Eh, I used to think I shed more light than heat, but in recent years have started to question that. I joke that I'm not the man I used to be, and apparently in fact never WAS the man I used to be.

I think it's memes like this that habituate us to the notion of having a starring role in our own personal melodrama. My life isn't all (or even mostly) about me. It just IS. Stuff happens. I like some of it and dislike a lot of it. Doing the wrong thing mostly (though not always) guarantees bad outcomes; doing the right thing mildly encourages, but does not guarantee, good outcomes. If you measure your life by things like how much your children (don't) adore you or whether your spouse stays with you or whether the work world showers you with lots of easy money, you're pretty much guaranteed to be disappointed. I measure my life by whether I was true to the light I had at any given point in time -- if I did what I understood to be right, even when difficult or inconvenient or at my own expense. Whether people value that or squander it is their problem and is not an occasion for an existential crisis.

Conversely, pretending that I'm fabulous and talented and brilliant (just like everyone else!!) is ego inflation and self-aggrandizement, sorry. I'm an insignificant fleck of biomatter in an indifferent universe that doesn't exist FOR or BECAUSE of me. And if you really get down with that, it can lift a tremendous burden off of you -- a performance burden of inhuman proportions.