1. The Untruth of Fragility: Who doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
2. The Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings.
3. The Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.*
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Any human action or experience loses meaning when disconnected to future outcomes or consequences. Nothing exists in a vacuum.**
Ben Hardy

1. The Untruth of Comfort: Allow nothing in your life that makes you uncomfortable.
2. The Untruth of Specialness: There is a universe waiting for you to be at its centre.
3. The Untruth of Self Care: Always look after Number One.
4. The Untruth of Control: You can do anything you want.
5. The Untruth of Death: Ignore your mortality and live as though you’ll never die.

You may have spotted what I’ve done.
These are the the five elemental truths I’ve referred to
for some fourteen years now, but flipped here.
If I believe these untruths then I’m going to be poorly prepared for a world in which
life is hard, I’m not as special as I think, my life is not about me, I am not in control, and
I am going to die.
Better to develop my future self sooner rather than later:
Through humility leading me to the truth of who I am that can be grown,
Through gratitude leading me to the truth that I have much to give,
Through faithfulness leading me to the truth that I can learn much from others and
invent many ways of giving expression to who I am and what I have.
As for the writer so for the future self:
Being a writer is an act of perpetual self-authorisation.
No matter who you are.
Only you can authorise yourself.
You do that by writing well, by constant discovery.^

*Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind;
**Ben Hardy’s Be Your Future Self Now;
^Verlyn Klinkenborg’s Several short sentences about writing.