David McElroy

The truths that matter most in life cannot be proven.

I know that love is real, but I can’t prove it. I am absolutely certain that some things in this world are indescribably beautiful. Painfully beautiful. I know those things matter in ways that I can’t explain or understand. I’m certain that there is a reality beyond the physical world I can see and touch. I know there’s a creator — who I experience as God — who is just as real as anything I can touch or see or hear.

I can’t prove any of these things, but I know they’re true.

For me, they’re not theories or hopes or abstract concepts. They’re facts about reality. All of these things are part of my knowledge — but it’s “irrational knowledge.”

Maybe “non-rational knowledge” would be more precise, but I adopted this phrase from a distinction that Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy made between rational and irrational knowledge. Rational knowledge is what we get from science and other sorts of experimentation with the physical world. Irrational knowledge is what we feel as though we just know — through intuition, gut feeling, faith, whatever you want to call it.

My version of irrational knowledge might be different from yours. And that’s OK. But when we look at human groups around the world and over long periods of time, we find that some shared intuitions about irrational knowledge are pretty widespread.

Rational knowledge helps us to survive and to live in prosperity. Irrational knowledge feeds our hearts and gives us purpose and meaning.

The longer I live, the more I value meaning and the less I value prosperity.

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I felt angry, but more than anything, I felt powerless.

All I was trying to do was set up an account with a new company that my suburb had contracted to pick up our trash. The service provider has changed several times in the 11 years I’ve lived in my house. I normally just start getting a bill from a different company, but it didn’t work that way this time.

The new provider was a large national company. I saw its new trash containers show up for all of my neighbors, but mine never came. When I called the company, I was told that my phone number matched a local address that I’d never heard of. The only choice I was offered was to pay the bill for that address.

When I called from my office phone, I was sent straight to voicemail and nobody ever called back. When I called the city to ask for help, I was told to call the company. There was nothing they could do.

There is no local office for the company — and nobody would return my calls.

I went for months without trash pickup. Nothing changed until a different company took over the contract. I now have trash pickup again. It feels like a huge win that they’ll at least take my money.

This entire mess is just one tiny incident in a growing collection of ways in which I feel I’ve lost control of my life — in big ways and tiny ways — to faceless companies, indifferent bureaucrats and bored gatekeepers.

These people have more and more power over my life. I’m feeling powerless.

And I’m angry about it.

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I did something radical last night. I turned my iPhone off.

I haven’t slept without my phone turned on and within easy reach since I got my first iPhone — in June 2007. I activate its “do not disturb” mode every night. But every time I wake up for a few minutes — or longer — I’m checking for notifications and messages and emails and whatever else I can find.

For almost 20 years, I’ve slept next to a small mobile computer that has ruled my life. 

At 3:30 a.m. — Sunday night, Monday morning — I was trying to get to sleep and having little luck. I had been in bed for almost two hours. I had too much on my mind that I was going to do Monday. I kept thinking about the people who might call, the text messages I might have waiting and a dozen other things that could be waiting for me each time I woke up.

Suddenly, I rebelled against this electronic tether to the outside world. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to wonder what notifications might be waiting for me.

I hesitated. The idea of shutting it off felt wrong. But I finally reached over and slid the control to turn off the phone.

For the first time in years, I felt free. Just a little bit.

And then I slept peacefully.

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