Watching a friend’s happy family makes me feel pangs of jealousy

By David McElroy · June 2, 2019

The feeling crept up on me so gradually that I didn’t see it coming, but I’ve realized lately that I’m envious of my friend’s happy family.

It’s not a negative thing. I don’t resent what he has. In fact, I get a warm feeling of happiness about what they are. I’m just ready to have the same sort of happy family, too.

My friend mentioned to me this week that they’re all — parents and two children — about to go on vacation together for a couple of weeks. In an email this afternoon, I told him what I’d been thinking.

“I’m envious that you guys are going on a nice vacation together, but I’m even more envious of you having a great family to spend the time with,” I wrote. “At this point in my life, I’m painfully aware of how much I dislike not having a family. It’s funny how so many of our regrets in life are based on specific decisions we wish we had made differently.”

And then I told him about a dream I had a couple of weeks ago.

I dreamed I was in their home for a social visit, but I wasn’t alone. I had brought my wife. In the dream, I was married to someone from my past, someone who would have been a good wife for me. I think I dreamed it because they are people she would have liked, and I think they would have liked her.

In the dream, I was happy and I was proud to be with her. I felt a sense of satisfaction which I haven’t felt in real life for a very long time. It was like a Charles Dickensesque scene of “what might have been” if my life had been just a little bit different.

My would-be wife is smart and educated and charming and likable. My friend and his wife are remarkably like her in these respects. All three of them are very impressive people. Spending time with them together in the dream made my heart ache for “what might have been.”

I wouldn’t really want to be someone else, of course. Even though I’m envious of my friend’s marriage and family, I wouldn’t swap places with him. I don’t want to be him. I want to be me. I just want to finally have what I’ve come close to having before.

Nobody’s life is perfect. If you knew him well enough, my friend could share with you all the ways in which he would like his life to improve. He could tell you about the problems he’s been through and the struggles he’s had to deal with. So it’s not that I think he has a perfect life.

I’m closer right now to having my life where I need it to be than I was a year ago, certainly closer than I was five years ago. But I’m still not there. I have professional and creative mountains still to climb. I have financial mountains I’m starting to climb. Progress is frustratingly slow.

But I can deal with all of that. I’m confident that I’ll get to where I need to be in those ways. The real question — and the one which haunts me — is about the family I want.

If I achieve all of those things I’m working toward and have no wife who loves me and needs me, well, it will have been worthless to me, no matter how well I do. But with love — and especially with a family — the struggle would be worth it.

I know what I want when I see it. I don’t often see it, but I feel some envy when I do.

I’m envious of a family going on vacation to a nice place together, but it’s not the vacation I’m envious about. It’s not their nice destination I care about.

If I had a wife who loved me and children who felt loved and nurtured, it wouldn’t matter where we vacationed. It wouldn’t even matter if we didn’t vacation at all. It would only matter to be with them — as a loving and happy family.

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Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

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