I just showered. While cleaning the shower, which I hate, because I lose a lot of my hair, which I love, which always clogs the drain almost immediately, so I'm basically always showering with the dread of the shower overflowing ... I started thinking about destiny and whether I believe in it.

I came to the conclusion that I don't believe in destiny, but I believe in the power of destiny.

I believe that believing in it can make one achieve great things. It doesn't matter if destiny actually exists, in the sense that it doesn't matter what you do, because destiny is something that happens to you. (In that sense, I think it would also mean that you don't believe in free will.)

I also believe the same is true for God. I don't believe in God, but I can see the power believing in God gives people. I can tell that my parents would be worse off if they didn't believe in God. I think history also shows that. People can achieve great, but also horrible things, and their belief in some supernatural power on their side is what gives them power.

So essentially, I need to face that, apparently, I believe in the power of humans deluding themselves to achieve great things. I'm not sure if I like to believe that. It can get quite depressing sometimes. So ... can't I just believe something else?

This desire to believe something else is related to what I've read in the book I'm currently reading: How to Win Friends and Influence People. In the first chapters, the author talks about what common strong desires of people are. And one of them is feeling important.

It seems this desire can be so strong that people would rather go insane than face that their lives have no meaning or that horrible things happened to them. And they're actually happier because of it! You're not the person you want to be, but if believing so makes you feel great, why not?

Some authorities declare that people may actually go insane in order to find, in the dreamland of insanity, the feeling of importance that has been denied them in the harsh world of reality. There are more patients suffering from mental diseases in the United States than from all other diseases combined.

What is the cause of insanity?

Nobody can answer such a sweeping question, but we know that certain diseases, such as syphilis, break down and destroy the brain cells and result in insanity. In fact, about one-half of all mental diseases can be attributed to such physical causes as brain lesions, alcohol, toxins and injuries. But the other half—and this is the appalling part of the story—the other half of the people who go insane apparently have nothing organically wrong with their brain cells. In post-mortem examinations, when their brain tissues are studied under the highest-powered microscopes, these tissues are found to be apparently just as healthy as yours and mine.

Why do these people go insane?

I put that question to the head physician of one of our most important psychiatric hospitals. This doctor, who has received the highest honours and the most coveted awards for his knowledge of this subject, told me frankly that he didn't know why people went insane. Nobody knows for sure. But he did say that many people who go insane find in insanity a feeling of importance that they were unable to achieve in the world of reality. Then he told me this story:

I have a patient right now whose marriage proved to be a tragedy. She wanted love, sexual gratification, children and social prestige, but life blasted all her hopes. Her husband didn't love her. He refused even to eat with her and forced her to serve his meals in his room upstairs. She had no children, no social standing. She went insane; and, in her imagination, she divorced her husband and resumed her maiden name. She now believes she has married into English aristocracy, and she insists on being called Lady Smith.

And as for children, she imagines now that she has had a new child every night. Each time I call on her she says: "Doctor, I had a baby last night."

Life once wrecked all her dream ships on the sharp rocks of reality; but in the sunny, fantasy isles of insanity, all her barkentines race into port with canvas billowing and winds winging through the masts.

Tragic? Oh, I don't know. Her physician said to me: "If I could stretch out my hand and restore her sanity, I wouldn't do it. She's much happier as she is."

— How to Win Friends and Influence People, p. 22-23

Now I need to go and believe I can be a lightning protocol developer.