Happiness and success elude me unless I’m doing something I love

By David McElroy · September 11, 2020

I don’t really want to sell you a house. I wish I did.

You know how you sometimes admit something to yourself that you’ve been trying to hide? I had one of those moments this week — when I couldn’t even try to lie to myself.

I was waiting inside this nice $425,000 house for a potential buyer to arrive. I had arrived 15 minutes early and had the house to myself. I decided to record an impromptu video that I could use as a promotion. I started recording about half a dozen times but stopped in disgust each time.

“I don’t want to sell houses,” I suddenly said out loud. And I was glad no one was there to hear me.

For the last five or six years, I’ve felt as though my life was on hold. I felt like someone treading water. I’ve worked in real estate — because it was a convenient opportunity — but I’ve hated work every day. And it makes me long for the days when I was excited about work instead.

Earlier this year, I had decided to leave my job and take a chance on things I care about more, but this entire coronavirus mess made that a non-starter. It just didn’t seem feasible with as much financial uncertainty as we were facing.

I spend half of my time running the office operations for a real estate company. I’m free to sell in the other half of my time. I’ve actually become really good at what I do, which is almost annoying since I dislike it so much.

If a friend wants to buy a house, I can actually enjoy that process, because it’s someone I’m excited about helping. I love helping people I like. But if it’s another random stranger — who’s probably delusional from watching idiotic and unrealistic real estate shows on television — it’s hard to make myself care. It’s hard to even make a call, even if it’s someone I know wants to buy or sell.

I’ve been thinking about this again Friday night because I found myself getting excited about a project that I would care about. It’s actually a real estate project, but it’s not something simple and pragmatic like matching up buyers with available houses. It’s a development project that I’ve dreamed about many times.

It’s a project that I would care about. It’s something I would be excited about. It’s something that should be far more profitable than what I’m doing now. But it would require a partner who could sell investors and raise the money. I have good ideas and I’m a good project-builder, but I’m terrible at selling people on things that seem obvious to me.

There’s an ornery part of me that wants to shout, “If you can’t see why this is a great idea, I’m wasting my time with you!” And that isn’t very diplomatic, much less successful

This isn’t anything new. I’ve encountered this obstacle time and time again in my life. It’s something I’ve never really figured out. I feel like somebody who’s invented an amazing space ship that can take people to another planet successfully and gracefully — but I forgot to figure out how to build the booster rocket to get it off the ground.

The world is a playground of exciting and possibly profitable projects to pursue, but I’m doing something that I hate every day instead. I’m not sure how I allowed this to happen. It wasn’t that long ago when I was making well over six figures and enjoying what I was doing. It’s humiliating and it’s humbling to have lost that and somehow fallen to this point in life.

I have to find a way to get back to doing something I’m passionate about and that offers big rewards for success. In some ways, I feel like Job from ancient Hebrew scriptures. I had everything take away from me — for reasons I don’t understand — and I’m waiting for the nightmare to finally end. If God and Satan had a bet about me, I’m ready for it to be over.

In the meantime, I’ll sell you a house. I’ll keep working to make the company I administer more profitable and competitive. I’ll do what I have to do. If I like you, I’ll enjoy helping you. If I don’t know you, I’ll help you and try to pretend I care. If I can make myself call you.

But I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I’m not very good at pretending to be someone I’m not. And I’ve gotten to the point that I can’t even look into a video camera and pretend to care about finding new clients.

I’ve somehow dug a hole for myself — and I haven’t been able to find a way to climb out.

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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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