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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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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