{"id":40861,"date":"2026-10-18T02:13:57","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T07:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=40861"},"modified":"2026-10-18T02:13:57","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T07:13:57","slug":"im-trying-to-live-for-what-i-love-instead-of-attacking-what-i-hate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/?p=40861","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m trying to live for what I love instead of attacking what I hate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve discovered that I can\u2019t be free until I stop telling other people why they\u2019re wrong.<\/p>\n

By the standards of my culture, that sounds like nonsense. I\u2019ve lived my entire life doing just the opposite of this. I\u2019ve invested a tremendous amount of time and energy and effort in \u201ccorrecting\u201d other people.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve invested a lot of time in explaining why political coercion is wrong. I\u2019ve invested a tremendous amount of energy explaining why certain people and groups and ideas are evil. I still believe all those things. I haven\u2019t changed my mind about my morals or ethics or philosophical reasoning.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve slowly realized something that terrified me. The time I spend fighting the things I hate \u2014 and the time I spend explaining why certain people or groups are wrong \u2014 is the time I keep myself trapped in a prison cell of my own making.<\/p>\n

This is a paradox, but it\u2019s changed my life.<\/p>\n

The truth is that there is an unending supply of things to complain about in the world \u2014 things that deserve criticism and attacks. All sorts of people are wrong about all sorts of things.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s Trump. There are the Democrats. There are other socialists and fascists and control freaks of various kinds. I can explain to you \u2014 in great detail \u2014 why each of these groups is wrong or evil.<\/p>\n

There are people who use religion and ideology and social philosophy to control other people. Many of those people make me angry because of the ways in which they hurt other people.<\/p>\n

But I can\u2019t make my life about explaining why other people are wrong. I can\u2019t make my life about attacking people, even if they are terrible people.<\/p>\n

Freedom doesn\u2019t come from being angry at others and screaming about how wrong they are. All that does \u2014 at best \u2014 is make some portion of the public angry at the same things you\u2019re angry about. But it doesn\u2019t point people at the positive truths that matter.<\/p>\n

For years now, I\u2019ve been struggling to point more and more toward things that matter \u2014 beauty, truth, meaning and love \u2014 and less toward the things that merely attract attention and whip up righteous anger.<\/p>\n

For years, I couldn\u2019t see where my focus should be, so I spent a lot of time and effort being part of the arguments. And I still<\/em> struggle with it sometimes. Every now and then, I feel the need to strike out in anger at the people who I see as blind and evil and stupid.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an undercurrent of arrogance and delusion in that, too, because part of me is still so naive as to believe that if I just explain things clearly, every person of good will must inevitably see things my way.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s absurd.<\/p>\n

I now understand that this behavior doesn\u2019t do other people any good. The people who already agree with me might enjoy seeing someone express what they believe, but the people who don\u2019t agree with us are going to go right on ignoring us \u2014 and treating us like lunatics who won\u2019t shut up.<\/p>\n

(Do you really think that\u2019s changing hearts and minds? I don\u2019t.)<\/p>\n

I used to tell myself that I had a duty to spread the ideas in which I believed, but I realize now that the ideas are already out there for anybody who wants to find them.<\/p>\n

I think I have a deeper understanding of what real freedom is today. I\u2019ve seen that fighting against an evil can leave you enslaved to a battle that is going to consume you and free no one.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the real paradox.<\/p>\n

You can be entirely correct about the evil you\u2019re opposing and still be wrong to devote your life to fighting it. That\u2019s not because the evil doesn\u2019t matter. It\u2019s not because you\u2019ve changed your mind about what\u2019s right and what\u2019s wrong.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s because you\u2019ve allowed the things you oppose to determine what you think about, what you write about and how you experience your own life. It\u2019s because you\u2019ve allowed your life to be consumed by what you hate instead of living a life of love and generosity and freedom that other people might want to emulate.<\/p>\n

When you live that way, you\u2019re allowing the people you\u2019re fighting to have power over you forever.<\/p>\n

I used to need to show other people that I was right about the things I felt powerfully about. But I now know that the satisfaction of being right isn\u2019t the same thing as the satisfaction of living well.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m trying to occupy my mind with things that I think matter:<\/p>\n

Beauty. Truth. Meaning. Love.<\/p>\n

But those aren\u2019t simply alternatives to anger. They\u2019re things that require a different orientation toward life.<\/p>\n

If my attention is constantly occupied by the ugliness of the world, I have less capacity to recognize its beauty. If I\u2019m constantly identifying enemies, I have less emotional energy available for loving people. If I\u2019m constantly trying to prove that other people are wrong, I can lose sight of the positive truths I want to promote.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing that was probably hardest for me to accept. I don\u2019t have to defeat the things I detest in order to build a life around the things I love.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t mean pretending evil doesn\u2019t exist. It means refusing to allow evil the power to control my thoughts or organize my life.<\/p>\n

My old self would have feared that remaining silent about the things I hate in the world would have been the same as abandoning a fight because I\u2019ve decided my enemies were right or that I couldn\u2019t respond to them.<\/p>\n

I now know that\u2019s an ego problem.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve abandoned a fight that I once saw as a holy struggle simply because I\u2019ve begun to understand that fighting the battle won\u2019t give anyone the life I believe we deserve.<\/p>\n

And I now understand that I can live a good life whenever I choose to do so, even in a culture that\u2019s unfree and often evil.<\/p>\n

And living a good life \u2014 with loving values \u2014 can help far more people than any amount of yelling about why other people are wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve discovered that I can\u2019t be free until I stop telling other people why they\u2019re wrong. By the standards of my culture, that sounds like nonsense. I\u2019ve lived my entire life doing just the opposite of this. I\u2019ve invested a tremendous amount of time and energy and effort in \u201ccorrecting\u201d other people. I\u2019ve invested a Keep Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1x9iR-aD3","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40861"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40878,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40861\/revisions\/40878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidmcelroy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}