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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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Beauty queen’s suicide leaves me pondering lesson of Richard Cory

By David McElroy · January 30, 2022

Cheslie Kryst lived the kind of life that most people can only dream about.

She was a 30-year-old attorney — who held an MBA, too — and she lived in a fancy New York City apartment. Just a couple of years ago, she won the Miss USA pageant. She was followed by more than a quarter of a million people on Instagram. In addition to her law practice, she was also a correspondent for an entertainment news site. She lived a life of glamour that millions of young women envy.

Despite all that, Kryst killed herself Sunday morning. She jumped from the 29th-floor terrace of her Manhattan apartment building.

I have no idea why Kryst wanted to die and I have no judgment about her life or death. But the news of her suicide immediately brought my mind back to a lesson I learned through a 19th century poem when I was in the sixth grade.

Edwin Arlington Robinson eventually became my favorite poet, but I had never heard of him when my father discussed him for the first time. I knew very little about mature poetry — and I wasn’t inclined to pay a lot of attention to it. But my father asked me to pull a book off a nearby shelf and read a particular poem out loud.

“Richard Cory” isn’t a long poem, but its sparse language is painfully beautiful and its lesson pierced me even though I was only 12 years old. Although I wouldn’t encounter Robinson’s work again until high school, I decided to memorize that poem. And I’ve never forgotten it.

The poem is about a wealthy man named Richard Cory. The narrator recalls seeing this man on the street. He recounts how much everyone he knew envied Cory for his money and charm and education.

After the narrator makes it clear how much everyone admired and envied Richard Cory, he lets us know that he and the others around him were poor and lacked all the finer things of life that Cory had.

In the last line of the poem, though, we find out — with no explanation — that Richard Cory went home one day and “put a bullet through his head.”

(Click or tap below to listen to me recite the poem.)

I thought a lot about that poem as I was growing up. I’ve thought a lot about it as I’ve gone through life. I’ve spent a lot of time in the homes of wealthy and powerful people — mostly when I worked in politics — who had lives that others envied.

But I often found that those wealthy and powerful people were no happier than anybody else. In fact, I’d say that the wealthy people I spent time around tended to be more unhappy — and their families more dysfunctional — than the more average people I’ve known.

Celebrities such as Cheslie Kryst are held up to us — in news media and on social media — as people we should envy. They’re often beautiful and successful and well-educated. These “influencers” typically have many people following and envying their every move.

The lesson that most people draw — unconsciously, perhaps — is that trying to be like these people will make us happy, too. Because of that, many people strive to look like and act like these celebrities.

The truth is that achieving success and wealth will never be enough to make us happy. It will never bring us peace. Each of us has a different way to find peace and happiness and purpose in life, but chasing the life of status and wealth and success is only a distraction from whatever we ought to be doing.

We don’t need to feel envy for people who are held up to as as glamorous and successful. Their path isn’t necessarily the best path for us. And it’s often not the best path for them, either.

I’m sorry that Cheslie Kryst never found whatever it was that she needed to be happy and to have peace in her life. The only thing we can say for certain is that all the success and fame she achieved wasn’t enough to save her on a cold Sunday morning when she jumped to her death — leaving that fame and success behind.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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