David McElroy

My father was an ideal product of the American public education system from the middle of the 20th century.

Neither of his parents finished high school, much less attended college. His father had quit school after the sixth grade in order to help support his family. They were smart people — and my grandfather was incredibly well-read — but nobody in previous generations had even thought about being educated at a university.

The boom in taxpayer funding for colleges after World War II enabled both of my parents to go to college. They met as students at Jacksonville State (Ala.) University and married right after graduation. Both started their careers as teachers. My father soon moved to Southern Railway, where he was an executive in the Safety Department.

He had been well-prepared for corporate life in 20th century America. He was successful and he was paid well. When I was young, we lived the upper-middle class lifestyle in various cities as he was transferred around the South.

But something was wrong in his heart or his soul.

He didn’t learn what really mattered in life, not when it mattered. He lived in ways that caused three wives to leave him for good. He embezzled millions of dollars from an employer after he left the railroad. He treated his three children so badly that all three eventually cut off contact with him.

In the final months of his life, he was thinking about killing himself. After his death in 2018, I discovered a journal he had been keeping. What you see above is the last page of the journal, just six months before he died.

My father’s education had been badly incomplete. He had been taught how to make a living, but he never learned how to live a good life. And that might have been what killed him.

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There are some things about myself that I’d rather not realize. This is one of them.

Facebook recently started sending me regular “report cards” about my posting performance.

“You’ve recently been posting less often,” it said. “Create new content to catch up.”

Catch up to what?

I don’t work for Facebook. Nobody is paying me to keep its users entertained. I have no obligation to feed its endless appetite for photos, videos, jokes, observations or essays. Yet the notification implied that posting regularly was somehow my responsibility — and it gently encouraged me to get back to work.

The message irritated me.

At first, I thought I knew why. Like most people, I don’t enjoy software telling me how to behave. The platform wants more content because more content keeps people scrolling, which benefits Meta. That much is obvious.

But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that wasn’t the real reason the notification bothered me.

The real reason was that it touched a nerve I didn’t want to acknowledge. I’ve become an unpaid sharecropper on the social media plantation — and I’ve let myself be brainwashed to crave the attention that the platforms promise me.

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This story is about me. Only me. It’s about my ego and insecurities and fears and needs.

I typically write what I think might be useful for others to know and understand, but this is different. It’s more like a diary entry. A confessional. A cry of frustration.

It’s the sort of thing I would address to a wife or partner or trusted companion — if I had a woman in that role. It’s my half of a conversation which I would need to have with someone who loved me and believed in me and was permanently a part of my life.

So this probably isn’t for you.

I’m struggling right now. In many ways, things are the best in my life that they’ve been for at least 20 years. I have stability and purpose again. I know where I want to go. I’m more clear about my values and my priorities than I’ve ever been in my life.

But I’m struggling with the gap between how things ought to be and the reality I see in front of me. And that gap terrifies me — because nobody lives forever.

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