David McElroy

There are two men who live inside me.

One man is the most rational person you know. He’s deeply logical and focused on objective reality. Just the facts. This man wants to have his affairs in order and live in ways he can be proud of. He wants to be a good man above all.

But there’s another man inside of me, too. That man is deeply emotional. He believes in magic. He trusts his intuition. He values love and connection above all. He would do anything for the right kind of love.

There are times when the hyper-rational man is in charge. He gets a lot of things done. He’s hard-working and he’s capable. Many people admire him for being smart and reasonable.

But there are times when my heart is open and there seems to be a portal open to some sort of fantastic world of wonder instead. And when that man is in charge, he feels like taking risks and making magic happen — if he just knew which magical words to say.

He’s waiting for something inexplicable to happen. Any moment now.

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By the time I was in college, I knew everything. My beliefs about politics and theology and society were firmly fixed. I’d been taught almost everything and I figured out the rest.

Or so I thought.

Eventually, a bit of humility started to erode my arrogance. I finally had to ask myself  how I could have been so lucky to have been born into the only culture and country and religious group to have everything figured out correctly.

When I realized how absurd it was to think that could have been true, I was forced to look at what I believed and ask myself why I believed those things.

I went through a lot of deconstruction of what I believed. The process was painful at times. Eventually, I firmly embraced some of what I’d been taught and rejected other parts of it. This was a terrifying process that forced me to be vulnerable to the scary possibility that I had everything wrong.

Years later, I’m nothing like the person I was when I was young. My values are the same, but many of my beliefs have changed. I’ve realized now that a lot of people believe changing your mind is a sign of weakness or failure.

I’ve come to see that the power of change has given me more joy and freedom and confidence than I ever had when I knew everything. And I couldn’t have experienced that without accepting that I’d been wrong.

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I had one of those moments again recently.

I was watching a video on YouTube when I suddenly realized that I didn’t care about what I was seeing.

The video wasn’t bad. It wasn’t offensive. It wasn’t stupid. In fact, it was reasonably interesting. That was the problem.

I sat there for a moment and asked myself a question that has become increasingly common in the last few years: Why am I spending part of my life on this?

I don’t remember what the subject was. It could have been history. It could have been politics. It could have been science, culture, economics, theology or some obscure piece of trivia. The specific topic doesn’t matter because the pattern is always the same.

I start with something that I specifically want to know. Then another thing catches my attention. Then another. One link leads to another. One article leads to another. One video suggests another video. Before I realize what has happened, an hour has disappeared. Then another. And then I realize it’s 4 in the morning — and I’ve wasted hours.

The strange thing is that I wasn’t seeking entertainment.

Most discussions about distraction focus on entertainment. We imagine people wasting their lives watching mindless videos, scrolling through inane social media or consuming celebrity gossip or watching “reality TV.” Certainly some people do that, but that’s not my problem.

My problem is curiosity.

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