David McElroy

What will be left of me when my body has turned to dust?

I’ve been thinking about this lately. I’m not being morbid. I expect to be around for decades to come. But I’ve felt a growing sense of unease in the last few years — a sense that I’m running out of time to start work on the things I was put on this planet to do.

I’m feeling a sense of urgency to do a lot of things that matter to me — things I never realized until now would matter so much. I think that’s why I feel so driven to write as much as I’ve been writing for the last year.

I’ve realized in the last year or so how much I need to make art that will survive me. It’s not so I’ll be famous, though. It’s not about making a lot of money or achieving some flashy success. It has nothing to do with success or money or fame.

It’s about being able to do some work that might matter to someone else after I’m gone. It’s about being able to make human lives — at least a few of them — more peaceful and joyful and loving.

I want the chance to reach out to people from beyond the grave one day and say, “See this? I made it. This contains what I needed to tell you. I think these ideas can change you and help you live a better life. These things are important to me and I hope they’ll be important to you.”

The clock is ticking for me.

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Would you apply for this job?

HELP WANTED: Profitable and successful tech company is looking for workers to create all content for its media platforms. Applicants can create as much as desired, but company will determine which content is used and which is ignored. Company has strict content rules and workers can be banned or punished with no warning or recourse. No compensation is offered except to the most popular creators, but think of the exposure. Join our company today.

Unless you’re an idiot or a masochist, you wouldn’t apply for that job. I wouldn’t, either. I would laugh at it and mock the intelligence of anybody who would fall for such a one-sided deal.

But when I’m honest with myself, I realize that’s what I’ve been doing for years on social media.

I started joining social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even Threads — starting in about 2007. The value proposition was simple: You connect with your friends and anybody else you want to connect with. Your friends will be shown everything you post. You’ll see everything they post. And there’s no charge for this. What a deal.

As the social media companies grew more popular, they changed the deal. They introduced algorithms which determined which tiny portion of your posts would be shown to your friends. Then the companies started randomly showing you posts you never asked for — from people you’ve never heard of, about things you don’t care about.

But we put up with it, because we had developed a weird addiction to social media. We created all of the editorial content for companies which have gotten fabulously wealthy. We’ve been bewildered sharecroppers on a digital plantation.

Today, I’m starting the process of walking away from all of that. This is not what I signed up for.

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The truths that matter most in life cannot be proven.

I know that love is real, but I can’t prove it. I am absolutely certain that some things in this world are indescribably beautiful. Painfully beautiful. I know those things matter in ways that I can’t explain or understand. I’m certain that there is a reality beyond the physical world I can see and touch. I know there’s a creator — who I experience as God — who is just as real as anything I can touch or see or hear.

I can’t prove any of these things, but I know they’re true.

For me, they’re not theories or hopes or abstract concepts. They’re facts about reality. All of these things are part of my knowledge — but it’s “irrational knowledge.”

Maybe “non-rational knowledge” would be more precise, but I adopted this phrase from a distinction that Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy made between rational and irrational knowledge. Rational knowledge is what we get from science and other sorts of experimentation with the physical world. Irrational knowledge is what we feel as though we just know — through intuition, gut feeling, faith, whatever you want to call it.

My version of irrational knowledge might be different from yours. And that’s OK. But when we look at human groups around the world and over long periods of time, we find that some shared intuitions about irrational knowledge are pretty widespread.

Rational knowledge helps us to survive and to live in prosperity. Irrational knowledge feeds our hearts and gives us purpose and meaning.

The longer I live, the more I value meaning and the less I value prosperity.

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