Family seemed perfectly typical, but I felt envious of their lives

By David McElroy · January 8, 2020

They were just another random family having dinner together at a fast food restaurant. But I couldn’t stop listening to their interaction with each other — and feeling envious.

I don’t know these people. I’ll probably never see them again. They have no idea anybody was paying attention to them. But there were some things about them that made me want to be like them.

There were two little girls and a boy, along with their parents. Everybody got along and seemed completely relaxed with one another. The children were well-behaved for their age, but they weren’t perfect. The parents gently corrected when they got a bit out of line, but they were relaxed about it.

The parents seemed as though they liked each other. They were trying to figure something out about an online order that they were about to pick up, so they were collaborating in the midst of dealing with the kids. Nobody was snapping or being short. They were polite and helpful to each other.

It sounds completely unremarkable, but what I saw was completely different from what I typically see and hear.

They didn’t laugh at each other or make fun of one another. Everybody seemed gentle and loving.

“We came here tomorrow,” the little boy said at one point. He meant to say, “We came here yesterday,” but nobody made fun of him. The dad gently asked him whether it was really “tomorrow” when they came. It took him a couple of minutes, but the boy finally laughed and understood what he had said.

Nobody was stressed out about anything. Nobody was upset. Everybody seemed to feel relaxed and loving and normal.

One of the little girls had ordered a cheeseburger, but she decided she wanted to take the meat and cheese off and just eat the bun with ketchup. The mother explained why this was an expensive thing to do and why she didn’t need to do that in the future if that’s what she wanted to eat, but it was relaxed. Nobody was angry with her. They just explained and then moved on.

Almost all of the families I see are tense and unhappy in some way or other. The parents are frequently ignoring the children — at least until the kids get too loud and then they angrily threaten the kids. With most families I observe, most of them seem bored or tense or angry or disconnected. These people weren’t like any of that.

They weren’t special. The children weren’t performing amazing feats for their ages. They got a little too loud at times. They were completely normal children.

But none of this bothered the parents. They never let things get out of hand. They were constantly interacting gently and lovingly with the children and with each other. They seemed like a perfectly normal and emotionally healthy family — and that made them seem remarkable to me.

I’m sure there are times when they’re not a happy and healthy family. They surely have flare-ups. But those are normal. What I saw tonight was too relaxed and natural to have been an act. This seemed to be what they are.

I don’t want something that’s wildly unattainable. I don’t want the perfect wife or the perfect children. I just want a family where everybody is loving and kind to one another. A family where people like each other and treat each other with respect.

What I saw was unremarkable — but I couldn’t help wishing that I were part of a family just like this perfectly normal group of people.

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Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

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.

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