David McElroy

The devil doesn’t have horns and a pointed red tail. He doesn’t wear a red suit. The devil looks exactly like whatever it is you want the most.

The devil is a shapeshifter. In every moment, he becomes something which seems too good to be true. To me, he appears as the object of my deepest desires. To you, he appears as whatever you believe will finally make your life complete. But when we follow where this shapeshifting demon leads us, the heaven on earth we expected often turns out to be a living hell.

The devil is one of the most enduring archetypes of human history. For some people, he’s been a literal creature roaming the earth. In Christian theology, he’s seen as a spirit who’s the chief of the fallen angels. But however the devil has been conceived in theology or mythology or psychology, the real demon is in your head. It’s the lying trickster promising whatever it is you want and need the most.

The things that destroy us are typically the things we eagerly accept and even pursue. When evil and heartbreak arrive in our lives, these things don’t typically force their way in. They come in disguise — and we eagerly welcome them in.

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What if you suddenly realized the whole world has been reading your diary?

I’ve been feeling that way recently, because I’ve had reason to go through most of what I’ve written over the last 15 years. A handful of my old articles left me feeling that I communicated an important idea in a clear way. I was proud of a few of them.

But the overwhelming feeling I had was that I’ve spent years writing things that I wish I’d never shared with the world.

When I write and publish an article here, I almost never read it again. Maybe that is a reflection of my origins in the newspaper business. As a journalist, we would simply write and edit the best we could in the moment — then send it to the pressroom and get started on work for the next day.

Lately, I’ve been writing a book, so I wanted to go through what I’ve written to find ideas I’ve written about that might belong in the book. I found what I needed, but I also found things that made me feel as though I’d left a diary open for the world to read. And it was a diary filled with hurt and angst and need and anger.

It’s been disturbing — not that I felt those things, but that I’ve allowed others to see so clearly inside my mind and heart.

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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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