Apologies if this veered too much off topic. I've been kicking this around for a week or two, and felt the need to add recent events and post.
It's 5am, I haven't eaten in 12 hours, had anything substantial to drink in about 8, have been sitting on the toilet for over an hour, and instead of doing something about any of those things I'm editing a comment to fix a typo.
iirc there's something called 'depressive realism' where depressed or otherwise overly pessimistic people tend to be more accurate at predicting outcomes. The implication being that to function as human beings we have to be at least slightly deluded at all times.
That "slightly" there is putting in a ton of work.