David McElroy

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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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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