David McElroy

I’m happy to announce that I have a book coming out before the end of this year called “10 Signposts on the Road to Living Well in a Broken Culture.”

I can’t give you an exact date, because I’ve never self-published a book before. I have a good portion of the manuscript finished, but that’s only the first step. The copy has to be edited. The cover and pages have to be designed.

When it’s all said and done, I should have a paperback version plus a Kindle edition and an audiobook version.

Books such as this rarely sell many copies — even from “legitimate” publishers — so this is more of a project I’m doing because it’s important to me. This book represents the evolution of my thinking — personally and philosophically — over the last 20 years.

This book isn’t a guidebook or a “how to” self-help manual. It represents what I’ve learned as I’ve tried to make sense of a broken and dysfunctional culture. I don’t have any interest in telling anybody how to live. I’m not begging you to change your beliefs.

It’s simply a systematic examination of what I’ve learned. Ultimately, I’ve been trying to answer one central question:

How can a person live a meaningful life in a culture that has lost its sense of meaning?

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My face is contorted in terror and my mouth is wide open. I’m ready to scream that you’re in danger. That you’re on a speeding train which is about to go off a cliff. But no words come out, because I know you won’t understand my warning.

Imagine you desperately needed and wanted to warn someone that something terrible was about to happen, but the two of you spoke different languages. That’s what this feels like.

My words of warning can coming pouring out of my mouth, but almost nobody will hear. Those who do hear will shrug. Even the ones who find my words interesting — or who might suspect I might be right — will go right about their business. The show must go on.

No matter what I do, the grand entertainment of modern American culture will roll right on without me. This dysfunctional culture has no time to listen to something which can’t be presented in the form of entertainment.

And I’ve discovered that I don’t know how to entertain you while I beg you to learn an intellectual and cultural context which is more terrifying than entertaining.

I tried. I really did. But it just doesn’t work.

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Most people sense something is wrong.

They may not have language for it. They may not be able to explain it. But beneath the distractions, beneath the noise, beneath the endless scrolling and entertainment, there is a quiet unease — a feeling that something foundational has slipped.

We were told we were building the most advanced civilization in history. Scientific. Rational. Enlightened. Smarter than every generation that came before us.

So why does it feel so fragile?

For years, I believed the solution was better arguments. If something was wrong, it could be explained. If people misunderstood reality, clearer reasoning would fix it. If the culture drifted into confusion, the answer was more clarity.

I grew up believing in the power of direct language and linear logic. Declarative sentences. Cause and effect. If something was true, you could prove it.

But somewhere along the way, I began to notice that proof didn’t change much.

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