Okay, I'll try. At the end of 2006 I had one pretty bad week: within that week I broke up with a girlfriend I'd been with for 7 years, the company I worked for fell apart, I lost the apartment I lived in, and my grandmother died of cancer while I was in the room. Subsequently I moved into the attic of my parents' cottage, surrounded myself with books, shut the door and went offline for two months to analyze everything. I realized my past actions must have been suboptimal because the investments of effort into my job and family went up in smoke. I realized I didn't have any personal accomplishments. I realized I had to learn to ignore the desires that other people had about my life, and reach the results I want regardless of other's attempts to judge me. After that I scanned my past for occurrences where I made other people worse off by manipulating them, found lots and lots of such occurrences, and resolved to just throw this kind of thing out of my life altogether. There were also other heuristics I found, but no one's asking about those :-) That particular story does have a happy ending. After two months I quickly found a new apartment (best place I'd ever lived, still living there now), a new job (most interesting job I'd ever had, still working there now), and more new girlfriends than I wanted at that point. And then spring came, other crazy things started happening and I started escalating the chaos like Harry in Eliezer's fanfic.