David McElroy

I’ve always been unimpressed by money. I know I need it to survive, but I care little for most of the things people spend money on. The idea of accumulating it for its own sake has always left me cold. But I finally have a motivation for making money, so it suddenly matters to me. It’s an odd feeling to care.

A year ago at this time, I knew I was embarking on a year that would bring serious change, even though I didn’t know exactly what the change would be. I had an experience in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day last year that changed my perspective on where I was going with my life. It forced me to start moving away from politics. It also led to the creation of this site.

This week, something else has added a new layer to the changes I’ve been going through. Suddenly, I have an urgent need to pursue material success. It’s not for the luxuries of life that it can provide — because I still don’t care much for those — but it’s because of what it has the hope of leading to in another way. (No, I’m not going to be more specific about this one.) With this two-year oddity of post-Christmas timing, I’m now eager to see what God might have up His anthropomorphized sleeve for the same week next year.

Although I don’t want to talk about the specifics of what led to this, I do want to talk about the thoughts it’s sparked about money. We live in a society that worships money. On the surface, that’s a criticism, but I think it’s really a double-edged sword.

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It’s a new year, so plenty of people are making new resolutions. But nerds think differently, so if you ask one of us about our resolution for the year, you might get a different sort of answer.

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Where were you a year ago? As 2010 was drawing to a close and 2011 stretched out before you, what did you expect the new year to bring? Have your hopes been met? Or have you been disappointed instead?

The end of the year is always a time of introspection for me. I know the new year is an arbitrary thing that doesn’t mean anything other than what we bring to it, but I still end up thinking a lot about the year I’ve just been through and the year that’s about to start. I evaluate what I wanted from the year just ending and I think hard about what I want from the new one.

This thinking can leave me emotional and introspective, so I’ve been feeling a lot of things strongly this week. I’m impatient about some things. I’m angry at myself about others. I’m determined and focused about yet other things. I’m happier with where I am today than I was a year ago, even though I didn’t make as much progress as I’d hoped.

Every year, the slate is wiped clean and we get a new year, but that doesn’t mean we can wait forever to start the things that matter. We have choices about what to do with each year. If you spend a year wisely, you can build something else on top of that year in the years after that. But if you squander the years — and never start moving toward being the person you need to be or toward doing the things you need to do — you reach a point at which some doors start closing.

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