making sense of a dysfunctional culture
I’ve spent the last six week trying to work out a partnership with someone for my new YouTube video venture.
Someone with a lot of experience with profitable YouTube channels noticed the idea I was launching with DavidMcElroy.TV, so he approached me about joining forces. He and his partners have a lot of experience with marketing and growing YouTube channels, so it seemed like an exciting possibility.
But not everything is as great as it seems. Here’s a brief report about how things went.
I’ve been falling in love with the same woman my entire life.
She’s had different names over the years. She’s had different faces. There have even been very real differences between her incarnations. But at the core, she’s always been my latest and most mature understanding of “the Ideal Woman.”
The ideal woman doesn’t exist any more than the ideal man exists. I know that. But it’s the best phrase I have for this abstract idea. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but it’s constantly been on my mind for the last week. I need to talk about it. Maybe I’ll have a point. Maybe not.
Think about a product that goes through generations of change over years, but it’s still recognizable as the same product each time. If you compare the first iPhone from 2007 with the current model, it would seem radically different. But if you compared the first iPhone to the second, then the second to the third — and so on, including last year’s model to this year’s — you recognize the same idea and same product. But the latest is radically different from the very first.
If you compared my first Ideal Woman with my most recent, you would see differences, but the core elements — the ideal parts in each of them — are startlingly similar.
What if you discovered something life-changing — something that could improve life for everyone — but nobody wanted to hear about it?
About 12 years ago, I discovered the germ of an idea that was astounding to me. It hit me out of the blue. It was an epiphany that I didn’t ask for and which I didn’t control. I immediately knew it was true and I knew it was important, but I couldn’t put it into words simple enough to explain it to others.
The idea was so abstract that my heart felt it more than my brain reasoned it. I knew it would change everything — for me and for others — if I could ever fully work it out. But it remains so abstract and so instinctive for me that others look at me blankly when I try to explain.
Ready? Here it is.
You do not want the real-world things you think you want.
And I don’t want the things I think I want, either. Instead, we all want — and need, require, crave, thirst for — an inner state of being which we can’t consciously understand. Our hearts know this instinctively and abstractly, but our brains completely misunderstand — and our conscious reasoning leads us astray.
Please don’t tune out. Not yet.
How could we take responsibility but avoid self-destructive shame?
Your motivations tell me more about you than your actions do
Joseph Kony is evil man, but don’t let yourself be ‘guilted’ into war
Trust and spontaneous order don’t require heavy hand of the state
We can’t have real freedom without also allowing discrimination
We can’t defeat the existing system; we must build a better one instead
Don’t complain about debt when you borrow $35,000 to study puppetry
What if our craving for dopamine drives our desires and addictions?
Do five big beer companies force Native Americans to abuse alcohol?