David McElroy

How long can a human being stew in a cesspool of hatred and anger and meanness before he’s permanently changed? How long until he’s so full of bitterness that there’s no love left in his heart?

We’re seeing that happen in real time in our society right now. Different people are responding in very different ways. Some good people are becoming so bitter and angry that they can focus on almost nothing so much as hurting the people they see as the enemy. Some people who were already angry and unloving are now so full of hatred that they spew bitter vitriol constantly.

And some are so horrified to find themselves in this cesspool that they’re almost despondent about what they’re experiencing.

I’ve been trying for years now to process what I’ve been feeling about the toxic online culture that we’ve created for ourselves. I’ve gone back and forth about what to do about it, but I haven’t really done much about it. I’ve been left ambivalent, because I can’t live with what I experience here — but I’ve found it impossible to truly pull away from it.

Whatever this thing has become, I can’t escape blame. I want to point fingers. I want to say, “Look at what you’ve done!” But in my heart, I know I’ve been a part of it, too. I’m to blame.

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Almost anyone can type. Some of those people can write and think clearly enough to shape a coherent story. A tiny fraction of those do it well enough to get a good novel published.

Anyone can splash paint onto a canvas. Even if you have no talent for illustration or composition or brush strokes, you can make painted shapes and call it modern art. A tiny fraction of those can convince critics that their work should be sold in galleries.

It’s true for every field of art. With the tools that are readily available today, almost anyone can make a creative project — a film, a sculpture, a photograph, a book. A few of those will be really good.

It requires talent and work and patience and luck to produce something that most people would see as art. It’s incredibly difficult. It’s something many people spend a lifetime trying to do.

But as difficult as those things are, it’s even harder to earn a living today with art.

For some people, it’s simply because their work isn’t good enough. But even many people who produce excellent work can no longer make a living from the art they most want to create.

The world has changed in ways that make things very hard for creative people today. I don’t like the changes. I’ve ranted about those changes and been angry about them, as have many creators.

But the media world of the past is gone. It’s not coming back. For me, that means I have to change. It’s time for me to stop fighting reality.

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When I was a little boy, I was obsessed with an unusual question. I wanted to know why I was here — and why I was part of my family.

Most children ask a lot of “why” questions. I did, too. But the question that fascinated me most wasn’t why the sky was blue or why birds could fly. I wanted to know what I was supposed to be — and to answer that, I first had to answer a more fundamental question: Why was I here?

Somehow, when I was about 3 years old, I reached a conclusion. I don’t remember how I arrived there, but I became convinced that I was part of my family because I was there to help.

One day, my parents were unloading groceries from the car. While they were carrying bags into the house, I quietly went outside, got a huge box of Tide detergent out of the trunk and tried to carry it inside myself.

The box was much too heavy, so I found my little red wagon. By the time my mother discovered what I was doing and took a picture, I was struggling to load the box into the wagon so I could pull it to the house. I managed to drag it only a few feet before giving up in tears.

Looking back, I don’t think that’s just a cute story about an overly ambitious little boy.

Nobody had asked me to help. Nobody had assigned me a chore. My behavior flowed naturally from the answer I had reached to a single question. I believed I was there to help, so helping simply seemed like the obvious thing to do.

I’ve been thinking lately that this may be true of all of us. The quality of our lives depends less on the answers we’ve found than on which questions we’ve chosen to organize our lives around.

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