Why do so many of us stay where we know we’ll remain miserable?

By David McElroy · March 6, 2021

I talked with a friend tonight who’s been miserable for years. If she ever loved the man she married, the love died quickly. He’s abusive and dysfunctional. He’s cut her off from her friends and made her life into a nightmare.

I no longer even ask her why she doesn’t leave him. For a long time, I thought she was ready to escape. I sometimes fear for her safety and I always fear for her sanity. But for reasons she can’t explain, this strong and decisive woman hasn’t been able to walk away.

I have no idea why she refuses to fix what she could easily fix.

Earlier this week, a woman moved into a house that she just rented from me. She is extremely happy and satisfied with her new home, even though she’s worked hard all week moving out of the house where she had lived for the last seven years.

I visited the house from which she just moved and I was stunned that she had been paying almost as much to rent that rundown house as she was now paying to rent a nice house that I manage. We talked about how terrible the old house was and how she had been overcharged for the place.

“I’ve realized this week that I’m angry with myself,” she told me. “I knew I was unhappy, but I hate change, so I just ignored how bad everything was. I just don’t understand why I put up with it.”

Why do we put up with what makes us miserable? I don’t really know.

I used to think that only weak or stupid people would do such a thing, but I know better now. My friend who hasn’t left her abusive husband is bright and she’s always been very strong and decisive. Nobody would have predicted this behavior from her. The woman who just moved into one of our rental houses is a mature and responsible professional. She manages other people. Nobody would suspect her of being anything but fully in charge of her own life.

It’s easy for me to look at others and wonder why they’re doing such things — and it’s easy for me to judge them, of course — but the truth is that I can see the same behavior at times in my own life. And I have no idea why I’ve done it, either.

I’ve stayed in relationships that needed to end. I’ve stayed in jobs that made me miserable, even when I knew I was talented enough and experienced enough to go where I would be happier. I’ve gotten stuck in bad situations and done nothing to lift myself out of my misery.

I hide my unhappiness well. I have a lot of experience at it, so I fake a happy persona very nicely. I don’t think about it. That’s just my social face.

Earlier this week, I talked with a local Walmart employee who’s been friendly with me ever since I moved to this suburb nearly six years ago. She was telling me that so many people she saw in the store were unhappy and she related some unhappiness that’s gone on recently in the lives of people she’s known. And then she shifted the subject.

“But you’re always happy,” she said. “You have so much joy every time I see you that it makes me feel better myself. How do you stay so happy all the time?”

I didn’t want to burst her bubble, so I didn’t correct her assumption. I was briefly surprised, but then I remembered that I learned at an early age to hide my unhappiness — so people rarely know when I’m unhappy. I can’t decide whether that’s a good thing or not.

I don’t know why I hide my unhappiness. And I don’t know why I don’t change certain things in my life when I need to do so. I really don’t.

I don’t know why my friend won’t escape her abuser. (There are no pragmatic reasons to stay, unlike those in some such cases.) I don’t know why my new tenant stayed in a situation in which she was unhappy with her home and she was paying way too much for what she was getting. (She didn’t move until the house was being sold and she was forced to move.)

I just know that this seems to be a pattern with human beings. I see almost everybody do it, even those who are normally quite good at hiding their feelings and those who are outwardly seen as quite forcefully in charge of their own lives.

I sometimes think that my life could be better if certain people knew I was unhappy. I have this silly fantasy that if this person or that person knew just how miserable I was at times, well, maybe he or she would do something to help.

And then I realize I’m being ridiculous.

Yes, it would be nice for someone to “rescue” me. At least sometimes. It would be fantastic to find the things in someone else that I need. But ultimately, there are some things that only I can change. And that’s true for you, too.

If you know you’re unhappy, hasn’t the time come to do something about it? Isn’t it time to stop making excuses — for yourself and for other people — and take decisive action to change what’s making you so unhappy?

My experience is that change in my life is always sudden. I might know for months or years that I need to change something — and then I suddenly make a change one day.

Maybe that’s true for you, too — and maybe today is the day for you to take the action you’ve been putting off for ages. Until you take that first step, nothing will ever get better.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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