David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

Is it persistence or stubbornness to keep chasing uncertain outcomes?

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Have you ever watched garden-variety YouTube videos or listened to amateur podcasts and wondered why the quality was so pathetic? I used to ask myself that question, but I know the answer now. Doing high-quality video and audio without huge studio budgets is difficult and frustrating work.

For months now, I’ve been working on perfecting my own home studio. I shared an early tour of the incomplete studio several weeks ago, but the work has continued. At the time of that video, I was experiencing a mysterious buzz in the audio and it’s taken weeks to track that down.

For several years now, I’ve been lurching awkwardly on this quest for a high-quality video studio — like a modern-day Captain Ahab trying to capture a technological Moby Dick that keeps eluding me.

After shutting down my equipment again tonight — in frustration and fear that I’ll never get it right — I’m left thinking about the value of obsession. I’m left wondering whether obsession is the only thing that ever gets us the things that are worth having — even if we’re not sure what we’re doing along the way.

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Without motivation, dreams fade,
but with it, all things are possible

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We like to pretend that personal change is more difficult than it is.

There are some goals that are long shots and pipe dreams for most of us. Becoming an NBA basketball player. Being elected president. Winning a Nobel prize. Becoming a best-selling novelist. Even if you have the talent or physical ability to do those sorts of things, they might not happen. There’s a lot of luck involved — and very few get lucky enough to make it.

But for most of us, the changes we want are simpler. The goals are more achievable. Most of us look at our lives and wish for change. We wish we had more money. We wish we had partners who understand us and love us. We wish we lived somewhere we liked better. And some of us — such as me — just want to make some movies or find a platform to speak to the world in other ways.

But we don’t do those things. Why? We tell ourselves it’s just difficult to achieve what we want. We struggle to make the millions of dollars we’d like. We put up with relationships we’re unhappy with. We stay where we don’t want to be. And we keep dreaming about things instead of doing them.

I realized recently why this happens. At least for me. And maybe for you.

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Now that his threat is truly gone, I realize my father hated himself

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Until today, I didn’t really comprehend that my father hated himself.

Now that I realize it, his self-hatred seems obvious. Of course he hated himself. I should have figured that out a long time ago — but I was too busy trying to protect myself from him to notice.

For the last decade, I’ve been studying narcissistic personality disorder, because I was desperate to understand how my father had affected me — and how I could protect myself. Over and over, I’ve read that narcissists hate themselves at their core, but that had never quite made sense to me.

My father didn’t act as though he hated himself. He often said — especially since I cut off contact with him — that he “knew” I hated him. When he first accused me — years ago — of hating him, I tried to correct him, but it was difficult to explain that I didn’t hate him but I also didn’t love him anymore. So I didn’t pursue it.

I heard something on a podcast this week which mentioned how narcissists project their feelings about themselves onto other people. The therapist used hate as an example. She said a narcissist might accuse you of hating him — only because he really hates himself.

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