Short answer: President, unequivocally no. Local office, yeah, and not as hard as you might think.

President has pretty open formal requirements, but the informal ones are the killer. To be on the ballot, you need to get a threshold of signatures that varies by state, so you need to fund a campaign well enough to attract enough people to go out and stand on street corners or go door to door collecting signatures in all 50 states. That’s tens of millions of dollars you’d need to raise just to be on the ballot. Then you’ve got the actual campaign and unless you’re running with a major party, you would need to raise it all by yourself. The last presidential race cost billions of dollars, so without a political party’s support, which you won’t get because you’re an outsider, you’d better be friends with some billionaires and prepare to sell off huge chunks of your authority to get elected.

Local elections, especially things like city council are reletively easy. You need some signs, flyers, a website, and good campaign strategy. All of that costs money but you’ll need to gather the support of local business owners or residents and solicit campaign contributes, maybe $20k for a small city. If you’re in a bigger city the money you need to raise goes up and so does the presence of crony politics like in the presidential races, but unless you’re criminal record was rape, selling drugs, or murder, the background won’t matter.

The guy I helped frame for my friend’s scam didn’t deserve getting fired. He loved working there and his only crime was being annoying.

When I was younger I tried to write that book because there was more than enough material, but set it aside halfway through. I didn’t want to be known for my most painful traumas. I’d rather get a bunch of rejection letters trying to sell weird fiction than a deal selling pain.

Yeah, actually.

The second worst was in-house marketing at an Oil & Gas services company where years long difficulty with the son of the owner, an extreme level or boredom and unfulfillment lead to a full on nervous breakdown at work that cost me my job and a good chunk of the life I had built for myself.

The worst was working on my father’s shrimp boat as a deckhand at 15. The job was from 5am to 9pm and the work was mostly sifting through literal tons of shrimp by hand to sort out all the non-shrimp while fighting with crabs and aggressive seagulls during sweltering Texas summers for no pay. The smell alone… I still won’t eat fish 30-ish years later. The first few days I was beaten for being too slow until he decided the improvised rope whip wasn’t working well enough. He let me finish the most recent drag (the net is dragged and pulled in 4-6 times per day) and then threw me overboard, tossed out a short rope, and kept going with me holding on for dear life until it was time to bring the net in again, which was about 45 minutes. The only money for the entire season was from soft shell crabs I collected on the side to sell at the fish market, but he took that money too once they started giving me a decent rate.

With the benefit of hindsight I actually really regret doing this, but at the time I was a shithead that only thought of themself.

One summer a friend, who was the assistant manager, got me a job working at Game Stop. It was the third worst job I’ve ever had and I hated working there. My friend was running a scam in the store where he would take all the games in the drawers that didn’t show up in inventory and exchange them for cash. Just the transactions I ran for him, he netted several hundred dollars.

What my friend did not realize though, was that there was a lag time between a game being traded in and it appearing in inventory so he actually had been turning in games that were in the system. The store manager became suspicious, ran inventory himself, and discovered several thousand dollars worth of missing games. During the course of his investigation he interviewed all of the employees and when it was my turn the only thing I said was that another employee that I didn’t like personally because he was a mouth breathing know-it-all was the only one who brought a backpack to work everyday, he was fired several days later. A month after that I quit after the store was robbed at gunpoint for the third time in the three months I worked there.

I keep a water gun filled and primed next to my front door for this exact reason.

Never trust an addict. You might love them, they might be family, but their drug of choice will always be more important than you.

Only commit one crime at a time. Make sure you don’t have a headlight or turn signal out or speed if you’ve got something in the car you’re not supposed to. Being a person of color counts as a crime if you live in the south or a large city.

Authority must be questioned. Just because they’re your boss, a cop, or a politician doesn’t make them automatically right or justified. This also extends to subject matter experts whose qualifications, methodologies, and other bona fides should be interrogated.

You will have regrets for some of the things you didn’t do, but also some of the things you did. Choose the exciting risk over the boring comfort and you’ll have fewer.