I saw this tweet from another Substack writer whose work I find interesting:

This resonates with me. I guess a few things—“Anything worth doing is hard”; the weird relationship Catholicism has with guilt and the idea that suffering is sort-of good; all the conservative talk about work ethic and deservingness and merit—can lead to this error, at least in my case.

It’s sort of like an inverse of the idiom “If you’re getting flak, you’re over the target.” The truth in that, however, is a subset: “If you’re over the target, you’re getting flak.”...