I’m struggling to bridge the gap between my need and my reality

This story is about me. Only me. It’s about my ego and insecurities and fears and needs.

I typically write what I think might be useful for others to know and understand, but this is different. It’s more like a diary entry. A confessional. A cry of frustration.

It’s the sort of thing I would address to a wife or partner or trusted companion — if I had a woman in that role. It’s my half of a conversation which I would need to have with someone who loved me and believed in me and was permanently a part of my life.

So this probably isn’t for you.

I’m struggling right now. In many ways, things are the best in my life that they’ve been for at least 20 years. I have stability and purpose again. I know where I want to go. I’m more clear about my values and my priorities than I’ve ever been in my life.

But I’m struggling with the gap between how things ought to be and the reality I see in front of me. And that gap terrifies me — because nobody lives forever.

Maybe I’m slow, but it’s taken me decades to figure out things I should have understood a long time ago. The different threads of my life have moved at different speeds and they’ve developed in their own ways.

The vocational side of me has taken a long and meandering path. I was once going to start a huge and successful company. I was driven and I planned to build a media empire. I went through years of discovery and change, culminating with the simple realization that I want none of the things that I spent more than a decade pursuing.

I don’t want a company. I don’t want a fleet of planes and armies of employees. I just want to make things that matter to me. I want to write and make media to express my artistic and intellectual priorities. And as long as I make a modest living at it, I’m perfectly content.

My emotional side was once perfectly happy to think about spending vast amounts of time building a company and being a successful and powerful man. I was in denial about what such a life would mean to my ability to be a good husband and father. I now realize that I am willing to sacrifice almost anything in order to have the family life that I imagine.

I don’t want to spend time away from home. I want to live with a wife who is my partner and friend. I want to raise children with her. I want her to be invested in the same ideas and creative pursuits that matter to me.

I want a family that is weird and smart and nerdy and creative and loving. And I am willing to accept a modest financial standard of living in order to provide that life for myself, for a wife and for any children I might be fortunate enough to have.

I also need an audience. I need applause, figuratively speaking. I need to be heard. This is where ego creeps in. I have a need to know that people like me — that they love my work and that my work plays an important role for some substantial group of people. I want to offer something to these people that makes them feel happier and wiser and more enlightened.

I want my work to be part of the spiritual, intellectual and emotional growth of these people. I don’t want them to like me just because I parrot what they already believe. I want the sort of audience that experiences my work and says, “I never thought about that before. This might really change the way I experience the world.”

If I could find a thousand such people — Kevin Kelly’s theoretical “1,000 True Fans” — I suspect that would be enough of an audience.

So I have this fantasy picture of my life. I have a wife who loves me and believes in me — and is willing to be part of my work as we build a family and live a modest and loving life. I have a core of people who are invested in my writing or films — and my work is seen and read widely enough to make a substantial difference to a tiny group of people who want to change a culture.

So why am I not living that life?

I should be clear about something here. What I’m expressing to you is not a lack of confidence. It’s not that I don’t believe the right woman could love me. It’s not that I don’t believe my work is good enough to make an impact. It’s not that I don’t believe it’s realistic to build what I’ve outlined. Instead, I see everything I envision as completely realistic and feasible.

But everything I want to do and every way I want my life to look runs contrary to what our culture teaches people to want. This means there are almost no people who share my values and my desires for the future — and it also means that I am in such a tiny minority that it’s almost impossible for me to find the minuscule number of people who might share my plans.

This is where it gets depressing, at least to me.

I can publish anything I want today. Nobody can stop me. I have a website which is available all over the world. People from dozens of countries visit this site each week.

But I have a vanishingly small audience. Back when I wrote political commentary which was geared toward a specific political niche, I had a much bigger audience. But all I was doing was doing different iterations of telling them what they already believed. The vast majority were just feeling better about themselves by reading someone confirm their beliefs again and again.

Today, social media is useless for spreading the sort of work that I want to make. I have a few dedicated readers who care about the things I want to talk about. Those people mean more to me than I can tell you. (As I said earlier, my ego needs an audience. I get discouraged without that audience.)

But social media is becoming one vast cesspool of two types of “content.” One type is people validating what other people already believe. (I can’t do that any more. It feels dishonest and useless.) The other type is short vertical video clips which have the intellectual value of a bubble gum wrapper.

I keep writing and publishing the things that seem important to me, though. Why? It’s simply because I don’t know how to live without writing and creating — doing the best work I know how to do — whether the audience is 10 people or 10 million people.

I make things because I must make things.

When I’m being pragmatic, I feel like a fool who’s obsessed with things that my better judgment says I should ignore — simply because there’s no audience for what I need to say. Only a fool invests so much time and effort in things nobody wants, yet I feel compelled to continue.

It often feels like the equivalent of publishing books that nobody other than me will ever read. It would be so much easier to emulate the media circus around me — on social media — but that feels viscerally wrong to me.

I do want to talk about ideas that matter, but I also want to make you laugh. I want to use humor — through satire — to make people see truth as I understand it in ways that entertain them. That’s what I did when I made my one short film nearly 20 years ago.

Mentioning this passage of time brings up the elephant in the room. I’m terrified that I’m running out of time to create this life I want and need.

If I had understood all that I’m telling you back around 2000 or 2005, I would have made radically different decisions. I had multiple options for who to marry — including one who would have been a great choice for the life I now know I want.

But at the time, I was still confused about what I was trying to achieve. I hadn’t given up all of my old egotistical need for worldly success. And I still had a lot of psychological growth I had to go through that was related to having grown up in a dysfunctional family with a narcissistic father and an absent mother.

I’ve taken decades to finally get emotionally healthy and philosophically clear about what I want. Does the right sort of woman still want to take a chance on my vision for the future and build a life with me? I don’t even know where to find her anymore.

Ideally, I would have been emotionally and psychologically healthy enough to understand what I now understand when I was young, but I wasn’t. Ideally, I would have been philosophically and intellectually mature enough to see past the culture around me and develop a vision for the future I now want — many years ago.

But reality didn’t play out that way.

I had a lot to learn when I was 20 and 30 and even 40. I had a lot of growth to go through. I had a lot of healing to experience. I even had to discard a lot of what I was once so certain about — in order to find things that now seem like timeless truths.

I feel more isolated than I’ve ever been, not because I don’t have people around me every day, but because there are remarkably few people who see the world the way I do. I also feel very isolated because the media landscape has become so dominated by brain-dead social media slop that there seems very little room for my sort of thinking to break through. And I feel isolated because I have no idea where there might be a woman who believes in the values and priorities I have — and who also wants to build a family with a man who’s starting the race decades after his peers did.

I feel like an architect who has been dithering for his entire life about how to design the building he wants to build — and then finally figures it out, only to find that the world around him might have changed so much that nobody wants the perfect building he has so meticulously laid out.

I’m frustrated. I’m terrified. I’m a little angry.

But I’m also hopeful. My mind is full of the possibilities that I can still create — the art, the family, the life.

I see where I need to be. What I need to be doing. How I need to be living and loving. And that seems so real that it hurts.

But I also see where I am. I feel like an obsessed man talking about a beautiful dream. I feel like some strange hermit who is looking for someone to share his dream and for an audience who sees a better way to live in a dysfunctional culture.

I’m looking at the reality around me and I’m also looking at the vision of where I need to be — and I am caught between hope and despair about how to bridge the gap between the two.

But I have to believe it’s still possible. Otherwise, I would have trouble finding the strength to continue struggling toward a future that’s still shrouded in the mists of possibility.