Free A First-Rate Madness by Nassir Ghaemi

a hundred separate studies have documented that people estimate themselves as more likely to experience positive events than their peers.
    One study even quantified this principle. Standardizing sixteen studies of life satisfaction on a 0 to 100 scale—with 0 reflecting abject misery and 100 bliss—the average score was 75 percent, meaning that most people are mostly happy about their lives. More important, the spread of scores was very tight: almost everyone scored between 70 and 80 percent. In fact, 90 percent of people scored above 50 percent (which would theoretically be an average level of satisfaction). In other words, there is a skew to normal life: most everyone feels happier than average, which means that “average” satisfaction is uncommon.
    2. The perils of success: Leston Havens, a wise psychotherapist, once commented to me that he had known many people who had been improved by failure, and many ruined by success. Failure deflates illusion, while success only makes illusion worse, as shown in the coin toss and button-pushing studies (in which believing one was correct early on, or winning money, enhanced the illusion of control). Most normal, mentally healthy people have these features: they overestimate how happy they are; and when things go well, this illusion only gets worse.
    This isn’t a settled debate, and these interpretations could be proven wrong. But if they’re correct, they raise several questions. Why do positive illusions occur? Can we only arrive at realism through personal hardship? Or are some of us inherently more likely than others to become realistic? Is depression the royal road to realism?
    We tend to assume linear relationships about most things. If some is good, we presume that more is better. But for many things, there is a curvilinear relationship: too little is harmful, so is too much; in the middle is just right. Scientists call this the inverted U-curve, but we can also see it in the fairy tale about Goldilocks and the three bears, where the girl is choosing between bowls of porridge or beds until she finds the ones that are just right. We might call this the Goldilocks principle .
    In biology, it’s generally accepted that anxiety is curvilinear. A moderate amount is good for the organism, keeping it vigilant, ready to defend itself or flee. Too little would make an organism vulnerable to predators or other danger; too much would cause excessive stress, making the organism less capable of handling danger. Illusion may play a similar role, suggests Taylor, noting that most of the patients in her studies of physical illness were not completely out of touch with reality; they were far from psychotic, or even neurotic. They were basically normal people, in touch with reality, who, in relation to their medical illness, were overly optimistic. They were, in short, only a little unrealistic. Too little illusion, she suggests, makes us all too realistic, seeing the stark hopelessness of the facts, leading us to give up. Too much illusion, as Freudians argue, renders us unable to respond properly to the world’s challenges. Positive illusion in people with medical illness is a moderate, in-between amount that helps them cope with adversity even better, to prepare responses to life’s challenges and to meet them.
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    WHETHER ONE SUCCEEDS by luck or skill, the absence of early hardship often has a later negative effect; when difficult times arrive, one is vulnerable. Early triumph can promote future failure.
    In contrast, early failures repeatedly experienced by a person predisposed to depression inoculate against future illusion. Like the ascending group in the Yale experiment, later success fails to swell one’s head because one remembers one’s failures and respects the role of chance in life. The philosopher Karl Jaspers once said that how a man responds to failure determines who he will become. Through suffering, one becomes more