As I understand it, Groucho Marx was known to say he didn't want to belong to any organization that would accept him as a member. Kidding or not, he seems to have been saying that his high standards were more important to him than pretty much anything else -- including, apparently, being accepted or being happy.

For me, what is and isn't "self-destructive" (or more often "self-sabotaging", in my case) has never been as clear-cut as others have insisted. Once upon a time I found myself in school, studying toward a supposedly-desirable career doing things that I was becoming less and less interested in doing. It seemed quite perverse of me not to enjoy being there and to want to be doing something quite different.

My family used to attribute my apparent craziness to some combination of puberty (actually over for some years by then), and having been hit on the head with a hard snowball even longer ago.* I'd moved pretty far from them and their influence by the time I realized that I'd ended up working at what I did enjoy and that I didn't at all mind learning, as long as I could set my own pace and direction.

Here's something I once posted elsewhere as part of a conversation about standards. It seems to fit here as well:--------------------
* A neurological angle, of sorts -- and here I'd thought I was coming here without any!