You have to be a bit crazy to be free.

I find that stresses and pressures are fundamentally my own. Sure there is competition everywhere, but at the end of the day, I can choose how I feel in the long run.

Beliefs are powerful, precisely because they are not grounded in reality, as we perceive it. And the less one is able to perceive about the full reality for what one wants to do, the more one needs dogmatic beliefs.

Take, for example, a humble spam filter. Now, suppose it always predicts non-spam. Since most emails coming into most accounts will not be spam, our naive spam filter will actually be 90+% accurate. Beliefs, rational or irrational, play a role in maintaining a person's psychological integrity and consistency.

Or maybe it's just that whatever seems irrational is actually the optimum and necessary for existence. Viewed in this way, I can appreciate why humans have built all sorts of cultures to hold societies together.