能完成一套标准叙事的人，在我们的认知中可能是「常态」，但在真实的世界中，实际上是「非常态」。我们因为认知的偏差而努力追求「正常」，在结果上偏离「正常」会造成自身巨大的痛苦。这一切的根源在于偏离真实的社会叙事，也在于我们疏于审视：疏于内省，不知自己真正需求；疏于外观，不知真实世界面目。

But whichever way you look at it, this kind of control is an illusion.

It's that this is it, right now, with all its odious imperfections – the tasks that remain unaddressed, the messes that haven't been cleared up, the enormous personality flaws that still haven't been corrected. And it's the only place I can ever hope to get anything meaningful done. 

What you need, instead, are tiny goals and a commitment to incremental progress ("small wins"), plus a willingness to encounter failure after failure as you stumble toward improvement. To put it another way: fresh-startism is a form of perfectionism, and as with all forms of perfectionism, the solution is to stop being such a perfectionist – to resign yourself to the fact that things probably won't unfold as flawlessly as you'd hoped.

Contrary to self-help cliché, the thing we perfectionists need to learn isn't that we're probably going to experience failure. It's that we've already failed, totally and irredeemably. 

Experiences become shareable creations the way tree sap becomes maple syrup.

To put it another way: fresh-startism is a form of perfectionism, and as with all forms of perfectionism, the solution is to stop being such a perfectionist – to resign yourself to the fact that things probably won't unfold as flawlessly as you'd hoped.

Ergodicity means that the ensemble average is the same as the time average. Something being non-ergodic means the opposite, that the ensemble average is not the time average.