David McElroy

I had a disturbing realization Sunday. I have no motivation right now.

I was reading a book which lays out a detailed plan for achieving success in a particular business field. It’s something I’ve recently started pursuing with the encouragement of a friend who’s in the business. I should be able to make a lot of money doing it. But the writer brought up a foundational question: Why are you doing this? What’s your motivation?

That’s when it hit me that I haven’t had any motivation for years. I’ve had brief periods during which I started feeling motivated — only to have it fade immediately when a woman left my life. That’s when I realized the obvious. I feel no motivation when I’m alone.

I haven’t had anyone in my life who I wanted to achieve things for — and I seem to be as weak without that as Samson was without his hair.

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Do you want to know where bad public policy comes from? Do you want to know why governments keep getting bigger and bigger, despite you wanting smaller government? Here’s how it happens:

1) People consume “news” from media sources which give them no useful context and which lead them to believe scary narratives.

2) People feel intense grief and anger at the negative facts which support the narratives they have been led to believe.

3) Those people then selectively choose which facts to believe and which to ignore — based on the narratives they have been given.

4) Those people increasingly feel a strong emotional desire to “fix things,” because they’re scared and angry and hurt.

5) Politicians offer them simple-minded solutions which accept the negative narratives as obvious truth. Keep Reading

Not everything I believe is rational, but most of it is.

Most of my world is solid, material and fairly predictable. Almost everything has an explanation if I look long enough.

But as much as I hate to admit it, there are things which I can’t explain — and I often find hidden meaning in those unexplained things. Some of those inexplicable things have felt holy at times. Others of them have felt evil. Some have felt ambiguous and baffling. (I have a collection of stories which I rarely share.) But something in me looks for meaning in these unexplained experiences.

I know this is a common human trait. (Apophenia is the psychological term.) I’m rational enough to know I might be looking for meaning in things which are really just random and meaningless noise in some quantum field. But I’ve had two experiences this week which leave me feeling as though someone’s trying to tell me something.

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