Friend’s happy family and career remind me how good life can be

By David McElroy · March 30, 2018

It makes my heart feel full of joy when my friends are happy. Seeing happiness in a friend reminds me that life in this world can be incredibly joyful — and I need that reminder sometimes.

I just saw a man who I rarely see anymore and I got an update on his life. When I first met Josh six or eight years ago, he was a young man working as an assistant manager at a fast food restaurant. By coincidence, I had known of his father — although his father was older than I was — when I was in high school about 45 miles from here.

Nearly five years ago, Josh married a beautiful and sweet woman and I was happy about that. He worked his way up to the top of management at a very successful restaurant. He was making a nice living, but he was working too many hours. I assumed he would stay on that path.

When I saw him tonight, I found out he had finished his college degree last spring. He had been in college off and on for years, so he didn’t even tell most people he was back in school until he finished his coursework.

He and his wife timed having a baby to come just after his graduation.

On the day his daughter was born, he got a call from a major bank asking him to apply for a job. Three months later, he was a retail banker with a prestigious bank, working at an upscale branch in a nice neighborhood.

The news was all good, but what really made my heart full was to sense just how content he is. He obviously loves his wife and baby daughter. (The little girl is adorable.) He’s happy to be in a job he likes that requires far less work — and it’s a job that gives him a career path he’s happy with.

I’ve been really down this week because I’m unhappy with some of the things life has been showing me lately. It’s easy for me to allow all of my unhappy circumstances to get me down — and it’s easy to wonder whether things can get better for me.

So it makes me happy to see Josh so full of joy and contentment. It makes my heart full to see my friend happy — and it’s encouraging to remind myself that life might still have joy and happiness to send my way, too. That might sound trite, but it’s true.

I’m happy for Josh — and I’m hopeful for the rest of us. Including me.

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Six years ago this evening, a scared young dog came to live with me. She was so terrified on the ride to my house that she pooped in the back seat of the car. She had originally lived her life on a chain as a puppy. Then she lived among far too many other animals in a cramped apartment, where she was pushed around by bigger dogs. I was told she would always be a “special needs dog” and would probably never be much more than the scared girl she was then. But with a lot of love and patience, a very different dog emerged in the coming months. Now that she’s been with me for six years, it’s hard to imagine her any way other than she is today — as the World’s Happiest Dog®. One day, she’s going to tell her own story on her own podcast. You’ll subscribe when she gets started, won’t you? This loving girl deserves it.

It was obvious to me in the late 1990s that western society is heading toward social and economic collapse. When I told other people back then, most thought I was crazy, because they saw their society as stable and booming. But more and more people have slowly been coming to the same conclusion. And now, even the wealthy and powerful seem concerned. A new report from the World Economic Forum says the erosion of “social cohesion” is what we should fear right now. (Full report here.) Although I disagree with a lot of political spin that these elites put on the dangers ahead, I feel certain that we are headed toward social collapse. And most people will not prepare for it. The book that started me down the road of thinking about this came out in 1993. I thought its reasoning was impeccable, but that the time frame would be longer than the book expected. I still find that book a useful foundation for thinking about the issue — “The Great Reckoning,” by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg — even though its predictions are out of date. Dark days are coming. Smart people are going to have a plan to get out of the way of what’s coming. Will you?

Since I posted my audio discussion a couple of nights ago about some recent realizations I’ve had about myself, several people have asked for more about what I quoted from Jordan Peterson. The Canadian psychologist is controversial to some — and I don’t always agree with him — but I’ve found his lectures about art and its relation to psychological archetypes very useful. You can find him here talking about art being more about process than just result, which contains the material I quoted. Here’s another video from a lecture in which he discusses how artists mediate for the rest of society between the known and the unknown. And here’s another portion of a lecture at an art exhibition in which he talks about the necessity of artists for society. And if you missed my audio from two nights ago, here’s a link to my discussion about some things I’ve learned about myself and some things I need to change about myself as a result.

I just realized it was four years ago today when I came uncomfortably close to dying. I don’t remember how blunt I was publicly about this at the time, but the surgeon who operated on me made it clear afterward that I had been much worse than he had thought. My gallbladder was inflamed and I had been in tremendous pain, but what the doctors didn’t know until they started is that the organ was close to rupturing. Surgery that was supposed to take half an hour took two or three hours, because my gallbladder was so diseased — the surgeon’s word — was falling apart as he tried to remove it. I had gone to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s Hospital (the same one where I was born) and was kept for emergency surgery the next morning. I should have been home that night, but I had to stay in the hospital three days instead. The weird thing is that I never really believed I could have died. Maybe it was just denial, but I didn’t feel as though it was my time. I thought I still had a lot of life left to live. Four years later, I’m grateful to be alive, but I feel as though my life is still on pause. It’s been a blur. I still feel as though I’m waiting for “the rest of my life” to start.

Is “The Nightmare Before Christmas” really a Christmas movie or a Halloween movie? It’s both, making it a delightful mashup of themes and images from two very different holidays. Although Danny Elfman’s score was nominated for several different awards, Elfman wasn’t a typical composer for film scores. Up until he started working on films with Tim Burton, Elfman had been a rock-and-roll artist best known as the leader of the new wave band Oingo Boingo in the 1980s. Just this week, I heard an interview on the podcast Song Exploder on which Elfman explains how he came to write the music for the movie, including why he approached the music for the film very differently than he had approached writing rock music. I enjoyed the 20-minute interview and if you happen to love the film, this Christmas would be the perfect time to learn more about how the score came to be. Tap or click below to listen. Listen here.

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