House design reflects our vision and helps shape who we become

By David McElroy · March 1, 2018

As I drove through an upscale suburban Birmingham neighborhood Thursday afternoon, I couldn’t help thinking how much I hated the houses — and how stifling I found the oppressive designs.

I laughed at myself, though, because I knew I was one of the very few people in town who would think such a thing. This neighborhood is popular and desirable. The irony was that I was driving to a $250,000 home which my own realty clients were buying in just a few minutes.

The house is exactly what the couple wanted, particularly the wife. She loves a stately home that’s very traditional two-story in red brick — and this neighborhood has variations of that in abundance. And I was about to be paid a commission for helping them to find and buy a house which they loved — and which I would have considered oppressive and stifling.

Design matters to me. Beauty matters to me. Graceful use of space and light and angles makes my heart soar and gives me peace. (The picture above is a random example of such an interior.) But to the people who love these traditional brick homes — which look as though they’re cold copies of copies of copies to me — my beautiful design represents something frightening.

I can usually tell how well my intellectual and emotional spirit would mesh with a place based on the sort of design which dominates the area. One of the ways I’ve known for years that Birmingham will probably always be too conservative for me — speaking in the intellectual sense, not the political sense — is the dominant feel of its most popular neighborhoods.

It’s very rare to find a local neighborhood where I would feel truly at home. (Mount Laurel is the only one that comes to mind — and that seems to attract oddballs like me who happen to have money.) The neighborhoods that are truly popular — the ones where I show clients and am happy to collect commissions — are filled with bad copies of houses that have been built over and over again.

Don’t misunderstand. I don’t try to steer real estate clients to houses that fit my own intellectual and emotional understanding. I help them buy what they want. But I don’t envy the homes they are proud to call their own when we’re finished.

I know it sounds a bit odd, but cities can have personalities. It’s almost as though the collective spirits of the people who live there form an organism that has a spirit and mind of its own. The people whose spirits collectively form Birmingham don’t reflect who I am, even though I’ll always feel a connection to the place. Unless I go to “weird and artsy” parts of town, the overall spirit is far from who I am.

But I walk a fine line between conservative in lifestyle and liberal in intellect and emotional orientation. It’s hard to find where I fit. It’s hard to find someone who’s more conservative in orientation and values than I am, but something in my mind rejected a conservative intellectual orientation decades ago — and nothing represented my change in that respect as much as my preferences in architecture.

At one time, the houses of these very traditional neighborhoods would have been my preference, too. That’s what I grew up liking. It wasn’t until I was about 30 years old that some switch flipped in my mind. I started changing. I suddenly “got” a lot of incredible modern design that had never clicked for me. Ever since then, I have been like a fish out of water — eager to find a place for myself to fit.

Our homes and neighborhoods don’t just reflect who we are. They also shape who we are. In ways which I can’t understand — but which I’ve seen over and over again — our built environments shape what we value and what we become. If we’re living and working in poorly designed places — places which don’t feed something in our hearts and minds — we end up adopting the values that created those designs. (I’m not going to get into this deeply at the moment, but if you doubt this, think about the correlation between different types of theology and different design philosophies that come with them. The spartan Calvinist mindset creates very different church spaces than the very different traditional Catholic churches, for instance.)

Living in beautiful organic design (such as that represented by the best work of the late architect Frank Lloyd Wright) leads to a very different mindset than the one produced by living in cookie-cutter houses that might as well be made out of Legos.

I couldn’t make a living selling houses in Birmingham of the sort I prefer. This is a very traditional city that likes its architecture to look a certain way. (Even the neighborhood covenants for the place where I sold a house today requires nothing but traditional design.) It’s not what I want. It’s not what I need. But I don’t know where I need to be.

I appreciate my real estate clients. They’re how I hope to make my living, at least for awhile. But I feel a bit like a veggie-hating, steak-loving guy who’s working in a very popular vegetarian restaurant. I know what everybody else likes — but I need to eat elsewhere.

I love beautiful organic design and I hope to build something amazing for my own family one day. (I actually found the perfect architect for me years ago who was with a firm in Minneapolis, and he said he could build anywhere in the country.)

I’m eager to have a home that would be an intellectual, spiritual and emotional refuge for a happy and loving family. The kind of home you choose for such a family can go a long way toward laying the foundation for what kind of group they’re going to become. I hope I find the right woman to understand this in the way that I do — because I just can’t take a permanent life in one of the cookie-cutter homes which are so popular in modern American suburbia.

But in the meantime, I’ll be happy to sell you one of those if you want it in Birmingham.

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After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

Narcissists tend to turn their children into narcissists — and since a narcissist doesn’t realize he or she is a narcissist, there’s no bad intent. How does this happen? I watched a YouTube video over the weekend from an Australian psychologist who does a nice job of summarizing how it works. None of this is new to me, but I thought it was useful for those who haven’t spent years digging through books and articles about it. The same psychologist has an excellent summary of something which confuses a lot of people about narcissism. You’ve all seen examples of the loud, boisterous and overbearing narcissist, but what about the ones who are more introverted and vulnerable? This type is called a covert narcissist (or a vulnerable narcissist), and this is what my father was. In the first video, I strongly see myself in the ways my father treated me and in the second video, I see what my father was almost successful in making me become.

It’s National Dog Day in the U.S. and Lucy is here to remind you to go express love and appreciation to your favorite canine. Not only does your doggie friend give you love and affection, but he or she also protects your home from intruders — such as birds, squirrels, mail carriers and other undesirables who deserve to be barked at vigorously. Where would we be without that? And if you think this service is actually unnecessary, ask yourself how long it’s been since your home was the victim of a vicious squirrel attack. See? The doggie defense works. Keep barking at ’em, Lucy.

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time over the last couple of years thinking and writing about love and connection. I’ve come to understand that this lack of love and connection is at the root of a lot of human tragedy and unhappiness, including addictions and depression. As I talked with others and researched the psychology behind the issues, I ran into the surprising fact that researchers are increasingly using psychedelic drugs to allow volunteers to have experiences which are giving them a sense of connection which they’ve lost — something that allows them to feel connected to love and God in a way they didn’t understand before — which is having dramatic effects in combating things such as depression and addictions. In this 15-minute TED talk — without an audience in the age of COVID-19 — Johns Hopkins researcher Mary Cosimano shares her experiences with guided psilocybin sessions being used to treat addiction, depression and end-of-life issues. One of her key observations is the importance of love and connection. She said that it seems love is literally part of the answer. In her role as director of guide/facilitator services for the program, Cosimano is responsible for training and supervising session facilitators.

It’s something I wrote four and a half years ago — in the desperation of loneliness — and it’s become my most popular article. It’s not my best writing. It’s raw and unpolished. But it seems as though a lot of people can identify with it. It’s called Missing someone creates intense physical sensations in my heart. Just to give you an idea how many people still read it, I had 11,586 people visit the page last month — from 2,907 cities and towns around the world. London sent the most readers for it, followed by New York, Westminster, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kuala Lumpur, Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto and almost 3,000 more. I’ve noticed something interesting. It always gets the most hits from an area of the world in the late hours, right after midnight, and that breaks my heart — because I understand why. All these people are so lonely and are missing someone so much that they turn to a search engine looking for answers, so they stumble upon this piece. I wrote this late at night on the day after Christmas because my heart was breaking. I needed to express how much I missed someone, and a lot of people seem to identify with it. If you’re one of those people, I have no way of knowing who you are, but I empathize with you. I know why you hurt. I wish I could do more to help. I hurt with you, because after all this time, I still feel the same way.

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