A home is not an investment, it is a liability. The "American dream" makes money for speculators, realtors, advertisers, builders, decorators, landscapers, lenders, insurance companies, and taxing entities. Homeowners may breakeven if they keep it for thirty years. They can actually make money if they were really lucky in their choice of "location, location, location." But that's gambling, not investing.
Read "Your Engineered House" by Rex Roberts. Avoid the updated version; get the original, 1964 version. Then read Ken Kern's "The Owner Built Home." Roberts deals with houses as machines; What do they do for us that make us need or want them? Both books deal with buying a house with sweat equity. Roberts points out that half the cost of a house is labor. (If you build it yourself you can have twice the house for the same money.) But half the materials cost comes from fixtures: doors, windows, cabinets, etc; things that other people make for retail. We buy them ready-made because ... builders get a kickback (discount); because they are advertised in "Better" Homes and Gardens; because we don't know that we can DIY-build better for a quarter the cost.
A rental house is an investment. Keep it until the loan is retired and you have an income-stream.
Building your own home is the same as buying it for twenty-five cents on the dollar ... and that IS an investment.
Always remember the Rule of 72 - "Seventy-two divided by the interest rate yields the years required for your investment to double." Don't forget to subtract the inflation rate from the interest rate. The point is that if you can live on half your income and invest the other half at 10% interest (after inflation), then you can retire on half your income after seven-point-two years. When you are thinking about a major expenditure, think about it in terms of the Rule of 72 and your eventual retirement.
...Do you see a therapist because you have difficulty distinguishing between what YOU want and what self-interested others tell you that you SHOULD want?
Well what do you want?