I remember this confrontation I experienced once, when someone told me that their goal in life was to be happy. I was angry at them. So selfish, I thought. My only purpose has always been to make other people happy.

Over time I learned that it was me who was different from the majority of people.

Now, revising the origins of such thinking, going beyond the fact that my Catholic upbringing never made me think that it's something that I should be worried about, I see that it's because:

I have always felt that I have to pay off the debt I took in order to arrive on this planet.

Taking into consideration that I was indeed an accident child, the above should not be surprising. But there's such a vast abyss between intellectually understanding that I must have unconsciously picked up as a child that my parents (maybe only initially) didn't want me, and actually feeling that I owe the world everything for merely being allowed to be alive.

That's the problem with the beliefs that develop in childhood. They're not just beliefs, they become the basis on which one's identity is built. Other people don't understand it, they say "Ok, so now when you have figured that out, it should be easy to stop thinking like that", no it's not. When one gives up a belief they acquired at one point in life, they can just go back to what they thought before that point in life. I have nothing to go back to. It's just the way I know the world IS. It's not the way I believe it to be, it's how I have always experienced it. The fact that one learns that they have evolved from fish does not make them be able to swim instantly, or breathe under water.

It's all not about WHAT but about HOW.