You’re stuck with you for the whole ride. Might as well make it a person you like hanging out with.

You will spend more hours with your own commentary than with any person alive, and that voice is not fixed. It got built out of things said to you and things you repeated back, and it can be rebuilt the same slow way. Becoming someone whose company you enjoy is not vanity. It is the difference between a long ride and a long ride with somebody hostile in the passenger seat.

Notice how you talk to yourself after a mistake this week. If you would not say it to a friend in the same spot, try the other sentence instead.