What really matters in life? Hardly any of the things we worry about

By David McElroy · October 3, 2011

I have a long history of running away from the things I need the most. I used to assume I was the only one who engaged in this ritual of self-sabotage, but I’ve discovered that plenty of others do it, too — standing on the brink of achieving what they need and then pushing it away. Why do some of us do that?

I’ve talked before about how fear keeps most of us from doing the things we want to try, but I’ve also talked about how we can overcome fear to become the people we want to be. What is it that keeps so many of us confused about what’s important in life? Why do so many people end up stumbling through life aimlessly, with no apparent purpose other than to get finished with it?

It seems to me that many people are confused about the purpose of their lives. They’re either trying to live materialistic lives by other people’s standards or else they’ve ended up somewhat nihilistic, feeling that life has no purpose or meaning. Both approaches are missing the point of living, in my view.

I’m thinking about this for an odd reason. I watched a documentary about King Tut Sunday afternoon, and it left me thinking about the meaning of life.

As I looked at the video of this mummified Egyptian pharaoh, I found myself wondering whether his life mattered. We certainly know of him today, but until his tomb was discovered in the 1920s, history had pretty much forgotten him. Even though he was buried with great wealth — and obviously had great power before he died — his life left nothing of substance to show for it. Other than having a fancy tomb, the body could just as easily have been that of one of his servants. His wealth and power meant absolutely nothing in the end.

The biggest preoccupation of modern society seems to be the struggle to gain the wealth and power that Tutankhamun had. What is there that makes modern people think it will matter any more for them in the end than it did for Tutankhamun?

Other people have avoided falling in love with the plastic materialistic suburban lifestyle, but they’re still just as unhappy and unfulfilled. Their lives seem hopeless and empty, because they’re sleepwalking through life simply waiting for it to end. Is it any surprise that so many of this group end up killing themselves?

So what then is it that gives life meaning? I’d say it’s the same thing that religions and philosophies of various kinds have taught for centuries. However you dress it up and make it complicated, any real meaning we get out of life comes from the people we love and who we allow to love us. If you’re experiencing love and expressing love — real love — in healthy ways, I don’t think you can possibly feel that life is pointless. And if you’re feeling that your life has no purpose, there’s something wrong in your life, either in your ability to experience love or in the ways that you have your life structured. Because love gives your life meaning — every time.

There are many types of love. As a Christian, I have to put love of God at the top of the list, but loving other people can take many forms. (In Matthew 22:34-40, Jesus even indicated that all of God’s law depends on loving God and loving others.) Different people are going to see loving others in different ways. Sometimes it’s going to be romantic love. Other times, it’s going to be the love between parents and children. Or between close friends. And in still other times, we might even show love for people who we don’t even personally know. But in whatever ways are meaningful to us, we gain purpose by loving — as long as we’re loving in a way that is genuine and right for us, rather than in a forced and artificial way. (I’ve known plenty of people who worked long hours through their churches, but didn’t get any meaning out of it, because they were doing something out of a sense of duty. The same is true in family relationships and marriages where something is missing.)

We all know instinctively that we want to be loved and we all know instinctively that we want to love others, so what is it that keeps us living meaningless lives instead of loving in genuine ways. Some of us have come from dysfunctional family backgrounds where we were confused about what love was, so we have trouble recognizing it. Others of us have issues with self-esteem that make us fear we’re not going to be loved by the right people. For those facing issues such as those, the singer Sam Phillips speaks of the tendency to run from the love we need (or even anything we really need) in her song, “Libera Me”:

Dreams that I can’t trace
Pull my heart away
From love I long to taste
Why do I run away
When I come face to face with anything I need

I am so afraid
If I keep hoping
That there will come a day
When my heart is open
That you will walk away
Like you were never there

And I don’t know all the truth
From the lying
But I know that I need you
Because I am dying
From being held by hell
In a cell of blinding fear

For those of us who have lived a life of sabotaging ourselves, we’re really trying to avoid love. Maybe we don’t think we deserve love. Maybe we’re afraid of what others will see when they really know who we are. Maybe we’re afraid we’ll disappoint those who want to love us. There are a million different excuses, but for those of us who have learned the fine art of self-sabotage, almost any excuse will do. Until we learn what we’re doing — and why — we’re going to “run away when [we] come face to face with anything [we] need.”

But that’s the bad news. There’s good news as well. You don’t have to keep living in ways that keep you separated from love. If you’re living for money and power, you can re-arrange your priorities. If you’re living without purpose, you can get honest with yourself about what’s missing from your life — and then get serious about making changes, however painful those changes might be. If you’re sabotaging yourself, you can face your fears of not being good enough. You can choose to take risks and allow the right people to love you, partly by being loving yourself. Whatever your situation, you can take steps to experience love. You just have to get very, very honest with yourself — and you have to be willing to pay any price to get your life where it needs to be.

I can’t say whether anyone will remember me after I’m dead and buried. I don’t want to be like King Tut, so insignificant that he was forgotten until his tomb was found buried in the sand. I want to love enough and give enough that I can leave a mark on enough hearts and in enough places in the world that the love I give will live on in different forms, whether they know it came from me or not.

Don’t ever make the mistake of believing your life has no real purpose. If you do that, you’re telling the God who put your here that He made a mistake in saddling you with this life. You have a purpose. It’s to learn how to love and to learn how to accept love. As Australian Christian speaker Christine Caine says, ‎”The purpose of life is not to arrive at death safely.”

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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.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

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