The best thing a human can do is not to try to change himself for the better, achieving success it is a combination of luck, serendipity, hard work and talent. From all these four you barely have control over your actions and chose to work hard, it is not fair to yourself to hold yourself fully responsible to your lack of success in life, other than your actions.
Beside even if you are going to achieve whatever your version of success might be, the ending of your life remains the same.
The best decision you can take in your life is to choose to live your life without denial, to try to see yourself and your surroundings for what they really are.
Being positive is the easy way out, seeing things for what they really are is really one of the biggest challenge you will ever encounter.
The purpose of denial is to keep you functional whenever you are trapped in pain, you simply stop paying attention to it because there is nothing you can do about it. We are not only in denial sometimes about the nature of our relationships, like for example someone who is in an abusive relationship, but we are also in denial about the nature of life.
And our denial about life puts us in a situation, where we spend most of our life engaging in various denial strategies rather than live it fully. This increases the amount of sufferance you experience, the same way for an alcoholic denial is dangerous, the more he denies the more he drinks. The more damage to his body and mind also the wasted time.
Take for example depression, something that everybody experiences from time to time. Most people get depressed because of a certain situation, like your car broke and you weren't financially prepared to pay for the repairs, so now you are running low on money.
Whenever you experience a lot of these negative events that trigger your depression, it is like seeing backstage of a broadway show, you see the actors without costumes and makeup on their smoking break, talking about boring stuff. It kinda kills the magic of the show, now you can't get fooled that those people on the stage are who are they are trying to pretend to be, you just saw them five minutes ago smoking and talking about politics.
The same happens with depression whenever you experience it a lot it kills the magic of your life, you can't get fooled that everything is going to be ok, or that things are going to get better. After you experience it frequently enough, your depression might get triggered by a random event, but it is not just that event that is making you feel depressed, why you really are depressed is because you realize that you are going to die one day, everything decays and failure is unavoidable. Your depression is no longer specific it becomes existential.
There is nothing you can't do about that, there is no fix, at best you can soften the blow with things like diet, exercise or some scientific discoveries, but you can't stop or avoid it. There is no way out, if you are an alcoholic and you come out of your denial you can stop drinking alcohol, if you are in denial about death and you come out of denial you are still going to die.
The only advantage you get is that instead of a life of constantly being engaged in denial activities you can do whatever you want. When the things that you are afraid off become certanties, there is no anxiety.
The fact that almost everybody is trying to avoid is that life doesn't get any better, neither for the individual that is going through life and progressively ages, loses his physical and cognitive capacities. Or for the rest of the civilization as a hole, as the technologies progress and civilization advances things just become more complicated. And when you are dealing with complex things there is an increased probability for things to go wrong and malfunction. Progress is directly proportional with loss and pain, the more you have the more you will lose so the more pain you will experience.
Life is like a control crush, because it is impossible to get to the ground safely, the best you can do is get there without to much damage.
