Some Important, But Uncomfortable Truths...

A great quora question and an amazing answer:

• Every person is responsible for their own happiness -- not their parents, not their boss, not their spouse, not their friends, not their government, not their deity.
• One day we will all die, and 999 out of 1,000 people will be remembered by nobody on earth within a hundred years of that date.
• Practically all of the best opportunities (in business, in romance, etc) are only offered to people who already have more than they need.
• The idea that you will be happy after you make X amount of dollars is almost certainly an illusion.
• The idea that you will be happy after you meet [some amazing person] is almost certainly an illusion.
• For most people, death is pretty messy and uncomfortable.
• When you don't possess leverage (go look up "BATNA"), people will take advantage of you, whether they mean to or not.
• Almost everybody is making it up as they go along. Also, many (most?) people are incompetent at their jobs.
• When talking about their background and accomplishments, almost everybody is continually overstating their abilities, impact, relevance, and contributions.
• Physical beauty decays.
• Compared to others, certain ethnicities and races (and genders, and sexual orientations, and so on) are just plain royally f*cked from the day they're born.
• Bad things constantly happen to good people. Good things constantly happen to bad people.
• Very few people will ever give you 100% candid, honest feedback.
• People are constantly making enormous life decisions (marriage, children, etc) for all of the wrong reasons.
• Certain people -- some of whom are in positions of enormous power -- just do not give a damn about other human beings. A certain head of state in Syria comes to mind.
• Often, the most important and consequential moments of our lives (chance encounter, fatal car accident, etc) happen completely at random and seemingly for no good reason.
• Your sense of habitating a fully integrated reality is an illusion, and a privilege. Take the wrong drug, suffer a head injury, or somehow trigger a latent psychotic condition like schizophrenia -- and your grip on reality can be severed in an instant. Forever.