

As a child, I felt weak. I felt powerless. I felt unimportant. I felt shame. I didn’t have words for all those things, but I recognize them today in the wounds I hid back then — wounds that I’ve carried with me all my life.

When I felt those ways — as an immature child — I turned to the only things that seemed to make me feel good about myself. Intelligence. Talent. Competence. Achievement.

I pursued all those things and made them my identity. I tried to make them fill the hole created by the shame and humiliation I felt. Somehow, I was going to show everyone. They were going to admire me. They were going to praise me. But no matter what I did, it was never enough.

I’ve been like a preacher who cared more about making himself popular and loved and admired than he cared about the sheep who were supposed to be his flock. But it’s finally gotten through my thick skull that the message matters far more than the messenger.

I know how I could be popular and successful in today’s media environment. I would need to be an entertainer who tells people what they want to hear. But that is a shallow and empty path for someone who wants to make a difference in the world. I can’t do it. And I’ve realized that I can’t deliver the message that matters to me and be a star.

I can be a successful and popular “star” who’s the center of attention — or I can be a humble servant delivering an unpopular message I believe people need to hear. I can’t do both. To save my own sanity — and to be the man I need to be — I have to “preach” a message that almost nobody is going to listen to.

This culture is hopelessly dysfunctional. For many reasons, I believe we are doomed as a society. Things are going to get much worse before they get better. I don’t believe there’s anything we can do now to change that. I don’t look forward to it. I dread what life might be like when it collapse gets here.

Most of the people of our culture are so enmeshed in the cultural dysfunction that their personal lives are just as diseased and dysfunctional as the larger culture is. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I believe it’s possible to walk away from the lies of our culture. I believe it’s possible to rediscover values and principles which used to enrich the lives of individuals with good hearts and sound minds.

I believe it’s possible for you and for me to live entirely different lives — of love, peace, belonging, freedom — in the midst of these troubled times. But that will require us to change ourselves. It will require rejecting much of what seems normal and acceptable in our culture.

It will mean looking to the past to rediscover some things of eternal value and objective truth.

Very few people want to hear anything like this, but it’s the message I need to deliver. And that’s what I’m going to do.

I don’t know if anybody will listen. I know it won’t make me popular. It won’t make me a star. But maybe some of us can find genuine love and meaning together. Maybe.

If something in you aches for meaning, I hope you’ll walk this path with me. We won’t change the world — certainly not in the short term — but we can change the worlds inside us. And we can change the lives of those we touch.

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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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