We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them… - Oliver Burkeman

reminded that in reality this isn't the case. Nor is this a phenomenon confined to megalomaniacs or pathological narcissists, but something much more fundamental to being human: it's the understandable tendency to judge everything from the perspective you occupy, so that the few thousand weeks for which you happen to be around inevitably come to feel like the linchpin of history, to which all prior time was always leading up. These self-centered judgments are part of what psychologists call the "egocentricity bias," and they make good sense from an evolutionary standpoint. If you had a more realistic sense of your own sheer irrelevance, considered on the timescale of the universe, you'd probably be less motivated to struggle to survive, and thereby to propagate your genes.

In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth.

...once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.