Attention to Oneself... A Dangerous Thing

“Among our egocentric sad-sacks, despair is as addictive as heroin and more popular than sex, for the single reason that when one is unhappy one gets to pay a lot of attention to oneself. You get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Misery becomes a kind of emotional masturbation. The unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwelling on himself and start paying attention to the universe.”
– Tom Robbins

Quote from a side tunnel in the Monday Morning Memo