Sometimes I get this feeling like, “Nothing will ever work out for me, I will always be unhappy, the rest of my life will be a sort of wandering twilight punctuated with periods of misery.”

And my wife will go, “You're hungry.”

And I'll go, “No, no, this is true unhappiness, it comes to me unadulterated from hell itself, it lives inside my bones, I... See more

I only started making progress when I realized I was facing a toothbrushing problem: feeling normal again would probably require me to do stuff every day for the rest of my life. I might get better at doing that stuff, just like when you first start brushing your teeth as a kid you get toothpaste everywhere and end up swallowing half of it, and... See more

This is gutterballing : excelling, but in slightly the wrong direction. For most of its journey, after all, the gutterball is getting closer to the pins. It's only at the end that it barely, but dramatically, misses.

About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap : situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity.

The mediocrity trap is a nasty way... See more