If you want out, if you want a decent life, you had better not devote your life to avoiding psychological pain. You had better not spend your life worrying about whether people like you or whether your car impresses people. What kind of life is that? It is a life of pain. You may not think that you feel pain that often, but you really do. To spend

Neurosis is a substitute for real suffering. Fearfulness is the most common state in a life that asks for no real courage.

In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”2

Jung said that to avoid the “legitimate suffering” of being human, we inflict untold suffering on others, and finally actually bring more suffering on ourselves anyway. I find that to be profoundly true.