I’m trying to live for what I love instead of attacking what I hate

By David McElroy · October 18, 2026

I’ve discovered that I can’t be free until I stop telling other people why they’re wrong.

By the standards of my culture, that sounds like nonsense. I’ve lived my entire life doing just the opposite of this. I’ve invested a tremendous amount of time and energy and effort in “correcting” other people.

I’ve invested a lot of time in explaining why political coercion is wrong. I’ve invested a tremendous amount of energy explaining why certain people and groups and ideas are evil. I still believe all those things. I haven’t changed my mind about my morals or ethics or philosophical reasoning.

But I’ve slowly realized something that terrified me. The time I spend fighting the things I hate — and the time I spend explaining why certain people or groups are wrong — is the time I keep myself trapped in a prison cell of my own making.

This is a paradox, but it’s changed my life.

The truth is that there is an unending supply of things to complain about in the world — things that deserve criticism and attacks. All sorts of people are wrong about all sorts of things.

There’s Trump. There are the Democrats. There are other socialists and fascists and control freaks of various kinds. I can explain to you — in great detail — why each of these groups is wrong or evil.

There are people who use religion and ideology and social philosophy to control other people. Many of those people make me angry because of the ways in which they hurt other people.

But I can’t make my life about explaining why other people are wrong. I can’t make my life about attacking people, even if they are terrible people.

Freedom doesn’t come from being angry at others and screaming about how wrong they are. All that does — at best — is make some portion of the public angry at the same things you’re angry about. But it doesn’t point people at the positive truths that matter.

For years now, I’ve been struggling to point more and more toward things that matter — beauty, truth, meaning and love — and less toward the things that merely attract attention and whip up righteous anger.

For years, I couldn’t see where my focus should be, so I spent a lot of time and effort being part of the arguments. And I still struggle with it sometimes. Every now and then, I feel the need to strike out in anger at the people who I see as blind and evil and stupid.

There’s an undercurrent of arrogance and delusion in that, too, because part of me is still so naive as to believe that if I just explain things clearly, every person of good will must inevitably see things my way.

That’s absurd.

I now understand that this behavior doesn’t do other people any good. The people who already agree with me might enjoy seeing someone express what they believe, but the people who don’t agree with us are going to go right on ignoring us — and treating us like lunatics who won’t shut up.

(Do you really think that’s changing hearts and minds? I don’t.)

I used to tell myself that I had a duty to spread the ideas in which I believed, but I realize now that the ideas are already out there for anybody who wants to find them.

I think I have a deeper understanding of what real freedom is today. I’ve seen that fighting against an evil can leave you enslaved to a battle that is going to consume you and free no one.

And here’s the real paradox.

You can be entirely correct about the evil you’re opposing and still be wrong to devote your life to fighting it. That’s not because the evil doesn’t matter. It’s not because you’ve changed your mind about what’s right and what’s wrong.

It’s because you’ve allowed the things you oppose to determine what you think about, what you write about and how you experience your own life. It’s because you’ve allowed your life to be consumed by what you hate instead of living a life of love and generosity and freedom that other people might want to emulate.

When you live that way, you’re allowing the people you’re fighting to have power over you forever.

I used to need to show other people that I was right about the things I felt powerfully about. But I now know that the satisfaction of being right isn’t the same thing as the satisfaction of living well.

I’m trying to occupy my mind with things that I think matter:

Beauty. Truth. Meaning. Love.

But those aren’t simply alternatives to anger. They’re things that require a different orientation toward life.

If my attention is constantly occupied by the ugliness of the world, I have less capacity to recognize its beauty. If I’m constantly identifying enemies, I have less emotional energy available for loving people. If I’m constantly trying to prove that other people are wrong, I can lose sight of the positive truths I want to promote.

Here’s the thing that was probably hardest for me to accept. I don’t have to defeat the things I detest in order to build a life around the things I love.

That doesn’t mean pretending evil doesn’t exist. It means refusing to allow evil the power to control my thoughts or organize my life.

My old self would have feared that remaining silent about the things I hate in the world would have been the same as abandoning a fight because I’ve decided my enemies were right or that I couldn’t respond to them.

I now know that’s an ego problem.

I’ve abandoned a fight that I once saw as a holy struggle simply because I’ve begun to understand that fighting the battle won’t give anyone the life I believe we deserve.

And I now understand that I can live a good life whenever I choose to do so, even in a culture that’s unfree and often evil.

And living a good life — with loving values — can help far more people than any amount of yelling about why other people are wrong.

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Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

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