Richard Reid, the would-be 'shoe bomber', had been tackled and subdued on board a flight from Paris to Miami, thereby initiating the era of compulsor… - Oliver Burkeman

Or perhaps you've tethered your self-esteem to the most crazy-making standard of all, 'realizing your potential' – which means you'll never get to rest, because how can you ever be sure there's not a little more potential left to realize?

the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy. They didn't see this conclusion as depressing, though. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a 'negative path' to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them. Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what 'happiness' really means.

You want it to be one way. But it's the other way. – Marlo Stanfield in The Wire